Oyster Festival

Little Known Facts from the 2009 Urbanna Oyster Festival

1. Above is a picture of the parking lot at the Oyster Festival. Seriously. It was a freshly harvested soybean field. Once we parked the car here, we gathered our belongings and walked fourteen miles four miles four hours until we crossed the bridge into the quaint little town of Sacramento Urbanna.

2. After walking for four days to California for so long, a person can work up an appetite. Good thing. Because there are forty two thousand forty two hundred food booths selling everything from roasted corn to kettle corn, deep fried pickles and deep fried feet.

3a. After you exhaust yourself walking and eating fried feet everything, there's a parade. If it's Friday, then it's the fireman's parade, which is basically sirens, firetrucks, sirens, bleeding ears, red lights, sirens, more trucks and permanent brain ear damage. If it's Saturday, then it's marching bands, classic cars, throbbing temples, hair of the dog, dancing with life-sized oysters and Noe Noe Girl running out to join the hillbilly portion of the parade. If it's Sunday, the Oyster Festival is over but the parades live on courtesy of flashbacks You Tube and the internet.

3b. Big Hair Envy has the cutest father ever invented.

4. The best oysters in the universe are served not at the Urbanna Oyster Festival but down Bavon at Ann Marie's Restaurant. She was brave enough to invite us to her house Saturday night after the parades and the hairy dogs and the marching bands and the forty thousand mile walk food booths. She served up fried fish, The World's Best Fried Oysters (with just a little help from Gene Autry), cole slaw, macaroni salad, hush puppies, succotash and deviled eggs--so good it'd make you run next door and smack your mamma, assuming she lives next door and in my case she does. Then we were treated to live entertainment which included singing, dancing and dogs dressed up as squirrels. I promise I am not making this up.

Then we stuffed ourselves into the car, drove forty two thousand miles home, made a few crank phone calls, went to bed and woke up Sunday morning ill prepared to say goodbye to the Oyster Festival.

In short, the weekend can be summed up as follows:

Noe Noe Girl: "It ought to be illegal to have that much fun."
Chesapeake Bay Woman: "In some states it is."