Um, yeah, about all those adventures I was going on? “Hitting the road?” Have you seen what they’re getting at the pumps lately?

Still, my editors do enjoy getting content on occasion. And what better way to force my debit card into the pump, in the name of providing content, than to check another item off of our to-get-to list? Mrs. Tourist and I have been planning to get to the Lighting of the Nubble for all of the six Christmases we’ve been here, but no soap as of yet. Well, get out the red pen! There’s a check mark to put down on the list now.

It’s all kind of a blur, really. Snapshots flash by in double-time, leaving me as dizzy as I was during the actual event. Hurry up, taste, wait, smell, resume… I’ll try to process this orgy of sensory overload in real-time, but I don’t guarantee anything. Welcome to the 156th annual Fryeburg Fair.

You see any balloons here? No, me neither.

(I hate cutesy titles, but it was inevitable.)

I have never been to the Yarmouth Clam Festival. Why not? Who knows. I'm not much of a festival guy, for one thing. Too many people, too many tourists, too many opportunities to spend waaayyyy too much money on bad food. Oh, and there was the time when I was eight or nine that I heaved a good gorging of HoJo clam strips all over the rug of an Orlando Holiday Inn. Put it all together, and I just never made it to this Maine institution.