Geoff here – I have to say that we had a really good weekend at Brimfield. This was our first road trip in the new car, and it did quite well. It is phenomenal the gas mileage that thing gets. I did not have to refill the tank at all for the entire trip. In fact despite driving over 200 miles we barely made a dent in the gas tank – the gauge went down maybe a quarter. I haven’t figured out exactly what kind of mileage we got but it is probably somewhere around 40 on the interstate. We managed to get everything packed inside of it, and still have room left over for the things we bought AND to make a little space for the dogs to lie down and nap.
Anyway, we stayed at our usual place, the Publick House in Sturbridge, about 7 miles away. We love that place, it has always been good to us. And the restaurant is phenomenal. We usually try to eat breakfast there on Sunday and sometime we will have dinner there if we are meeting other people. This year we just went for breakfast. We did not go out much for dinner, since we were trying to be more thrifty. We brought our big cooler (to keep all the food in) and the small cooler (to put in the wagon to hold drinks). The wagon Jo (Kelly’s mom) got us is turning out to be the envy of everyone. Seriously, we must have been stopped at least 50 or 60 times so people could ask us where we got it. There were a few other people that had the same wagon, and whenever we would see them we would joke about it because they got the same questions. We even got our picture with them. See Kelly’s earlier post for that picture.
Of course, the dogs were also a center of attention wherever we went. We were greeted by all sorts of “awww”s and such, especially when the dogs were in the wagon looking particularly cute, which was often. Rerun especially got tired after a while, and by Saturday he really did not want to go anywhere. I even had to lift him out of the car and put him in the wagon that morning. So he stayed in there most of that day, and occasionally Thumbelina would join him. We saw a lot of other dogs this year. It seemed like more than we usually do, and this time we saw a lot of other dachshunds. It was quite cute to see how Rerun and Thumbelina would interact with the other dachshunds. Thumbelina definitely liked them more than the other dogs she saw.
We got a little sunburned on our first day, but after that we did pretty well. In fact, we got quite a bit of exercise ourselves. Kelly’s pedometer showed we had walked over 7 miles on one day – no wonder the dogs were tired! But the weather but cloudy and somewhat cool most of the time we were there, until late Saturday when it started to look like rain. Luckily it did not rain until after we had already quit for the day. The next day, Sunday, it was already raining by the time we got out there. So we decided to leave the dogs in the car where they were sleeping while we checked out the last few tents that we had missed the previous day. While we were inside the first tent, the skies really opened up. It was raining so hard that suddenly there were rivulets forming in the tents and vendors had to start moving things around. After an hour or so of heavy rain some tents had several inches of standing water in them, and low-lying areas near some tents had water that must have been close to a foot deep. People were quickly abandoning any hopes of shopping and many vendors were packing up. Still, we managed to wander through the last few tents and even find a few real bargains. It helps when the vendors would rather sell for a song then have to pack things away. Afterward we stopped by a couple of other places to pick up some things on our way out of town, and then we headed home. The dogs were asleep in their little bed area most of the drive back to Cambridge.
More later!
The Books are Taking Over... 