Our brother-in-law, John, the bee guy, is also a dahlia guy. He puts hundreds of hours each summer into growing beautiful dahlias in gardens around his house (below). The annual pinnacle of his dahlia addiction is a showing and judging at the MN State Fair.
Last night my cell phone rang at 7:15pm. I could see it was John calling. He asked me what I had planned for the night – a loaded question that I didn’t know how to answer.
John already had two SUVs full of 5-gallon buckets containing dahlia cuttings ready for transport to the State Fair showing in the Ag/Hort building (below). He needed another sucker vehicle and driver for the remainder of his buckets/dahlias. Kate and I said we would be over at 8p to help.
We loaded the RAV4, got our State Fair gate pass from John and headed down the road, slowly, with the precious cargo in the back. Now understand, we are heading to the State Fair at 9pm, in the dark, planning on driving down the hideously crowded streets of the State Fair grounds to deliver flowers to the Ag/Hort building. I wouldn’t think it possible or permissible.
Well, we did it. It was a slow 15 minute creep from Gate 7 to the final location. We unloaded our cargo (below) and then had to get back out and off the fair grounds. All went without a hitch. John and Susan would stay most of the night preparing the dahlias for show and judging.
P.S. Since Kate and I were already at the fair, we decided to leverage our gate pass to park inside the fair and go on a quest to find mini-donuts. We found the donuts, a root beer and a $20 bill on the ground. The bottom picture in the stack, below, shows crowds waiting in indiscernible lines to get Sweet Martha’s Cookies. Unreal!
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