We made our annual family pilgrimage to New Braunfels yesterday for Wurstfest. We were met there by Stepan & Jfer and the English family (along with Kevin’s parents). The weather was fairly cold and it was overcast and drizzling for most of the day. The outing was a success for the most part. We ate all of our usual foods: potato pancakes with applesauce and sausage, bratwurst on a stick, pork chop on a stick, funnel cake, fried pickles and, of course, Paulaner Octoberfest with Sprite and Wurstfest Wasser (their own branded bottled water) for the young’uns.
The big disappointment of the day was Jimmy Sturr and his Orchestra’s failure to play the Chicken Dance (The link I picked is a bit dry, but it’s the first one that I could find that didn’t have blink tags or start one of those annoying midi loops. There oughta be a law). They normally play it and it was particularly disappointing since we had taken the time to teach the moves to The Boy beforehand. As evidenced by my link, the Chicken Dance is apparently really cool with the preschool set once they’ve been turned on to it. Luckily, the band that followed Jimmy Sturr played it and The Boy had a ball. We’ll have to reconsider scheduling our trip around Mr. Sturr’s performance in the future if he’s not going to play the required fare.
The Boy was more taken with the cheap carnival rides and games this year. Thankfully, the games aren’t a total rip-off. They give the kids something even if they don’t win and if you shell out $5 as opposed to the basic $2, they’ll let you pick out whatever you want from the prize junk regardless of whether your kid won or not. He scored a small crab, a medium-sized gorilla and a fairly large inflatable Spider-Man. He also proclaimed upon seeing another kid with a frog hat that he wanted a hat. We waited until the end of the day and convinced him that he needed an alpine Wurstfest hat (mainly because of cost). Unfortunately, the only color left was yellow. He seemed happy with his choice.
I think The La’s favorites were sausage, funnel cake and polka music. She also seemed to like the carousel. I’ve posted pictures of both kids. We got enough decent shots that I’ll probably rotate in a new one for each later in the week.