Day 15, WhooEeee Dog, It's Fair Day!

Today was full of pleasant surprises from beginning to end. While
breaking down camp this morning, the Boy Scouts next to us (bless
them) offered to share their breakfast of pancakes, sausage patties
and bacon with us! We gladly took firsts, and seconds, but didn't dare
take thirds as much as would have liked to for fear of overstaying our
welcome (and because one kid started giving us strange but impressed
looks with how much we were eating).

On our route, we wondered what kind of crops we'd been staring at for
10 miles straight, and had the good fortune of asking a woman named
Gloria who ended up telling us the surprisingly interesting process of
growing soybeans. Gloria helped to expand our limited farming
vocabulary to include tillable acreage and harvesting combines, which
incidently with a price tag of $200K each makes farming subsidies a
lot more understandable.

We bet that you readers have been asking yourselves for quite some
time, 'now where was our fine 19th president of the United States,
Rutherford B. Hayes, born?' Wonder no more. 'Rudy', as we'll call him,
was born in Fremont, Ohio, which we had the good fortune to pass
through today. Judging by the size of his estate, like many US
presidents, Rudy was not strapped for cash.

We passed through Pemberville that though only boasts a population of
1,365 puts on a pretty amazing little fair. While slurping on
strawberry lemonade slushies, we looked at some Margaritaville-themed
flower arrangements, played Skee-Ball, and saw the country's
preeminent (there can't be many) youth fiddle bands. We missed the
parade by a hair, but saw the baton-twirling aftermath along with Miss
Oak County Apple Festival 2007.

We got into camp rather late due to the fiasco of buying our third
stove of the trip. While I have been sworn to secrecy to not divulge
the location of our camping spot this evening for fear of others
making a run on the camp, we were given a free cabin by the ranger in
another stroke of good luck today which meant no setting up our tent
and that we have real beds for this evening! The 'ohio state parks jr
officer' plastic badge we both received is pretty cool too and we wear
it with pride.