Pam’s Pictorama Post: Our beach town summer idyll continues and tonight Kim and I enjoyed one of the pinnacles of a Jersey shore summer and attended the local fireman’s fair a few blocks away here in Fair Haven. After dinner on the deck Kim and I wandered out as the sun sank in the west, an increasing number of people as we got closer and could hear the shrieking of the ride participants.

Early in this blog I wrote a bit about this fair which I researched and discovered that it is one of the oldest and longest running fireman’s fairs in the country dating back to a more carnival form in 1906. (That post can be found here.)

Tonight, night two in a week long run, it was jam packed with families and teens. We got there too early for the full brunt of couples on date night and instead caught a lot of young parents of toddlers. Without really knowing (tickets have gone digital and you use a quasi-ATM machine to get “Magic Money” and the lines for that and the rides were long) it seems like an expensive proposition with kids between food, rides and games.

The fair raises enough money to pay for our volunteer First Aide force annually and is populated by volunteers. It seems like the rides and games are a set package that must just move around with some nominal personalization for the town it is in. The food concessions seem to be part of this, with the exception of clam chowder which was being sold at its own booth and I think made locally.

While I was tempted by the Ferris Wheel – I wondered if we could possibly see our house about a mile away – I was daunted by the rigamarole. Instead, Kim and I decided to buy tickets for a ride through the neighborhood on a fire truck. I don’t remember this as an option as a kid or a teen so maybe this is a latter addition. Like the chowder, the rides on the fire truck had its own ticket counter and took cash and handed back real tickets. We handed over our six dollars and got into what turned out to be a slow moving line of very small children and parents. An extended family was together in front of us.

The truck seats around 10 but there is much lap sitting among children. We were the fourth load of folks after getting in line. You bounce hard in the back of a fire truck and really you have to hold on. We of course weren’t going especially fast but it made me wonder about the art of holding on if you are racing to a fire. (Very short videos above – fun to turn the sound up!)

We transversed a very residential neighborhood and I wondered how they felt about the endless fire trucks passing all night for a week. Of course the siren and lights were an important part of the ride. The group was offered lollipops upon entry but the kids were already feted on sugar so the parents declined. (Kim and I had even just finished soft serve ice cream cones ourselves.) I don’t tend to run through this area but I think I will make a trip over there and see these homes over by the Navesink River.

Even the crankiest kids became enchanted with the few block drive through the dark of the night. Eventually we took a turn back onto the main drag and then back to our starting point and Kim and I headed home through the dark suburban streets.