the Tully Show delivers fun

[Michele]  This is the Tully Show weekend!  Right now!  The show is finally here!

This is a big event around here.  Equivalent to a county fair in the US, all shops and schools in the area were closed on Friday and most are still closed today (Saturday).  For weeks, people have been preparing their art, cakes, fruit, orchids etc for the competitions. We'd had a great time at the show four years ago and all went to Tully on Friday expecting fun.

Which is the best sugar cane?

Highlights of our visit include:

• Watching daredevil horse riding 
• Admiring the grand prizing winning sugar cane and speculating on the assessment criteria used for the judging. Straightest? sweetest? Greenest? Longest?
• Eating freshly made donuts from the Mission Beach scouts. Yum!
• Admiring the prize-winning poultry.  The chickens were amazingly beautiful!  I've actually been pining for backyard chickens for a while so Gavin was uneasy with my oo-ing and ah-ing over the hens.  He shuffled us over the budgie room.  They were nice but not as impressive as Uncle Larry's budgies.
• Watching people scream on rides while coaxing Robin and Will to go on one.  Coaxing was unsuccessful in part due to the next item



Robin's name is to the right of her head
in orange and yellow. Her name appears in
English, hieroglyphics and Japanese.  Yes,
that is her smiling-for-a-photo face.

• Eating a mightily-hyped Dagwood Dog.  This turned out to be a corn dog with very high grease content that left us all a little queasy.

• Finding Robin's entry for the Mission Beach State School exhibit.
• Drinking over-priced slushies in crazy shaped bottles.
• Seeing folks we know even though we've only been here a few weeks.
• Listening to a singer with guitar cover Willie Nelson tunes.
• Assessing the accent accuracy of the Aussie's singing. He really wasn't too bad at mimicking American country twang.
• Watching a cassowary being carved from a log of Kauri Pine.  It smelled delightfully pumpkiny.  The cool aspect of this is that, no kidding, we saw two cassowaries on our way to the show, a dad with his chick.  I feel obliged to provide photo proof of the cassowary siting, but keep in mind that we respectfully kept our distance from the cassowary (we were far away) and it was overcast (low light).

actual cassowary chick

Cassowary emerging from Kauri Pine. Note: rainforest
wilderness ironically situated in the background.

So in summary, lots of money was spent on bad food and a good time was had.  Pretty much what you expect from a show/fair.