Contest Winner, Covered Bridge Festival and Free Vintage Santa Image

Hi Everyone!
I hope your week has been going great! First off I'd like to publish the winner of the contest. I had such fun reading all the entries and want to thank each and every one who shared their spider stories and wished me a Happy Birthday. I've had a week full of goose bumps and although it was really hard to decide I finally settled upon Curt from Carmel who wrote:


"Hey There! I hope you have a very happy birthday! Here's my spider story. . .
my father loved to squirrel hunt and he would take us out with him when
I was a teenager to "teach" us how to hunt. Well, he would insist that
we get into the woods before daybreak. As we would be walking in the
gloom of the woods, you would walk right into these giant spider webs
(the kind where the spider lays in the center)and you would have to
wait to feel the spider crawling on you to figure out where it was.
Some of them were huge, and they would end up on your face, neck or
in your hair. I still get creeped out thinking about those spiders on me!
LOL Best, Curt"

I have a major aversion to walking into spider webs and each time I read his story I shook and shivered more! So Curt, please select the CD of your choice from HERE and EMAIL me your snail mail info and I'll get it off to you.

Now if you've been following me for a while you know that I often like to offer booby prizes to participants and this little contest is no different. So..

sucor
Rhonda Emery
Sharon aka Sharrabhug

Please select two cut outs of your choice from HERE and EMAIL me with your selection.

I'd like to give special mention to Sharon Caudle, DeeDee and The Memory Keeper. Sherri, oh my gosh the moving cacti gave me the creeps. I can't imagine having that Sci Fi horror in my house. DeeDee, even though your story didn't give me goose bumps you had me laughing for a good 5 minutes thinking about your hubby and his tidy whities. Thanks for sharing! Memory Keeper, every time I get in my freezer I see those creepy crawlies hanging around...thanks for sharing your nightmare.. lol

Now on to other things, this last weekend we attended the Parke County Indiana, Covered Bridge Festival. This is annual event for my family and we all, well most of us anyway, really enjoy spending the day out in the crisp autumn air and searching for bargains and hard to find items. It's about a 3 hour drive for us so we start out early.

We always stop at the Ernie Pyle Memorial Park which is just on the other side of the Indiana border near a town called Dana. Ernie was a WW II correspondent who was published in 300 different papers. He won the Pulitzer Prize in 1944 and died while in combat. His stories were about the out-of-the-way places he visited and the people who lived there.

We encounter our first covered bridge at this little park. The kids always enjoy romping through the leaves and expending some of their energy and being little investigators. This is Kaiden's first year where he really remembers and understands what's going on. He was totally enthralled with the bridge.



Usually, there's a little stream that runs under the bridge, but this year it was dry. So part of the fun was being able to actually climb down and check out the bottom of the bridge.



This was his third trip through..or maybe it was his fourth. He had the most fun running through the bridge, then down to the stream and up the other side.



But we had to get on the road, we had about another hour of drive time before we reached our destination. There's 30 different covered bridges throughout the county. And during the festival, there are tons of flea markets, craft sales, garage sales and vendors scattered throughout the area.

We usually head to Mansfield which is one of the biggest sites. The last time we checked, they claimed over 5,000 different vendors. It was a glorious day and it was the next to last day of the festival so it was packed with tons of people. This is a pic of the row we had just completed. It's kind of hard to see but there are plenty of heads bobbing up and down the row.



There's so much to look at and choose from that it's really hard to decide what to buy. I thought these little Snowmen were just the cutest. Maybe I'll try to make something like these, if I can find the parts.



This vendor has been here for several years and I keep thinking that one of these days I'll make one of these. I think they're just the cutest and would be perfect for the grandkid's bedrooms. Just in case you can't tell, they're little individual chalk boards that have been decorated around the edges.



At the end of the day we were exhausted and our carts were full of purchases as you can see here. But we had a great time and spent lots of money. Some of my best buys included some potpourri from the vendor in the picture below. It smelled so good and had some cute teeny tiny pumpkins mixed in. I thought it would be great for Thanksgiving. One of my other great buys was a set of 1000 count sheets for 15.00.



I know this is a really long post but I thought I'd share another image with you. This is from the Saint Clair collection. I love the Santa in this image and thought he would be great in a collage. So as usual, make sure you double click on it so you can save him at the max size.



Have a great week, plumb full of smiles!
Peggy