My annual cherry ice cream cone.

For the record: Pam and I went to the Van Wert County Fair on Sunday, September 1, 2013.

As best we can figure, it’s the 27th or 28th straight year for us. We’ve been married 24 years. While dating, we discovered that we’d both grown up (at least during my first 9 years when I lived in Indiana) attending the Van Wert fair. So it made a logical date for us.

Yesterday, we left right after church. It was a hazy, humid day that threatened rain. The place seemed like a relative ghost town when we arrived. We always start at the same place: Rager’s (not run by the Optimist club). A sausage sandwich and a ham and cheese sandwich for me (because I was hungry), and only the latter for Pam. Followed quickly by a funnel cake.

I texted my cousin Mike to let him know we were at the fair. He said he and his two kids had a beef show in 10 minutes. So we headed over to the show barn and watched Austin and Whitney show their steers. This was a first for me. There was a lot of bellowing from not-totally-happy steers.

Then we walked through the commercial building (nobody at the Merkle Electric booth), and then got another funnel cake. Time to leave. I headed for the roasted pecans and walnuts (one medium bag of each) while Pam went to the cotton candy trailer, where she was delighted to find that they not offered a Monster cotton candy bag. Which she bought, of course.

And then our last stop: the cherry ice cream truck. A $2 cone for each of us.

Everything is always in the same place, year after a year. In a world that’s constantly in flux, it’s nice to come to a place anchored in time.