All About Long Island

Dorothy & Toto Had Nothing On Me October 10, 2006

Probably in keeping with the celebration of the Columbus Day holiday weekend, I had the incredible good fortune to steal a few hours away with my favorite fella and take a wonderful trip back in time.  An early morning phone call started the chain of events that brought me and my five year old date to the 164th annual Long Island Fair at the Old Bethpage Village Restoration.

My buyer unexpectedly had to work and needed to reschedule our appointment for late morning.  Because there were quite a few houses to show him I chose not to bring anyone else in later in the day.  Serendipitously,  just as he called, I was thumbing through the paper and happened on the ad for the fair.  I’d been thinking a lot lately about my grandson and how the birth of his little brother last month appeared to make him feel just a little bit displaced.  We needed to spend some quality time, just the two of us.

Convinced he’d have a great time, I called his dad.  It’s not often that I get “time off” on a weekend so this would be a treat for us both.  The ride out to the village was filled with lively chatter about the happenings in his world and his plans for the immediate future.  I worried that the weather, threatening all morning, wouldn’t hold out and we’d be rained out.   But luck was with us. 

Standing in the vast expanse of grass that became a makeshift parking lot, I realized this was going to be quite a trek to reach the fair grounds and the attractions ahead.  I girded my loins and began the journey, wishing I’d opted for sensible shoes rather than the heels I sported.  After a quick stop to buy our tickets we left, map in hand to enter another world and another time.  Though there was no tornado and thankfully no witch to flatten, I felt a little like Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz, when she first stepped out into that foreign land. 

The Village Restoration is a collection of structures restored, transported and sometimes replicated to represent life as it was in a Long Island community of the mid 1800s.   There are homes, stores, a one room school house, a church and a working farm among the many buildings that make up this quaint village.  My grandson’s favorite aspect of the tour by far was discovering that homes of this era had no indoor plumbing.  When told they used outhouses, his response, other than a wide eyed stare was “I guess they didn’t go to the bathroom in the winter.”

We walked past pony and camel rides, a horse and buggy tour around a wide track and all sorts of animals grazing in what appeared to be some sort of center ring.  Tempted by none of it we continued our walk around the grounds and finally back out to a staging area where, to my great relief, there were waiting shuttle buses to take us back to the distant parking lot.

What a fun way to spend the day.  Now I have to figure out a way to go back for the Halloween celebration on October 28th and 29th.  Where there’s a will, they tell me, there’s a way.