Monday, April 26, 2010

Brenham Ice Cream Festival

On Saturday (April 24) we went to Brenham, TX for the Blue Bell Ice Cream festival. For those of you you who don't know what Blue Bell is, originally it was a Texas only brand of ice cream. Now it's expanded a bit, but you still can't get it everywhere (especially not in Utah!). We like it and think it's one of the best ice creams around. Some of the locals think it is the BEST ICE CREAM EVER!!!!!

The Blue Bell factory is in Brenham, so every year they have this one day festival to celebrate their ice cream. About 4000 people show up each year for the festival, so in small town Texas, it's a pretty big deal. They set up booths and shows around the court house square. The best part is that for $6 you get a wristband that you can show to get all you can eat ice cream all day long at booths set up around the court house square.

Here's Toby enjoying the first of his six scoops of ice cream that day. At the festival the kids learned that they actually don't like it when they can eat as much ice cream as they can.
This is Thomas, Abby and Molly enjoying the first of their ice cream. Molly only ate 2 scoops. Thomas and Abby both ate between 5-6 scoops, before they started to feel sick. So, they ate a deep fried Snickers bar to help wash the taste of ice cream out of their mouths. Suprisingly, we only had tummy aches on the way home, no one got really sick.
Molly loved this grate. The holes looked as though they were big enough to swallow her feet. So she slowly walked the "tight rope" over the gaping hole in the ground.

There was a "train" for the kids to ride. It took them on a loop around a couple of streets in downtown. We piled all three kids in, and they had fun.

Here is the train being pulled by the City of Brenham, Parks Department John Deere lawn mower. There was some poor volunteer who got to drive cars full of kids around all afternoon in the blazing sun on a lawn mower.

Here are some of the booths along the court house square. We bought the kids wooden frogs at one of the stands. These hand made frogs have ridges on their backs and a wooden stick that you rub over the ridges. If you do it right, the frogs start to croak!

This is the art deco entrance to the county court house. Every Texas county has a court house, and most of them were built around the turn of the century (the 1900's, not the 2000's). So many of them are this great art deco style. Notice that the Christmas lights are still up on the Court House. You might be a redneck if...

There were over 20 classic cars that had been brought out for the Ice Cream festival. The cars were all on display all morning and into the afternoon. I couldn't believe how much time and effort these guys had put into their toys.
There was a stick horse race for the kids. When we saw it Abby and Molly wanted to race. Thomas was too "cool" for any of that nonsense. Here we see Abby in third place as they round the first curve.
And here comes Molly bringing up the rear. After the race Molly was a bit sad to have to put her faithful steed away, but she was finally willing to just wave goodbye and leave.

1 comment:

Blarney Girl said...

I grew up in the town just south of Brenham and loved taking the tour and getting free ice cream at the end. YUM! Wish they'd had the festival then!!! :D