Bonanza Extravaganza!

The firefighters in the tri-state area here put on a huge shindig this time each year. If you buy a raffle ticket for $100 you get to go. Or a $20 guest. This is a massive raffle. On Friday night, they call 15 $1,000 winners (must be present to win). On Saturday, they have the big raffle. Your 4 digit ticket number can get you unbelievable prizes. They pull numbers from a lottery machine every 5 minutes. The crappiest prize is $1000. Course, your odds are 1 in 9999. I'll still go for it. They gave away 3 Harleys, a Tahoe, an Avalanche, a Corvette, an Impala SS, Travel trailers and a pick up of some kind I don't remember. They didn't have any 4 wheelers this year. They do that with the raffle money. They make the REAL money in the gaming tent. People are crazy with blowing their money on fish bowls. (I never knew what a fish bowl was until I moved up here-hey, they didn't know what matzo ball soup was) They had any kind of spin the wheel you can imagine. But the real draw, is that for 10 bucks, you get a bottomless beer mug, for the entire weekend. There were some messed up people there! A bunch of us go down and camp there. We had a great campsite that James R had gone down and set his camper up on. That is, until the rain came. We were at the bottom of the hill. Guess who had a river running through their camp. Nothing like seeing Jimmy standing there, under an awning, cooking breakfast in his slippers standing in 4" of water and mud. Thankfully, he rung them out after he finished breakfast. We had a soggy but great fun weekend.
No pictures were taken to protect the not so innocent.
Oh, and Jimmy was the only one to win-he won a thousand. Butch and I were sitting in the music tent listening to a blues band, and eating lunch about 3pm when they started calling the next number for $5000. The first number was a 3, and I went "woo-call an 5!" and they said "5" and I yelled "gimme an 8!" and they called "8" and I STARTED SCREAMING "1-MAKE IT A 1!!!" and they said "7" and I said a whole lot after that, but none of it was particularly nice.
So, my number was 3581 and they called 3587 and I knew there was no way in hell that I'd get any closer than that. The 7 kind of fooled me too, all I saw was the slash and I did at first think it was a 1. dammit. 5000 bucks. crap. oh, well, drink another beer.