quiet weekend

woodchop
Originally uploaded by Scootie.

This weekend was fairly quiet. With me on Lates and Joe in Sydney there was no real impetus to go out and get drunk on Friday, so instead I had a couple of quiet drinks with a colleague who was down from Sydney and then headed home at a reasonable hour.

Saturday I was ken to avoid any entanglement with the footy Grand Final, so I decided to head off to the Royal Melbourne Show and see if I could find a few photo opportunities. The show was quite small this year, particularly because of renovations occurring on the main showgrounds, so only half of the showground and grandstand were actually available, the rest being fenced off. The show itself has only a few things worth seeing, the events such as woodchopping, equestrian, dog showing, livestock judging, etc. Then the showbags, which as a kid were the main draw of the show but as an adult can be seen for the garbage they are :) Lastly the show has all the usual array of carnival rides and games of chance. Every tent had its own tout with a microphone hooked up to their PA shouting out to the crowd about how their game of chance is the best to play and how they are the ones giving away all the big prizes. As a rough count I saw about 6 'water race' games, about 4 basketball hoop games, 3 'magic ticket' games, 3 laughing clown games, a few ball toss games, one shooting game, and that's about all. :)
A highlight was overhearing a carny explain to a pair of twenty-somethings how the laughing clown game works, and the smirk on her face as she wondered the same thing I did, how you get to be 20+ years old without ever seeing the laughing clowns before :)
The rides had a few new faces this year, basically all working on the round-and-round-up-and-down principle, and most of the same old things like dodgem cars (three sets) ferris wheels (two) and roller coasters (two) were still there.
I went back later in the evening for some night shots and basically photographed everything there was to shoot at least twice :)

Sunday was spent on the couch watching crappy tv :)