Peach Festival

It's exactly what the name suggests. A festival about Peaches. Sounds silly I know but it was really fun! The peach festival is held in a little town called Palisade, which is about 5 hours away from Colorado Springs, nestled in the mountains. To get there you have to drive through all the popular ski resorts including Vail, which is pretty well known I think. Parts of the drive reminded me of the lake district in England and other parts reminded me of the mountain towns of Germany and Austria--if you can imagine those two sceneries together you've got a rather beautiful picture! As for the actual peach festival, it kicked off with a parade through the town-very american. They had the local high school marching band and different people dressed up, they even had their own Peach Princess. After catching the end of the parade we went to the local library which was having a book sale- it was great! The paperback books where 25cents and the hardbacks were 50cents--so cheap! (We all got some books--I think I got about 6) After spending some time in the Library we walked back over to the main festival events area, bought our tickets and headed in to see what peach related thing's they'd have. We sampled peach popcorn, got a free peach, had peach lemonade, peach crepes, peach mustard, peach salsa and there was even peach beer. There were lots of little stands selling local peaches and local peach products, such as peach butter, peach jam, peach ice cream topping etc. etc. everything had something to do with peaches! It wasn't super busy, so it felt nice and relaxed to not have to rush around but just take our time and enjoy the peaches and weather! Now, I was not a peach fan, as in the UK we don't really get the greatest peaches but getting to taste them fresh changed my mind. After spending time at the peach festival, we rode the school bus (yes, yellow american school bus) back over to the town and spent some time walking around and looking in the little shops- such a cute little town with cute little houses. We then headed back to get the car and drive to buy some boxes of peaches. The first place we stopped had some wonderful produce. Peaches, plums, squashs, pears and lots more. We bought our boxes of peaches there and also some pears and plums. Then we took a drive through the orchard country and stopped at another little farm where we bought some squash, tomatoes and a melon. All fresh and all rather inexpensive. It sounds kind of corny...a peach festival...but it really was a lot of fun and was nice to be able to support the local farms and buy fresh, fresh produce!