Take Shelter in a Sturdy Building, Away From Windows

August 24, 2025 — Day 4

New York State Fair, Syracuse NY

Nice click-bait title, huh? You’ll have to read until the end. But no worries, since we’re typing this obviously we’re ok. Well, as ok as we were before today!

After last night’s late night concert plus some after concert decompressing we all slept in. That means we stumbled out of bed around 8 and moved slowly. Donna had a live calf birth to go see so she and Bill went off to the Cattle Barn. A bit later we headed to the fair. At the gate Paul channelled his inner Bill and told the gate attendants, “Old People” and they waved us through.

We headed out to see Western Dressage but it had already ended by the time we got there. Which was odd because it was listed at starting at the time we arrived. Oh well, next on our list was to see Jon Stetson, The Mentalist. It seems that these fair shows are awesome or awful (like the racing pigs which was lame). Jon Stetson’s act was much closer to the awesome side. (susan here: enjoyable but I’m not sure I’d pay to see it. Included in the gate price? Sure, it’s a bargain.)

We didn’t stay too long because Susan wanted to see a yarn spinning demo. Looking for the yarn demo we went into a building that we thought had the demo areas. What we thought was a demo area turned out to be a “Taste of NY” area where maple things seemed to be in abundance. Being from New England we gave these imposters the stink eye and chuckled about their “coveted” participation trophies.

We trudged on through the heat and sun and finally stumbled onto the yarn demo. Paul was quite curious. Susan, the knitter, pretty much knew what they were doing. She also thought it was lamer than the Hollywood Pigs.

We really wanted to get back to the Toyota Colosseum for the light weight draft horse pull. They only pull twice, lightweights at noon, heavyweights at 4pm. Nothing for the rest of the week.

Sometimes the horses start before they are hooked up!

We left the pull early because we wanted to try and get seats in the shade for the Los Lonely Boys concert. We met up with Donna and Bill and headed off the concert. Paul went to grab lunch for he and Susan. Earlier we had passed a grilled sausage, peppers and onions vendor on the way to the mentalist and it smelled really good. It was as tasty as it smelled!

We both liked Los Lonely Boys. If you have a chance to see them they are worth checking out.

For a while we followed Donna who was on a quest for the perfect funnel cake. The heat & sun was getting to us no matter how much water we drank. Plus we knew that rain was due in around 4pm. So we headed back to the RV. The “nearby weather” alerts were becoming disturbing.

Then it was no longer “nearby.” Our phones were beeping, Donna said that everyone’s phone in the park were beeping and security was moving into place. That must have been an experience!

We quickly made up “go bags,” brought the slides here, retracted the hydraulic jacks (hearing a loud crash when we did so) and dashed to the bathhouse about 30 yards away. We huddled with some other campers. (susan here: The only other time I’ve seen a cloud like that was on Cape Cod and that storm was pretty nasty, just like what we were about to be subjected to.)

The good news is that worst of the storm passed just north of us. However it was still one heck of a nasty storm where we were.

Police had closed off the street and a fire truck raced left and right.

We could see that the main entrance canopy had collapsed. Later on, some heavy equipment came by to drag it out of the way.

Reporter Susan is on the scene, well, next to the scene with a big lens!

Oh, that crashing sound? We had never latched the shower door! We only need to latch it when driving, right? Nope, the road is crowned here, so when we retracted the jacks the RV leaned to the right and crash! Fortunately the door didn’t shatter. And now we have a new rule. When you step out of the shower, you latch the door.