05.09.05
The Fair at the PNE
Well yesterday it was time for a visit to the fair. The annual fair at the Pacific National Exibition is the equivalent of the shows back in Australia, but without the heavy emphasis on the Agricultural stuff. Sure they still had the farm yard animals but there didn’t seem to be the whole awards for stuff like Best Cow on Show and Best Fruit Cake that you see at the Australian shows.
The PNE (showgrounds) is in the middle of the neighbourhood of Hastings so Parking is at a Premium. The offical lots are $15 a car, and the surrounding streets are mainly permit parking for residents. Those steets that weren’t were well taken by the time we arrived at 2pm. Don’t despair though because on every corner in the streets in the area are the local residents, who were mostly asian, holding signs that read PARKING. Yes they were selling parking on their properties. With so many of them one is able to barter for the best price on parking with all of them were undercutting the $15 dollars offered by the PNE lots to varying degrees. Mel managed to get one elderly asian lady down to $10, and she parked Mel in her back yard! $15 probably got you the driveway. There were already 3 cars in there so she had probably made a pretty lazy $40 bucks for the day. Extend that to the 14th day of the fair and she would have made a few hundred dollars for next to nothing.
One interesting fact about the PNE is it is the location of the 1954 “Miracle Mile”. The Miracle Mile was the 1 mile at the 1954 Commonwealth Games race when John Landy and Roger Bannister first met over the Mile for the first time. It was to become the first time two runners would run sub 4 minutes in the same race. John Landy looked over his left shoulder with 90 yards to run, and at that moment Roger Bannister came around John on the right held on to win. Bannister would run 3:58:8 with Landy second place finish came in 3:59.6.
Anyway back to the fair. The fair had all the usual trade exhibits, petting farm, farm animals, crap over priced food that you eat anyway, rigged sideshow games and feral “Carnies” working the rides - more on that later.
The first big thing was the Superdogs show. I was wondering why there was nearly 4,000 people in the Pacific Coliseum to see this show, and evidently that had been the norm for the whole previous two weeks of the show, but left the show entertained and with a better understanding why. The dogs were cool, and did their tricks and were entertaining. However what wasn’t entertaining was Herb. Herb was the host of the show who had been doing this for over 20 years. For those of you who have seen the American version of The Price is Right, Herb reminded me of Bob Barker, that being a guy who just doesn’t seem to know when to give it up. (For those that haven’t seen the American version of the Price is Right Bob is the celebrity Adam Sandler has a punch up with in Happy Gilmore - which is Emmy award winning stuff compared to his efforts on the Price is right, Alice will confirm this). Luckily this was the last year Herb would host the show. Unluckily Herb spent 15 minutes at the start of the show crapping on about how much of a legend he is, or more likely was. Someone in the crowd had enough and yelled out “Just bring on the Bloody Dogs”, it was good timing and bought some serious laughter from that section of the crowd. And i know you are all thinking it was me being a typical Australian, but i can assure you it wasn’t and besides i would have added “You old fart”.
Later it was time to see the Duck races. The sight of 8 ducks leaping out of the barriers just like it was the start of the Melbourne Cup was very entertaining. Even though it was the duck that braved the slide first that took out the race not the fastest.
Finally it was time to hit up the rides. The PNE has a semi permanent rides area. Made up of a combination of Full-time themepark level rides being operated by responsible staff and temporary “Carnival” back of a semi-trailer type rides being operated by Carnival folk. All this added up to an interesting mix of rides. One bonus compared to the show back home is that you can buy a full day ride pass, rather than having to pay for each and everyride.
The pick of the rides was by far the old wooden rollercoaster that was built in 1958 closely followed by the log ride. But riding the log ride several times at 11pm made for a cold ride home in the car. I was wondering why the line on that ride was so short. I stopped short of having to pay an extra $5 to ride the hellevator, which is an extremely poor cousin of the Tower of Terror at dreamworld.
One of the rides was being operated by real stereotypical “Carnies” - Feral looking guys that didn’t seem care to much about what they were doing. In hindsight i really should have started to worry when one of them was drinking Windex! Yes Windex! Now i know these people probably don’t earn a lot of money but jeez - Windex straight from the bottle???!!! Judging by the look of him, Windex seemed to have a pretty high Calorie count.
Finally when you think you have spent just about all you could spend on one day at the fair, you walk past the Casino. A fully operational Casino, with all your favourites, blackjack, roulette, Pai Gow and all the rest. I was quite disappointed at the lack of a two up pit. About the only thing missing was a bookmaker taking bets on the Duck Races.
Despite all my stinging critism (and poor grammar) is was a good day out and i had a good day at the fair. And thats all for now, i’m off to enjoy the rest of the public holiday Monday, by doing some grocery shopping.