Locals call the Uncumpahgre River "The Unc" for short. So when they named this new event of Fun on the Unc they called it "Func." We had never seen a water park in use, so it was a great day to see how professional kayakers handle the man-made rapids.
The big blue balls are buoys that the racers must circle as they make their way around the course. Besides the kayakers, there were also Stand Up Paddle races. In close races, the area around the buoys got congested.
The emcee was entertaining the crowd between races, and asked who had come the farthest to attend the races today. We tied with another full-time RVing couple, so all four of us got free Func tshirts from the event. That's a nice souvenir from our favorite little city, and another great free event that we accidentally found in Montrose!
But we were actually heading to an event we have seen advertised on television several times--the 24th annual Sweet Corn Festival. Held in Olathe, Colorado, we read that they have as many as 20,000 people attend. The drawing card for the festival is all the fresh roasted corn on the cob you can eat. We started with the first cobs as soon as we got to the park.
The corn was harvested only hours before, and cooked in huge roasters at the festival. The Olathe volleyball team (and their parents) were shucking the hot corn and handing it out as fast as it was roasted.
We wiped the butter and kernels off our faces before we took the picture of Mark modeling our first two finished cobs.
It costs $10 per person to get into the festival. They were selling fresh corn for $5 per dozen, so Mark calculated that we needed to eat 24 each to break even. So we immediately had a second cob of corn.
We walked through the vender booths, and discovered that the shop where Mark had just stopped for a haircut was giving away coupons for free cuts. We wish we would have known that a couple hours before! We also discovered that there would be a salsa dance contest at 5:30. No one was entering the contest until they announced the prizes--$150 for first, $100 for second, and $50 for third. Suddenly, lots of couples were signing up, including the Engelmans. Here is Denisa modeling our official competition number.
Of course we don't have any idea how to salsa, but we figured most of the other dancers didn't either. There were between 40 and 50 couples in the contest, and we faked our way into getting selected for the dance-off between the top 5 couples. Those five couples had to go onto the stage for one final song. By this time we are tired because we had used a unique combination of vigorous western swing two-step moves and "salsa-ed" through 3 songs already. We had to introduce ourselves to the crowd, and we were the only out-of-state couple. We didn't win any money, but we figured top 5 was pretty good since we had no idea what we were doing. And we made lots of new friends because more than a dozen different people came to tell us they thought we should have won, or to start conversations about friends, family, or experiences from Oklahoma.
After all that exercise dancing, it was time for another round of corn. But Denisa finally had to agree that she couldn't eat 24 pieces of corn today. She could, however, put away three.
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