We watched with great anticipation as our happy contestants began putting rubber bands around the melons. It seems that when there is enough pressure from the bands in the middle of the melon, the watermelon will actually explode.
While the kids are working, we can describe some of the other reasons we came to this festival. We really enjoy festival food, so we had to try the muskmelon and watermelon ice cream. We like both fruits, but we have to say that the watermelon ice cream was the best. For an extra fee, customers can get their ice cream served in a fresh muskmelon half.
We are now big fans of Kiedrowski's Bakery. Their sign proclaimed they were voted "America's Best Bakery" in 2011. We're not sure how that polling takes place, but they would now get our vote. This is one of their inventions--a snoogle. They described it as "our delicious Polish butter pastry wrapped around a Polish-style sweet cream cheese and topped with a vanilla butter glaze." We would describe it as one of the most delicious pastries we have ever experienced. We forgot to take a picture until after we had already taken a couple bites, but it was a good long pastry that didn't last long.
Meanwhile, back at the watermelons, we are 15 minutes into the contest. We see that these kids already have a good number of rubber bands in place as we all wait for something to happen.
There was a full day of activities planned, and since we were there all day, we got to see the winners of all the age categories in the beautiful baby contest. These are obviously some of the cutest children in Ohio.
Some of the older cute kids were participating in the hot wheels races down Main Street.
Meanwhile, back at the watermelons, we are 25 minutes into the contest. A watermelon will explode when enough pressure in the middle causes the top to blow off. They must not understand the physics of this process, as it looks like these two girls are putting rubber bands across the top to keep it from exploding.
All these activities are working up an appetite, so it's time for lunch. We had to try the perogies. A local Polish food, these were made with a potato and cheese filling encased in dough and then boiled and cooked with onions. We had never tried them before, but they are quite tasty. For our friends back home, they are closely related to the veranika we have at our German festival.
After walking by all the food vendors, we selected the most healthy option for our main course. It also got the award for the most syllables to describe a food item--a pepper jack and grilled macaroni and cheese pulled pork sandwich.
We weren't the only ones consuming food, as there was a pizza-eating contest going on. The nine lucky contestants were treated to a large pizza, but they didn't have time to really enjoy it. The man seated at the right-hand end of the table would win the prize for eating the entire large pepperoni pizza the fastest. His prize was a gift certificate for a free pizza that he could eat as slowly as he wanted. We talked to him later, and this was his second time to enter a pizza-eating contest. He had won both contests, and he has now found a new hobby!
Meanwhile, back at the exploding watermelon tables, it is 45 minutes into the contest. The piles of available rubber bands are getting smaller. The process of stretching out the rubber bands is becoming painful, and some of their hands are even bleeding. The little boy in the red shirt stopped long enough to show off his injuries to the girls across the table. But they all continued . . .
Denisa was looking forward to the watermelon carving contest, hoping to get some good ideas for the next time she wants to carve up a pretty melon. She was a little disappointed to see that there were only two contestants. The one on the right brought his own set of knives and looked pretty intent. The other guy entered just for fun. His little boys were most interested in the carving when Dad finally cut deep enough so they could dig out spoon-fulls of juicy melon to eat.
Denisa was hoping that the winning melon would be a beautifully carved floral display of melon red and pink flowers. Instead, we think it was some pokemon character.
Meanwhile, back at the non-exploding watermelon table, we are a full hour into the contest. Almost all the rubber bands have been used, and these kids have literally worked their fingers to the bones. It is no longer fun, and they have now resorted to just pushing on the sides of the watermelon to coax it to explode.
We have discovered that every festival in Ohio has a queen, and the new one was being crowned right next to the exploding watermelon table.
Meanwhile, back at the watermelons . . . we are an hour and ten minutes into the contest, and one of the children's parents has decided it is time to help. By his expression, we're not so sure that their son thinks this is a good idea. But Dad is now putting on rubber bands, while Mom is helping to find some that had fallen on the ground. We guess it is time to admit that we had originally signed up for the exploding watermelon contest. We had even changed clothes in anticipation of getting juicy when our winning melon exploded. We had also watched you-tube videos and read an article on the physics of getting a watermelon to explode. But then we found out that all the other contestants were children. I guess these parents watched the same video, as they know that all the rubber bands need to be in the center of the melon.
FINALLY, an hour and 16 minutes into the contest, Dad's efforts paid off. The rubber band pressure was too much, as the rind first cracked, and then the entire top exploded into the air. Denisa didn't get a picture of the pieces flying in the air, but she did catch Mark enjoying the explosion on the right. By the smile on his face, it looks like the son is finally appreciative of his parents' help. The rest of the watching crowd was also appreciative to get to see the explosion after such a long wait.
The other neat part of exploding watermelons is that the rubberbands constrict into a tight ball, that makes for a nice bouncing toy.
We couldn't believe that we stayed through the entire day, and now into the evening. But we wanted to see the 9 p.m. entertainer. Mark Leach put on a good country music concert, and we can tell you that Main Street in Milan makes for a good two-stepping dance floor.
As if we hadn't seen enough of all things melon, we returned the next day for the 2:00 parade. We hoped there are no emergencies that day, because the parade was led by fire trucks from all the surrounding towns. Then there were floats for the royalty of each of the festivals for miles around. The newly-crowned Melon Queen was first in the parade.
Ohio is famous for being home to the Longaberger Basket Company, so there is even a group of Basket Queens in the parade.
Milan's claim to fame is that Thomas Edison was born here, and they have an Edison Museum downtown. So the local school is named "Edison High School," and they have a surprisingly large marching band. They stopped and did a dance/marching routine for the crowd that was impressive. We're not sure how their band director achieved this kind of marching prowess from a group of students so early in the school year.
There was a little humor thrown into the floats, with a write-in candidate for the presidential campaign. Melon Man promises to make Make America Melon Again. Given the current choices for president, I think he might get our vote.
This Disney-inspired float was the most elaborate we have seen in any of the local parades, so we had to include a picture.
But the thing that sets this parade apart from the others we have seen must be the number of baton twirlers. We really didn't even know that baton twirling was still being taught, as we see no evidence of it in the midwest. But there were six baton and drum corps in this parade. One group had twirlers in all age groups that stretched over a solid three city blocks. We saw more batons today than we have seen in the previous 20,075 days combined.
The parade ended with the clean up crew, and their beautifully decorated snow plows. We have heard evidence of the amount of snow this area can receive in the winter.
There were more activities planned for this second day of the melon festival, but we were already saturated with melon fun. So we made one more stop at the bakery tent for our last taste of festival goodness--Kiedrowski's Bakery Maple Bacon Creamsticks. That is real bacon on top of a maple glazed long john stuffed with more of that Polish cream. Again, we tasted before we remembered to take a picture, because the original creamstick was twice this size. This sounds like an advertisement for Kiedrowki's Bakery, but we just want to be sure that everyone traveling through Ohio doesn't miss their delicious pastries. We just wished this maple bacon creamstick lasted as long as it takes for a watermelon to explode.
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