The average temperatures for this area in April should be mid 70’s in the daytime and mid 40’s at night. Talk is that, this year, we’ve been paying for having a warm February and winter has made several encore performances. Still, it officially became spring on March 20th this year and the local festival season is starting to gear up.
There is exciting stuff going on over at the Fieldale Recreation Center (check their Facebook page for updates) and they had a bingo & Pampered Chef fundraiser this past weekend. Martinsville Bulletin made an excellent write-up in this April 5th article, “Construction Starts on Bassett, Fieldale Renovation Projects“.
This coming weekend is the annual Pig Cookin’ Contest and Craft Fair at Spencer Penn. Come Friday night to see the cooking and listen to live bluegrass. Then come back on Saturday to shop the vendors, see the classic cars, and maybe play some cow-patty bingo.
In getting my camera ready, I realized that I never posted about our last festival for 2017. It was a new one for us … the “What the Hay Festival” in nearby Mayodan, North Carolina.
We shop in Mayodan quite a bit because it is very close (around 20 minutes), there’s not a lot of traffic (it’s amazing how relative that gets), and their Food Lion has had one of the better craft beer selections around (it’s the closest place to get DuClaw). Big round bales of hay started popping up all over town decorated as all kinds of creatures in the weeks leading up to the festival. They did an excellent job with those.
Mayodan has essentially a one-light intersection downtown but downtowns don’t have to be big to have an ambience. Mayodan has a particularly pretty downtown with old brick buildings on all four corners. On the day of the festival, they closed the road that ran through it and set up just a humdinger of a small town festival.
In the center of the intersection, they set up a soundstage and people brought chairs to sit and listen to the music. The little shop that you can see on the left in the photo below is the Mayodan Arts Center. It’s sells a variety of arts and crafts made by local people – pottery, painted glassware, photographs, bookmarks, stationery, and more. We ended up getting a few Christmas gifts from them and definitely plan to go back.
They had a full midway set up for the kids and vendors in tents filled in any space that was left on the streets. Mother got her flu shot at one tent.
It was a great little festival. We also discovered Charlie’s Soap Outlet Store & Cedar Mountain Country Store nestled in the shops along one side of the road. As the name implies, they have Charlie’s Soap but they also have all kinds of knick-knacks for the home and seasonal decorations. If you talk to the shop owners, they’ll open up a second building with metal yard art/sculptures. We are fans.
In short, we loved the festival and we love Mayodan. There’s a lot to see there, I think, and I want to go back when it gets warmer and just spend some time looking around. Perhaps I can find more remembrances like this monument to Mayodan veterans. The engraving on this monument says, “This WWI mortar was originally dedicated to Mayodan veterans of that war. It was rededictated to all Mayodan veterans November 11, 2001”.
So, I’m already planning to spend an afternoon in Mayodan sometime when it gets warm (if that ever happens again). What other unique finds should I look for? Any great boutiques?
Life In & Around Martinsville-Henry County 