Jill Thomas is a rambler, traveler, and storyteller with a big laugh who lives part-time in Pensacola, USA, and the rest of the time in Salt Spring Island, Canada.
Yesterday was a perfect sunny day with bright blue skies and just enough warmth for rambling. So, we decided to take a day trip to a small town forty-nine miles and one state line away from our home in Pensacola Beach, Florida, and head to Fairhope, Alabama.
The American south is known for its frequent and quirky festivals, and my husband and I are huge fans. Since moving here just over a decade ago, we've attended festivals celebrating peanuts, shrimp, pepper jelly, UFOs, coon dogs, rattlesnakes, alligators, andouille sausage, daylilies, peaches, sugar cane, frogs, boudin, fried chicken, jazz, red dresses, witches, cocktails, voodoo, po'boys, crawfish, the blues, rice, cochon de lait, jambalaya, and strawberries.
Southern towns and festivals go together like cupcakes and frosting. And, when it comes to quaint, Fairhope lives up to all my Hallmark movie-inspired expectations. Its streets are lined with enormous fern-infested live oaks supporting pounds of long-hanging Spanish moss. Well-dressed ladies leisurely stroll its walkable downtown boutiques in flat shoes, ironed linen, and expansive hats. Its lovely neighborhoods are dotted with century-old houses that will spark your relocation fantasies.
On an average day, Fairhope holds 20,000 people, but for three days every March, it packs in an extra 250,000. Typically in this part of the world, when large numbers of people fill a small town for a weekend, they fill a football stadium. But here they come for art.
The Fairhope Arts & Crafts Festival is one of the oldest arts festivals in the country, and this year was its 70th anniversary. This weekend the town hosted 335 artists from 30 states representing 11 different kinds of media ranging from urban gallery-quality watercolors and ceramics to Alabama Football birdhouses and hand painted patio signs encouraging day drinking with an optimistic "It's always five o clock somewhere."
This festival's reputation makes it hard to get into organizers who can be choosy about its exhibitors. Hence, it attracts collectors from across the nation looking for an abundance of fine arts that can't be found anywhere else.
Town organizers, however, claim that the best thing about the festival is a less tangible art form - the art of southern hospitality. The community adopts visiting artists, inviting them to dinner and bringing them breakfasts, volunteering as booth sitters, and pulling wagons of drinks through the festival to keep the artists refreshed.
This is a town, like many others in the south, that knows a warm welcome is the most essential art form. Yesterday Fairhope didn't disappoint.
READ MORE > Ramble Log, Ramblers Cafe Blog.
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