People watching at Geneva On the Lake

Spent the weekend at Geneva On The Lake as part of the Artist Market at the GOTL Wine Festival. What a fabulous place to watch people…. and there appeared to be a wide variety of different people there to celebrate wine. Our first thoughts when we arrived were apprehension at the gale force winds. We tied down our tent and weighted each pole carefully to stabilize it, but there was no thought of opening up the sides of the tent because the winds were fierce.
One of the funnier observations was the thought that some vendor was selling lanyards with a special wire hook on them to hold your wine glass. Lanyards, you know, are those straps that hang around your neck and were (are?) popular for hanging your keys. Now consider this… a wine festival, with a number of people wandering around with their wine glass suspended in this lanyard contraption and a woman stumbles up to our tent and says ” Yeppers… theeeze things work great buuuuut yu have to stay vertical.” Ok, point taken. thankfully her glass was empty and she was topped off. We thought she was going to take the tent out with her swaying.
And then there were the sniff and touch crowd… had to pick up every bar of soap and sniff them. We began having fun telling everyone we are giving out free stuff – free sniffs of our soap. The free is what they heard… then they all laughed, but sniffed anyway.
And then there were the bands… our tent was about half way between the main stage and the wine fest stage… and we were ground zero for the convergence of music like Jimmy Buffet’s Margaritaville, and the Blues Brothers “Soul Man”. Now the question I have is this… aren’t speakers and sound systems directional? Why not have zones of sound… where you walk from margaritaville to soul man, or visa versa? By the end of day two we were completely exhaused by the sound… which had moved to rolling stones verses german umpa-pa polka party. It was entertaining to watch people react to the sounds.
The sight of the 5 ft 5 inch skinny guy dressed in a kilt, irish shirt and celtic sandals that laced to the knee dancing and shaking his walking stick to the music much like a drum major was very humerous.

And in the midst of the battle of the bands a woman stopped to talk to us about soap making, explaining she makes soap out of goats milk. Not really hearing everything well Steve asked me later “Why was she licking goats?” She had explained the saponification process of goats milk, explaining the milk takes about 5-6 weeks to transform into usable soap, and the way she knows is to lick the goats milk soap – if it doesnt burn her tongue she is good to go.