So I'm part German, studied German in high school and college, and even was CONCEIVED in Germany! Yet after Mike told me that he'd never been to an Oktoberfest, I realized that I hadn't either. I thought I'd found the perfect activity for our Saturday at the coast.
We had a great weekend getaway, all too quick of course, but we will never stop being grateful for the fact that my parents have a wonderful beach house about 1-1/2 hour away from Portland. Very lucky we are!!
At any rate, I got this bright idea in my head that we should drive to Pacific City for their first-ever Oktoberfest. We'd never been to Pacific City, so we thought it would be an adventure. Well first of all, it was about an hour-drive from Rockaway.
Then we got there and had a heckuva time finding the huge Oktoberfest!! We finally stopped to ask, and discovered that it was spread all over town. You paid for your "scrip" in the center of town and bought plastic beer steins. Free face painting for the kids (tip encouraged).
Then many of the businesses in town had little glass fishing balls you could win if you had the matching ticket number...which meant that we went into all these little shops and offices in the hope of winning a tiny glass ball? What else was there to do? :)
They did have a great selection of beer and root beer, and the bratwursts were excellent. But they billed it as a "root beer kindergarten," and my impression was that they'd have all sorts of activities for the kids, etc. About the only entertainment they had was a lone accordion player who took lots of breaks.
I believe Nicholas enjoyed the outing most of all, because the "beer garden" (ha!) was right next to a small runway where antique biplanes were going up and landing--giving people rides. He LOVES airplanes, so he was thrilled. He sings this little song, "Honolulu airplane" to the tune of "Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star" because he remembers flying to Hawaii.
After eating/drinking, we walked down several blocks to the "root beer tasting," where I correctly identified Jones Soda and Thomas Kemper root beer and won two bags of root beer candy. But as we were there, they were packing up the root beer tasting to move it down near the beer and brats.
All in all, it was a fun-enough outing, but not really worth driving a 2-hour round trip! Next time we are hitting the Oktoberfest at Oaks Park or Mt. Angel!!! My guess is that for the same price, we'd get a lot more entertainment included.
We had a great weekend getaway, all too quick of course, but we will never stop being grateful for the fact that my parents have a wonderful beach house about 1-1/2 hour away from Portland. Very lucky we are!!
At any rate, I got this bright idea in my head that we should drive to Pacific City for their first-ever Oktoberfest. We'd never been to Pacific City, so we thought it would be an adventure. Well first of all, it was about an hour-drive from Rockaway.
Then we got there and had a heckuva time finding the huge Oktoberfest!! We finally stopped to ask, and discovered that it was spread all over town. You paid for your "scrip" in the center of town and bought plastic beer steins. Free face painting for the kids (tip encouraged).
Then many of the businesses in town had little glass fishing balls you could win if you had the matching ticket number...which meant that we went into all these little shops and offices in the hope of winning a tiny glass ball? What else was there to do? :)
They did have a great selection of beer and root beer, and the bratwursts were excellent. But they billed it as a "root beer kindergarten," and my impression was that they'd have all sorts of activities for the kids, etc. About the only entertainment they had was a lone accordion player who took lots of breaks.
I believe Nicholas enjoyed the outing most of all, because the "beer garden" (ha!) was right next to a small runway where antique biplanes were going up and landing--giving people rides. He LOVES airplanes, so he was thrilled. He sings this little song, "Honolulu airplane" to the tune of "Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star" because he remembers flying to Hawaii.
After eating/drinking, we walked down several blocks to the "root beer tasting," where I correctly identified Jones Soda and Thomas Kemper root beer and won two bags of root beer candy. But as we were there, they were packing up the root beer tasting to move it down near the beer and brats.
All in all, it was a fun-enough outing, but not really worth driving a 2-hour round trip! Next time we are hitting the Oktoberfest at Oaks Park or Mt. Angel!!! My guess is that for the same price, we'd get a lot more entertainment included.
My little tigers!
Watching the airplanes fly by... "Nother Airplane!"
Runway right behind us...
Posing by the airplane...
Thank you for attending our first Oktoberfest Root • Beer • Float. Your pictures look like you were having a good time. As this was our first event, It was a guess on how many people would attend. We wanted to keep it simple and small. Now that we have our first Black Beer event under our belts, we now can proceed with a more "German" event. I do encourage you to attend the other Oktoberfest events in the area. Maybe you'll find that ours is perfect for the whole family. Thanks again for attending. We hope to see you in the future, watch us grow and become bigger and better.
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