Can I have an antacid please?

Festival season has officially arrived in Florida,  This past weekend was the Grant Seafood Fest and St. Katherine’s Greek Fest. I attend both annually and sometimes in the same day. This year was one of the “same day” years seeing as we had plans to take our cranky boat out on the river on Sunday.

I not so patiently waited Saturday for my husband to get home from work around 1pm and after a doing the let’s get ready to go battle with both the kids we set off around 2:30. Grant isn’t all that far from our house so we got there soon, and to make matter better for us it was starting to rain, so we had an easy time getting in and finding a parking spot. It also only took us a record 1 minutes to get our tickets to get food and drink.

Well, this year like every year past, the food was excellent and I bought a matryoshka ( I collect them). I always get the fried shrimp, fried clam strips and my favorite the fried scallops. The only improvement I would recommend would be to use sea scallops instead of bay scallops, but I understand they have to keep cost down and the bay ones are still tender and sweet.

I love to browse through the craft area, it’s like a small flea market of sorts, people from all over the state come and show their homemade thingie-ma-doos. The coolest one by far was what I could only describe as the most rednecky (Which I am in no denial that I am one). They call their shop Tire Swings and Garden Things and they had the most bad ass tire swing of all, it was cut to look like a rocking horse.  They also had a dragon, bull  & motorcycle, the “Redneck Hammock” &  “Redneck Chair Swing”, and multiple planters & bird feeders in about every color you could imagine. My personal favorite of the planters was the flamingo one. All the swings and things are made of recycled racing tires (great for the environment!) and were cleaned spotless. Both Joe & Lauri who make these wonderful creations were extremely friendly & helpful. The swings and things can hold up to 400 pounds as well too.

After leaving and trying to head home (my husband is easily distracted now by any boat on the side of the road with a for sale sign) we realized how late it had gotten and hightailed it home so our youngest could squeeze in her nap.

Now home, we gave our seafood about an hour to digest before we set out again to the second festival for the day, St. Katherine’s Greek Festival. One of my favorite of the year. As usual on our way there as we neared the church we could hear the Greek music and knew that the Odyssey dancers were already doing there thing. The Saturday night crowd was thick as usual, but the lines move fast. The only thing I would suggest to improve this one is to have more seating, it is a bit of a pain to be balancing 4 gyros and 2 cans of soda while trying to guide 2 preschoolers through the crowd. I usually bring the biggest purse I have so that I can stuff everything away in it and make navigation a little easier. The food was outstanding! I cannot stress that enough, I am a huge lover of Greek food and look forward to having a gyro and a bowl of loukamades every year. The have a small room that they devote to their bazaar, some of the things are expensive item that I wouldn’t think most people would have the cash on them to buy (but then again maybe their set up to take credit cards or something, I honestly have no idea). This year the guy who sells the matryoshka’s was there, he wasn’t last year, so I didn’t being enough money to buy another one. I was a little bummed. A little bit later the Odyssey dancers started up again, I will forever remain in amazement at how high they can leap in the air. It is really amazing. If you do go, be prepared for it to be extremely loud. I happen to enjoy the ear splitting music coming from sometimes rusty sounding speakers. Also, you must get out there and dance with everyone. They do the traditional style dancing where everyone is in a circle holding hands and you do these step while rotating the whole circle, it is a lot of fun. And don’t be worried if you don’t know how, enough people know what they’re doing and will get everything moving, just fall in line and watch what they’re doing.

Needless to say, by the end of the night, the worst heartburn I have ever had set it. It was agony, but worth it.

Tags: Brevard county, festival, Florida, grant, Greek, gyro, loukamathes, matryoshka, seafood, St. Katherine's Greek Festival