Moving on, I decided to visit the "Beamsvillle Berries and Blooms Festival" billed as a "Lincoln Family Festival" - I don't think so!
This so-called berries and blooms family festival was anything but. There was one lonely strawberry stand, they had the sole concession and the price was $5.00 for a pint! That was it for strawberries as far as I could see, the rest was your typical chip-wagon food - greasy, pricy and the same stuff you see everywhere.. The venue was the Beamsville District Secondary School (pavement, I'm afraid). Apparently the fair grounds (where it would normally have been) was not available because they have sold it off for a condo development. Really charming....not!
It looked to me like it was nothing more than a flea market, and a poor one at that. Take a look at the level of excitement and joy evident in these photos.
It's clearly all about the vendors.
I think it would have been less expensive and much, much, nicer to spend an afternoon with friends and family at the Niagara-on-the-Lake Strawberry Social than at the flea market type of affair in Beamsville. If I were driving in from perhaps Hamilton or Toronto, to enjoy a day out I would have been very upset to have read the website billing the event as "Berries and Blossoms" and a "family festival" only to have arrived to find a sad excuse for a flee-market.
Beamsville is part of the Town of Lincoln which, includes many positive things not the least of which is Charles Daley Park so I don't know what happened to Beamsville - could it be just plain old neglect? If you want to send the Mayor a wake-up call he can be reached at:
Mayor Bill Hodgson
4800 South Service Road
Beamsville, Ontario
L0R 1B1
tel 905-562-4464
email: bhodgson@lincoln.ca
