Disappointing Savin Rock 'Festival'

I'm just back from my visit to the shortened Savin Rock Festival - it was an amazing disappointment. We visited the ENTIRE festival (looking at every booth, every ride) in a short 45 minutes.

In the past, there has been a large craft fair - now there were only about 20 bored looking vendors. Mixed in were several 'raffle ticket' penny auctions, and a few hot-looking local businesses. Even the local Rotary club decided to not attend -- the usual Sat/Sun pancake breakfast will be greatly missed, particularly tomorrow, when church lets out, and the road race (which will be on a day without a festival) has been run.

The amusements were from Orange, CT, and were small kiddy rides - the most teen-oriented of the bunch was a small tilt-a-whirl. The Festival ended at 9pm last night, and will end tonight at 9 - no wonder the beaches were packed, and the festival was empty.

The "Laughing Lady' that they had rented wasn't from Savin Rock, and in fact, they had a notice underneath it that 'Are Laughing Lady is missing'... and the that the Mayor's office was looking for leads on it. Needless to say, it's disappointing that the mayor's office misspelled Our, and no one has bothered to fix it.

The food court usually seeks to impress, with Italian sausage and pepper sandwiches, fruit salad, strawberry shortcake, and many ethnic venders. This year, there were a handful of venders (down from what seemed like several dozen in the past). Two sold hot dogs, hamburgers, french fries and fried oreos. There were two fried dough venders, a 'cheese steak' vender, and the exotic offering was pan fried sandwiches. A couple of lemonade vendors were around the small craft fair, and a couple of italian ice vendors. Sad.

Mayor Picard has raised our taxes, and has increased the budget by $5M, and what do we have to show so far for it? We have 4th of July Fireworks in June, and a 2 day extremely cut-down Savin Rock Festival instead of a 4-day celebration of West Haven. Disgusting.