Yesterday was a beautiful day to spend a few hours at the Florida Strawberry Festival in Plant City – just a few miles East of Tampa.
Plant City is arguably the largest strawberry growing area in the Country. During each March ‘s strawberry harvesting time the area shows its pride with one heck of an eleven day agricultural fair celebration paying homage to the growers – many are multi-generational family farms. Besides a large midway for the kids and young at heart, there are the animal and Ag demonstrations and exhibits with two real stand-outs. First is the strawberry decked out smartly in every edible form imaginable from shortcakes, shakes, sundaes to jams, jellies and more.
Secondly, it’s over a week filled with some of the finest Country stars making appearances on the Wish Farms Sound Stage. This year featured Willie Nelson, Little Big Town, The Bellamy Brothers, Jennifer Nettles, Brenda Lee, Maddie & Tae and Rascal Flatts, to name a few.
This year we chose to see Larry Gatlin and the Gatlin Brothers’ afternoon performance. They were as good as we expected, singing many of the hits they have had over their 40+ year career. They had two of the famous Lennon Sisters – Jan and Kathy – join them on stage for a couple of songs. They sang their hearts out for a very large crowd for about an hour and a half. Great show – even though the temp was hovering in the low 80’s, there was a nice breeze now and then that was much appreciated by the crowd.
Our friends from Canada – Cheryl and Ray – joined us for this excursion and we spent several hours at the Festival enjoying the sights, listening to (and buying more CD’s from) one of Niki’s favorite groups – “Runa Pacha” – so versatile on the pan flute. We also enjoyed the Fair-type food including, of course, a mandatory round of huge, fresh, strawberry shortcake.
The Florida Strawberry Festival is a lot of fun and we enjoy visiting it each year. We do recommend if you ever have the chance to catch it as well.
See more photos of the Florida Strawberry Festival on our Pinterest pages at https://www.pinterest.com/snowbirdrvtrail/florida-strawberry-festival/.
Safe travels and enjoy every adventure,
Niki and Jack