Fall festivals filled with food and fun are what I am all about. I personally love going to festivals. They are so lively with the crowds and people passing from booth to booth in search of little treasures. Not to mention all the music, games and yummy treats from various food trucks.
Milledgeville’s favorite fall festival has returned once more! Deep Roots was this past Saturday, Oct. 19, and it had a wonderful turnout. This was my third Deep Roots, and every year it just gets better and better.
I love how invested GCSU students get into Deep Roots. It is such a big event for our little town. The Milledgeville locals love it, but the college students go all out. There are parties and events all weekend. I had brunch at my friend’s house before we all headed to the festival together, and the night before, we all had a bonfire together.
If the lead-up to Deep Roots isn’t hype enough, the outfits will get you. People get all dressed up like it’s New York Fashion Week or something. I love wandering around downtown looking at everyone’s outfits they’ve had planned out for weeks.
I don’t just love the attire surrounding this event, but one of my favorite things about going to festivals is that talking with the vendors is just so interesting. They each have such unique and fascinating stories. I just love hearing them, and they love sharing them.
“I enjoy making stuff with my hands, and it was a stress-relieving hobby for me because of work,” said Carmen Dabey, a vendor at Deep Roots. “I like to play around with food-grade ingredients and create things that are all natural.”
Dabey started her brand, A Girl and A Goat, ten years ago. She was a nurse, and with the stress from her job, she needed something creative to decompress and release tension and anxiety. Dabey makes soaps from the milk of her own goats and various other all-natural ingredients. It was important to her to make sure there was nothing harmful in her soaps and scrubs since she works in the medical field and understands the importance of taking care of your body. She told me in our conversation she does festivals like this very often, and that this was her third Deep Roots.
Like Dabey, many other vendors have similar stories. I went from booth to booth just gushing at all the handmade and intricate creations and listening to everyone share their own journeys. I saw jewelry, art, food, and personally my favorite -homemade and all-natural lemonade. The two men running the tent were so kind and fun, and I tried their all-natural strawberry lemonade. It
was just amazing and so refreshing. It is so charming how people care so much about making things unique or straying away from the artificial.
Though I did not stay for the live music, that is also one of my favorite things about festivals. I am sure that it was spectacular, but I did see when they brought out a huge screen to watch the football game everyone gathered in the street cheering and laughing together.
There is nothing better than spending an entire Saturday in a cute outfit, walking around an enchanting little downtown area with friends, and no worries in the world other than how I am going to carry all the trinkets I’ve bought back to my car and where we’re going to get dinner together to end out our fun, fall festival-filled day.
