The Pie Auction

Sunday was the Toledo Cheese Days Town Barbecue. For $7 a person could get a plate of roast beef (cooked in the park by the Lions Club who began the process at 5am), baked beans, coleslaw, watermelon, garlic bread and orange drink. If you are me, $7 will get you coleslaw, watermelon, garlic bread and orange drink plus shocked looks from the roast beef servers. Anyway, once the barbecue is over the leftover meat is auctioned off as depicted in the photo below. Most of the meat in the ziploc baggies sold for around $75. They did have meat in 25lb. boxes. One of those boxes went for a bid of $350!

Following the beef action was the pie auction. Silly me. I brought $20 thinking that would be enough to get me a pie. It wasn't. Drew pitched in $15 and we got this peach pie with a perfect crust for $35.

They also threw in a watermelon left over from the barbecue for good measure.

Becca bid on the Strawberry Rhubarb pie and snagged it for $50 (no watermelon though but that is probably a good thing as she flew home to San Francisco the next day and a watermelon would probably incur and extra baggage charge.

But $35 and $50 are small potatoes compared to the marionberry pie pictured above. That thing sold for $1200. No. I did not put an extra zero on that number. Twelve Hundred Dollars!!! The man sitting down and the man standing up are father and son. They were bidding against each other and got impatient when the auctioneer was only moving the bids up by $25 increments so they started shouting out their own numbers: $300, $500, $900. The crowd was freaking out. Collective gasps were heard round the park. This pie was the last thing up for auction and this family had already dropped at least $1000 on the meat and other pies. The son finally one-upped his dad and walked away with the expensive pie. Do you remember the floods in December? Rumor has it that this family owns Sunbirds, a sporting/outdoor outfitter store in Chehalis. They were under 12 feet of water and the Toledo Lions Club really helped them out, rescuing people trapped in the upstairs of the store and assisting with clean up. So the family came to Cheese Days to support the Lions by buy everything at really high prices.