RED ALL OVER Medina is minuscule—one main street, a couple hundred residents, a dozen or so stores—but during the International Apple Festival on Saturday, August 3, the town will be happily overrun by apple bobbers, bagpipers, balloon blowers, puppeteers, clowns, arts and crafts sellers, and 18,000 visitors. In midsummer, apples from other parts of the country have passed their peak, but the varieties that thrive on the Edwards Plateau are just reaching their sweet, tree-ripened best. Many of the 150,000 bushels expected this year will be turned into apple juice, apple pies, apple enchiladas, and practically anything else that can be made from an apple. About the only apple product that will be missing from the festival is hard cider—the event prides itself on being family oriented. In fact, Medina itself is so wholesome that when we called Texas Monthly columnist Kinky Friedman—who lives nearby and has poked fun at it in a few of his novels—to ask for a quote, he didn’t have a bad word to say. “It’s a charming little town,” he growled, “like the one you never grew up in.”
