Know your Fork: Main Street Shopping

One of the things at the top of my mum's list when they came to visit was to see the shops on Main Street in Spanish Fork. You would think that, seeing as we've lived here for almost two years, I would make an excellent native guide. But in spite of the best intentions, I've never actually made it out of the car on Main Street, unless you count the grocery store at the end.
So, being a support-your-local-businesses kind of girl, off we went.

We parked by the library on Center Street (which will be getting its own blog post sometime soon) and headed north on Main Street. We focused our efforts on the walkable part of town, which was from Center Street to about 300 North. Downtown Spanish Fork has a bit of an old west, small town feel, with just enough going on to keep you occupied for an hour or so.

A few highlights:

Our first stop was Rocket Rebellion, a 1950s retro store that brings "bijou" to an entirely new level: it was tiny! So small, in fact, that I felt bad bringing Espen's stroller in because it took up a good third of the available floor space. But they did manage to cram an amazing amount of stuff into that small space, and we spent a good fifteen minutes or so poking around, until my dad started telling the girl who worked there how hard it was to find women's shoes in his size, at which point we left in embarrassment. Don't ask.

Next up was was Wild Ivy Memories, a scrap booking store that was unfortunately closing down. So much for supporting local businesses! But they were having a huge sale, and my mum was going to make a scrapbook from their trip, so in we went. While we were there, it occurred to me that I should probably take advantage of the sale seeing as I'm planning to make a scrapbook for Espen. However, never having scrapbooked anything in my life (and feeling entirely uncomfortable using "scrapbook" as a verb), I was completely overwhelmed by it all and ended up scurrying away with a few sheets of stickers. Which the people at the store might have referred to as "embellishments", I don't know, I was hyperventilating too hard to really remember. We will return to my pathological fear of scrapbooks in a future post.

Continuing with the retro theme from earlier, we next went into Confetti Antiques and Books, which you might be familiar from their...shall we say, locally produced commercials shown here in Utah. The store has three levels, but we only saw the main one because I couldn't get up or down the stairs with Espen's stroller. So, negative points to them for that, but I was a fan of the combined book and antique store. It's definitely a place you where you could spend some time and money!

Antiquing (I can't believe spell-check recognized that as a word!) made us hungry, so imagine our delight when we wandered into Stone Drug and discovered their lunch counter! As you can see in the photo above of me and my dad doing our best "Nighthawks" impression, it looks and feels like it was lifted straight from the 1950s. Likely along with one of the waitresses, who ruled with an iron fist. But the burgers and fries were good, and it was fun to hang out with the locals. Which I guess I technically am by now.

And that just about sums it up. There are of course other stores that I could have told you about, but these are the ones that stood out. Also, Spanish Forkers, if there is anywhere in Spanish Fork you'd like me to write about, please let me know!