Minnesota State Fair

The Minnesota state fair runs from 2 weeks before Labor Day to Labor Day.  You actually have to get permission from the state for a school to start BEFORE Labor Day BECAUSE of the State Fair.  It’s a big deal.  The only one bigger is Texas, apparently. 

Stephen in front of the crowd (there is one with me, but it’s on Stephen’s dad’s camera).

When I think of State Fairs I think of farm animals and gross food.  And I wasn’t too far off.  I was actually amazed by the AMOUNT of food.  It’s like the point is to eat ridiculously disgusting food.  But this is also a pregnant woman speaking who really can’t stand the smell of a lot of things at the moment, deep fried and extra sugary are top on the list.  I was also surprised to learn that Minnesota’s State Fair is a permanent structure.  Well the Fairgrounds are a permanent structure with exits from the freeway and everything.  And it’s mainly only in use for 2 weeks out of the year… (apparently it also holds a few other minor events… but it’s not really used more than maybe 4-6 times a year).

Anyway, I went with Stephen and his dad, we left Samantha with Stephen’s mom and had a decently good time.  Although the stark difference in personality between Stephen (who is like a replica of his dad) and me are quite distinct.  We wanted to see “the cars” and so I wanted to go see… but the map was horrendous and what Stephen’s dad called “machine hill” was neither a hill, nor was it labeled.  So we wandered the entire time.  I slowly got over it.

We did manage to find the cars… but there were no old cars or even really big farm equipment.  There were only a few car dealerships and only American ones at that But we faithfully went through every single car and decided which features we liked and what we didn’t.  Ford had the most decent showing of innovation in their cars, and they weren’t half bad looking either.  Chevy was pretty bad and Chrysler was absolutely awful.

We heard this loud popping noise and went to investigate and we found this icecream maker.  The popping noise were the spark plugs. 

Here’s a mini one, by looking at it we figured it actually worked.

We also found the John Deere dealership.  Stephen and his dad were very disappointed in the showing.  It was mainly just consumer tiny lawn mowers rather than any REAL farm equipment.  There was one tractor that *I* thought was huge but they (Stephen and his dad) called it “hobby farm” equipment, and we weren’t allowed on it at all.

Here’s one tractor we got on that didn’t even make it into the “hobby farm” list.

A couple other things we did:

We did eat some food, Stephen’s dad the most.  I had eaten lunch before going so I wouldn’t eat too much gross stuff.

We got our bottomless milk cups for $1.  It was really good. 

We watched some of the performers on random stages. 

We watched some barrel races in the rodeo area.

Walked through every single barn (except the pigs).  Cows are huge animals by the way.

We got a malt at the end, which was also very good.