Sunday at the Fair

We went to the Fair.  I was thinking I was a little too tuckered out to try to get this all posted after we got home tonight but once I got the pictures loaded the rest came rolling out pretty seamlessly so here's a brief recap of the day as seen through the lens of Gzmoohoo.

We had already had the Walleye cakes at Giggles (excellent) and the Shrimp on a Stick in front of the Agriculture/Horticulture Building (excellent).  The GRider and I had camped out at a piece of granite suitable for seating 3 or 4 in the plaza by the Food Building.  We sent TCWUTH (and our special guest attendant for the day's activities) in search of the onion rings from Danielson and Daughter (really, really excellent).  Here she has returned with the onion rings in her hand and also with a couple of her friends that she bumped into as she left the onion ring place while they were coming out of the Food Building with cheese curds.  We know these people too so it was a good chance for a complete round of fancy bumping into you in this crowd of over a hundred thousand.

The cheese curds looked like they might be excellent but they weren't on our list for this year.

Mancini's is a new building and new concession on the grounds this year.  It is a subsidiary of a quite renowned Saint Paul steak house and appropriately the state fair operation did have a steak sandwich on the menu.  That older gentleman in the blue shirt with what appears to be a multicolored scarf, a beer and paper boat full of something camera right ended up sharing our stand up table.  He was having the steak sandwich.

We had the porketta pig wings.  They were excellent.  The GRider wasn't going to have any but there were five pieces in the paper dish and after the rest of her traveling party had each had one and had delivered smashing reviews she did in fact have one (and we each had one more).  GRider pronounced it excellent.

Unanimous.

The old fellow allowed as how you really can't beat the steak at Mancini's.

We then saw a musical act that the young person wanted to see.  The guy camera left with the acoustic guitar was on a couple of occasions a substitute music teacher for her when she was in high school.  They are FB friends and she knew of the performance.

It was excellent, lots and lots of fun.  At one point the two fellows came down off the stage and were performing and interacting with the audience, dancing with the ladies.  Emily's music teacher came right over and two stepped her around for a few bars as the performance proceeded.

They were excellent.

We had some of the World's Greatest French Fries (excellent).  I didn't get a photo of any of that but here is a shot from where we were sitting inside if I recall correctly the Frontier Bar while we shared a smallish order of fries.

We didn't actually try the Pickle Dog so I cannot with any reasonable hope of accuracy give a review but I am going to go ahead and guess that it was probably excellent.

It was getting dark and photography was becoming a bit iffy.  The deal is though, if you have one of these modern new electronic sensing devices that people call digital cameras the results routinely available are enough to make an old school film camera guy just want to weep.

Getting dark but entering the Midway.

I dunno, you open the sensor, the light flows through the lens and registers, you get almost all the time a pretty reasonable facsimile of what your eye can see.

This is all possible with film but you would have to carry all of those different films with all of those different ASAs around with you all of the time and keep swapping them in and out of the camera body or else carry six or eight camera bodies around with you.

It is enough to make an old school film camera guy just want to weep.

With joy over so much more being possible.

So we headed into the Midway.  You can't actually spend any cash on the Midway anymore, everything is done with tickets.  We had a coupon for tickets in the coupon book we had scored just inside the gate (an excellent value by the way).  Some of the coupons were quickly exchanged for chances at the roll the golf ball up the ramp into the hole and make the horsies move across the display game.

This is a perennial favorite at our house.  I have played in the past, I suppose, but those two love it more than I do and if all three of us play it means that we are all competing against each other.

Since each game allows only one winner I generally observe.  They love it more than I do anyway.

So a final ball of the game into the blue hole allowed the number 6 horsie to jump across the line first in their third try.

They celebrated our win with the prize dog in a tuxedo (an excellent prize) at a dessert stand in Heritage Square.

The cannoli being consumed here was some sort of chocolate with candied bacon and cream filling.  I didn't try this one but those two did and pronounced it (ready everyone?) excellent.

So a good time was had by all.  The Fair ends tomorrow, I am glad the hot and humid finally relented and allowed us to go.  One day once a year seems like enough to me, at least at this moment it seems like enough to me.

Happy September everyone, tomorrow is Labor Day, welcome to fall.