Greetings!

We had a gorgeous day at Panola Valley Gardens for our July meeting. We had eleven members and guests attend the “tea in the garden”. I think it would be fair to say that everyone was in awe at the beauty of the gardens.

Minnesota State Fair Reflections

I grew up in Northern Wisconsin, and as some of you may know, Wisconsin has two “state” fairs, one in the southern part of the state and one in the northern part of the state. We lived too far from either fair and so I never had the state fair experience growing up in Wisconsin. The first summer I lived in Minnesota, my friends took me to the Minnesota State Fair, telling me it was the best in the world.

We drove into the cities from Lindstrom and in no time at all, we were traveling south on Snelling Avenue. Us and a million others! My early bird friends had insisted we be on the road by 8 a.m. Well, we crawled along Snelling ever so slowly until finally we reached the gates, entered, paid our parking fee, and were directed to park in a lot which seemed at the other side of the city, or at least several blocks from the fair gate.

We stopped at the “$.25 all you can drink milk” stand (saving our cups for later in the day), Lou remembers when the milk was free. I am not That old. We had corn dogs (my first experience), enjoying the foot long hot dogs, caramel apples, snow cones, the midway, machinery hill (which is not what it used to be), the glass blowers, the music stages, dairy mart malts,the produce and livestock barns, the 4-H building and much more.

We were now part of the mainstream of fairgoers, tightly wedged amid a moving sea of people along Judson. We were propelled through the Hippodrome, the cattle barn, the swine barn – who would miss the largest boar on earth? Or that cute litter of piglets? Or the 4-H-ers bedding down next to their prize Holstein? Our feet were hot and tired, and finally we found the only place to sit - at the beer hall. Where else would a group of twenty somethings stop?

After a few minutes of refreshing our parched throats along with a thorough dose of “people watching”, we wandered over to the Grandstand, clinging tightly onto each other so as not to get lost, and began walking shoulder to shoulder with the thousands of other fairgoers, straining our necks and eyes to see if possibly one of these vendors had something that we could not live without. And, yes, we bought the glass swans – red, blue, green and purple. Everyone needs a glass swan, don’t they?

We took in the free music stages and sat on the grass along the hillside near the Grandstand. Neil Diamond was in concert and we had no money for tickets, so we enjoyed listening to the music on the hillside. Finally, as it was growing dark, we trekked back to our parked car. Does anyone remember which lot we parked in????

On average, 500,000 corn dogs are typically consumed by fair visitors each year?