2024 Fair Visit #3 - Solo Visit

My Annual Solo Visit

After morning meetings, I was able to cut out of work and head over to the Fairgrounds for my annual solo visit. I covered a lot of ground (literally - 23,000 steps!) in about six hours, exploring just about every corner of the Fair.

To give the day some structure I decided to walk the History Walking Tour, which takes you on a loop around the entire grounds. From there, I looked at foods and drinks I was pretty sure the rest of the family would not be interested in as some of my targets for the day, and off I went!

First food stop was for RC BBQ’s Sweet Heat Bacon Crunch.

This was a fantastic start to the day! This dish involves smoked slab bacon in BBQ sauce and topped with a hot honey and chili crunch and green onions, served on a bed of rice. I’m currently having a thing for chili crunch so I was really interested in trying this after it got some good reviews last week. I loved everything about this - the crunch was flavorful but not overpowerfully spicy, the slab bacon was definitely smoky and tender, not overdone. The rice turned out to be a perfect complement to the heat of the dish. I was scraping the bowl on this one. My only complaint is the price - at $13, this is probably $4 too expensive given the portion size. I expect to pay inflated prices at the Fair and even moreso for new foods, but that was excessive. If they take a few bucks off the price I think they could have a mainstay item on their menu.

After that I did a loop of the West End before starting the walking route. I came across this oddity of a pop-up performance in the West End Market:

This is apparently something called The State Fair Fitness Fanatics Comedy Show. It was… something. I watched for about 5 minutes but found it too awkward to keep watching. Points for trying though!

Next I wandered through the pig barn, and my timing was good because there was judging going on. This pig won its class. Apparently the judge liked her skeleton, the distance off the ground, and the way it used its hind legs.

After petting some cows I was hungry again, and the next food stop was for the Buffalo Chicken Cheese Curd Tacos. This involves fried buffalo-flavored cheese curds and chicken topped with blue cheese slaw and buffalo sauce in a fried flour shell. And here I made a rookie mistake - I forgot to take a photo! I did take a photo of the marquee while waiting in line.

I had a good reason for being distracted, though. Readers might remember last year’s out of state visitor Chris. When this year’s new foods list came out, Chris declared that he was most excited about this one, so I suggested I live stream the tasting. Well, we did! Chris was at the US Open in NYC, no less!

Here’s the food screenshot from the Fair’s new foods webpage:

Unfortunately, the food itself didn’t quite live up to the hype. It wasn’t terrible by any means - the buffalo flavor was legit and the crispy flour shell was also a highlight. The major miss was the slaw - I couldn’t taste any blue cheese flavor at all, and overall the slaw felt barely there. More minor quibbles included that the cheese curd and chicken coating felt soggy, maybe from the buffalo sauce, and the ratio of cheese to chicken felt a little off - too much cheese, not enough chicken. All in all, I gave these a B-.

After my livestream with Chris, I wandered through the Miracle of Life. Not that many cute babies today, but out back is one of my favorite Fair secret corners, the Future Farmers of America competition gardens. I like to check these out and get ideas for our landscaping. This year’s theme was designing garden’s for the changing climate. Here’s the winning garden, made by the Dassel-Cokato chapter (factoid: not far from the world’s largest ball of twine!) I got several ideas for plants to add at our house.

From there I wandered over to the Creative Activities Building. The founder of T-Rex Cookies was presenting in the demonstration kitchen.

I learned that the reason T-Rex cookies are so big is because she had really bad tennis elbow at the time she was starting the business and making the cookies big was less painful, and they turned out to be a huge hit. I also learned that their sea salt caramel chocolate chip cookie won a best cookie in the country award! And finally and most interesting, she mentioned that the company was pivoting away from grocery store distribution to things like stadiums and airports because the margins in grocery stores are tiny. She said that T-Rex Cookies were in Target for four years, and in that time T-Rex made $4,000 from that deal!

Next up, one of the things I really look forward to each year, the kids’ art! It seemed like a bit of a quiet year, but there were still several amazing pieces. Here are a few that I liked.

11th grade!

8th grade!

7th grade!

5th grade!

Next up on the food scene was the Que Viet Giant Egg Roll on a Stick. This is not a new food, but one I hadn’t had for many years, and remembered fondly.

Well, things have changed, and not in a good way. First off, the shell of this thing was SUPER crunchy. Too crunchy, had to fight through it. Once I did things did not improve - the filling was basically solid pork. It was like eating a pork sausage. It wasn’t terrible as pork sausage goes, but it wasn’t an eggroll. There was no obvious cabbage, and what little veggies it had were sort of completely encased in the pork. As I was trying this, I heard someone at the next table comment that it seemed more “pork-y” this year, so maybe we just got a bad batch. Whatever the reason, it was a terrible disappointment.

I popped over to the Hamline Dining Hall to attempt to purge the disappointment with a Cinnamon Affogato.

This was much better. The ice cream was definitely cinnamon-y and I appreciated the mini biscotti as well. If I have a minor nitpick it’s that I wish it had come in a smaller, taller cup - at the end, I sort of felt like I was scooping up espresso from a dog bowl!

I went into the Fine Arts building next. Here are a few of my favorite pieces.

I’m always a sucker for intricate details…

I doubled back to the 4-H Building so that I could catch their theater performance. I haven’t seen it in several years and it’s always fun to see what the kids in the 4-H summer camp have come up with - they only have 8 days to prepare before the run of shows at the Fair starts! This year’s performance was called Wonder Full, a musical about a travel agency and how the trips it sends its clients on have changed their lives.

As I made my way north, I stopped at Giggle’s to do my annual force-myself-to-try-one-new-beer-even-though-I’ll-hate-it. This year, I settled on the Sweet Clementine beer.

To my great surprise, I did not in fact hate this, I actually enjoyed it a lot! It didn’t feel gimmicky (gummy candy aside), but did feel novel enough to be a Fair drink. It was refreshing and tasted enough like clementines that a nearby bee was quite persistent in wanting to get into the beer.

After a loop through shopping destinations up north (scored a nice Flyers hat for cheap!) and the Pet Pavillion (I’ll spare you the photo of pet surgery), I headed back down towards the Ag building. Along the way, I stopped at new vendor Chan’s Eatery for some boba tea.

As I suspected, this works quite well at the Fair. I had the Thai Milk Tea with Tapioca Boba, which is pretty classic, but they also had lots of fruity combos. I’m happy to have some boba at the Fair, especially up north which is a bit of a food and drink desert. I didn’t try their Korean corn dogs, but they looked ridiculous, and you could get them coated in hot Cheetos dust.

At the Ag building I checked out the SEED ART!!

Yes the line was very long and moving slowly. The Fair advertised better traffic flow at the seed art this year, but I noticed no improvement. Oh well, still worth it! Here are a few of my faves. One thing I never appreciated before is how some of the artists are so creative showing what seeds they used.

I remember this picture from National Geographic from when I was a kid!

This being an election year, especially with Governor Walz on the ticket, there were plenty of political ones.

Yep, in our hyper-politicized environment, even depicting the new state flag is political.

After the long and slow line of the seed art, I was pretty hot. Luckily, I was in the right spot and grabbed a cider freeze, one of the Fair’s truly simple pleasures.

It was time to start heading out. I got a mini donut beer for the trek.

I came across KSTP’s news broadcast doing the weather live from the Fair.

One last lap around the West End. I was wondering if the glass blowers are still there, and sure enough, they are and they were doing a demo.

Ending where I began, we closed out with a much better pop-up performance in the West End market, this time flamenco dancing.

And with that my 2024 walking tour card was full and my solo visit was done! I enjoy this trip every year, getting to go at my own pace and wander into some of the more random and less-traveled corners of the Fair. We’ll be back probably two more times this year - one date day and probably one more family day. Until then, have fun at the Fair!