The Iowa State Fair–The Food

A post from Kelli–

So a while back, I mentioned something about going to the State Fair to Jason.  He asked if I wanted to go and I told him that I didn’t want to go by myself, so it really depended on if he wanted to go–I might have made a mean, snarky comment about how never will leave the farm–so we ended up picking a day to go.

So far this week, I’ve been super busy.  We had a family picnic on Sunday, spent Monday in Oelwein working on details for our quilt retreat next summer, and then spent Tuesday in Minnesota getting our hair done and doing a bit of shopping.  By Tuesday night, I was wooped!  So when I got home, I completely intended on getting Jason to go on Sunday rather than yesterday, but after a little tinking and such, we decided it wouldn’t work, so we were up and on the road by 6:30 yesterday morning for our 3 1/2 hour car ride there…and then another 3 1/2 hours back.

We hadn’t ate breakfast at all, but stopped at McDonalds on the way down, but otherwise drove mostly straight through.  We had a bit of road construction, but not too much at all.  I think MapQuest took us the most backwards way of getting there once we got to Des Moines, but we got there, so I’m not gonna complain.

Once we were there we were nearly bombarded with food stands.  People say that sometimes, the best part of the fair is the food–And they are correct.  We decided that we’d just kind of graze all day and try something if it sounded good.  So we started with a funnel cake.  While I don’t eat gluten, I do make exceptions, knowing I’m going to feel like crap for a few days, so I deceided to make an exception today and it was soooo worth it!

After the funnel cake, I wanted to track down some naked cheesecurds.  We found some and they were a bit on the spendy end, so we split an order.  They were super good, but I forgot to take a picture!  We then moved on with the intention of finding a pork chop or ribeye on a stick.  We ended up finding some, but the line was ridiculously long and we had lots to see, so we moved on and found pork chops a bit further away.

OOFDA!  They were really good.  We then walked around some more, checking out 4-H buildings, the Varied Industries Building, and the animals.  I took lots and lots of pictures, but I’m going to share them with you a little bit at a time.

After wandering through all of the barns, we foudn corndogs on a stick and had one of those too!  We continued to walk around and check stuff out.  I often found myself wandering through various “testosterone halls” with lots of tractors, motors, or classic cars.  There was a really nice mix of stuff that I was interested in and Jason was interested in too!

Finally, after 17,000 steps on my fitbit, we decided we had seen all of the things we were interested in and that we needed to end the day in the same way we started–With a funnel cake and strawberry smoothies.

As we were walking out, I thought to myself that maybe we could make this a yearly trip as it is usually feasible to get Jason off the farm in August and just as I was going to propose it as a yearly trip, Jason announced that since he had now been here, he didn’t think he would need to come back.  So that idea was shot in the butt–But I do think he enjoyed himself enough that I may be able to talk him into doing something and leaving the farm again by next summer….Afterall in the 8 years that I’ve been with him, I can count the number of days on one hand that he hasn’t gone to the farm at all…

Thanks  so much to U.S. Cellular for the tickets to the state fair.