The Minnesota State Fair!

We've just returned from an overnight trip to Minneapolis-St. Paul (or "the Cities," in local parlance) for the Minnesota State Fair. I'd really hoped to see a real, agricultural-state state fair while we were out here, and I was not disappointed.

Well, maybe just a little. It turns out the Minnesota State Fair is now targeted at largely the same demographic as our beloved hometown Montgomery County Agricultural Fair: Suburban kids who couldn't hit the broad side of a barn with a baseball, not so much because they're bad pitchers, but because they have no idea what a barn looks like.

As much as I'd hoped to see something qualitatively different from our home fair, I have to admit that Katie, Joey, and Ellie fall squarely in that target audience. They were delighted by the horses, cattle, sheep and pigs we saw. They received tattoos and hats from the swine folks:

The concessions closely tracked the ones found at the MoCo Fair, with a few key exceptions, among them, the all-the-milk-you-can-drink-for-$1 stand:

...which has very impressive apparatus backing it up:

For the record, the white milk, from the bottom row of pipes, was 2%, and the chocolate milk, from the top row, was 1%. All of it was icy-cold and delicious.

Sadly, one is also unlikely to see this at the MoCo fair:

Something about cheese curds just makes me happy.

One absolutely outstanding exhibit was the "Miracle of Birth" center, in a spanking-new building. Jen and I both initially thought, independently, that it was perhaps an elaborate antiabortion display, but it turns out it's sponsored by Minnesota's veterinarians and conglomerate CHS Inc. and devoted to actually showing people the, you know, miracle of birth.

The vets stock a large building with dozens of animals just about to pop with child, and then let fairgoers watch the deliveries. A calf had been born to a cow about two hours before we arrived, and we were there to watch it stagger around and get its first bottle feeding, while the mother ran somewhat angry circles around her calf and the vets attending to it. Katie, like 90% of girls her age, wants to be a veterinarian when she grows up, and was delighted by the whole building. The kids were mesmerized by a case full of chicken eggs that were hatching (left).

They also liked checking out the row of piglets nursing:

We'd read a story in the Forum about the champion state-fair pumpkin, an 813-pounder. I promised to get my colleague P. a picture of the kids with it; here it is:

Ellie seems particularly pleased to be there.

We wrapped up the evening with:

...not so much because they sounded good, but because they are perhaps the ultimate state-fair food. Ellie refused to even take a nibble – I'm not sure what she thought they were, but she would not be moved.

It started raining just as we left the fair – terrific timing. We were out of the parking lot in two minutes, and after a little congestion through St. Paul, were back on the interstate to the hotel in Minneapolis in no time. I dropped the kids and Jen at the hotel, so as not to muss their 'dos, and parked on the street. I parallel-parked in front of what I thought was a swanky new Corvette, but which turned out to be a swanky $440,000 Porsche Carrera GT, which makes me extra-happy I did not back into it:

On the way out of town this morning, we hit the Minneapolis Ikea to get a few more sets of curtains and a few odds and ends. Since Target is based in Minneapolis, we also stopped by what looked like a very fancy Target store, but once you got past the two-story target-shaped atrium, it was a profoundly regular Target store.