Digesting the Fair

Eaten: An onion burger and brick of fries.

Do you see that whiteboard to the right there? That’s the straw poll that the Republican booth in an exhibition hall at the Puyallup Fair has been conducting during the event. Fred Thompson by a landslide. He has more than twice the votes of Rudy G., his closest challenger, and three times the votes of Romney who just won a Michigan straw poll, yet we barely know anything about him. That’s one of the things we love about the fair, though. We’re hoping for Ron Paul, we’re afraid it will be Romney and we expect it to be Guiliani, but it’s some also-ran by a landslide.

Eaten: A swirl ice cream cone (aka zebra, aka twist--actually she guessed our order when we made a spin-y finger gesture).

The big exhibition halls are one of our Can’t-Miss fair activities. If you haven’t been, it’s like being crammed into an aisle at Sears with a few hundred Fred Thompson voters and each and every product on the shelves has its own polished pitch guy giving it the whole QVC treatment. Miracle mops, the last kitchen set you’ll ever need and sidings and roofs of every kind will blow your mind. Even the most jaded consumer is sure to be hoodwinked by something. Tooth whitening? Right there on site. Just get in the chair.

Eaten: Roasted corn.

Our other Can’t-Miss is the livestock. If we’re going to be a meat-eater the least we can do is go look a few cows in the face once a year and remark again about how un-dumb they seem up close. From giant beef animals, to slightly less giant dairy cows, to the obligatory swine babies, to the draft horses (giant-est), to the everyday-seeming dogs, cats and rabbits, it’s all fun to see. The best is when there’s a teenager sweeping up in front of an animal, its caretaker, right there, proud and tired.