The California State Fair & Exposition - 2005

I went once with my dad 2 weeks ago today, and once with the husband this past Wednesday. Unfortunately, it's holding less and less charm for me -- but I've been going since I was a kid and I just feel compelled to go. Most of what they're selling in the exhibit buildings is crap, except perhaps the Andersen Windows folks and the Liberty Safe company -- perhaps a few others. Shari's Berries, for example. Love them. The Blues & Brews area is pretty cool, with live music. There was a cool sandcastle exhibit as well. They've been out there before, but it's been a while. They do amazing work. I go mostly to see the farm animals, to see the special exhibits and to eat something on a stick -- though I don't think we ate anything on a stick this time. I believe we had BBQ. It was just okay. We got a chocolate vanilla swirl soft-serve cone (his dipped, mine not) and I snuck what was left of mine onto the monorail. I'm a real criminal! The husband, at that point, had just wanted to go home but we already had tickets for the monorail and I wanted to ride it. We went, and it was nice, especially at night. It takes less than 10 minutes. When we were done, we were ready to head out. We still had 2 tickets for the monorail so we walked back over to where the entrance for the monorail was and saw a young couple headed in. Turned out they didn't have tickets yet so we gave them the ones we had left and went on our way.

I took a few pics:

Cool welded horse -- full size! The mane and tail were impressive:





Driftwood?



Another metal sculpture -- cool!



There was a surf exhibit:



Check out this motorized surfboard from the 50s. I think they called it a jet board:



Then here's a more modern board with a wireless computer built in, if you can believe that. They had a picture of a surfer sitting on it in the water -- it said you could check e-mail on it! Technology runs amok:



Fun with cutouts:









Sign o' the times -- not so long ago, on a hot August day you'd see dozens of people standing under the spray of these fountains. Now, there's a fence and you have to enjoy it from afar:





I didn't get to hold a piglet this year, but I took some pics of them and other farm animals. Too bad I can't post my little bit of video showing them all trying to get something to eat, but I don't know yet if there's a way to do that:











Here are the sand sculptures -- painstaking work, particularly considering they just get torn down later:























There was also a shark exhibit -- Nurse Sharks and another that I can't recall:



Action shots from our ride on the monorail -- I'm kind of surprised they came out!









That's about it from our visit (actually, I combined my pics from both visits). I highly recommend visiting on a weekday evening after school has started back up. We were able to get around and see everything we wanted to see w/o being shoulder-to-shoulder with the rest of California.

Next time we go I think we'll go on a weekday evening and spend a considerable amount of time at Blues & Brews!