Do the Puyallup!

When you grow up in the state with the #1 state fair in the country (heyyy Iowa!), it's a little tricky to go to other fairs and not compare.  Which probably explains why I've never gone to another state fair.  I have gone to county fairs though, and those are snoozefests, particularly if you don't know anyone else in the county.

But I get a free ticket to the fair though school (Teacher perks, guys.  I may not get paid the biggest bucks, but I can move that $10 I would have spent on a fair ticket over to my savings account, so it's a win-win), so why not take advantage?  I think I gave my ticket to someone with a family (haha) last year, so I didn't go.  This year I called up one of my friend that lives in the Tacoma area and met her family there for a Sunday afternoon.

I guess Washington used to have a bunch of different fairs (different sides of the mountains, I think?) but they have combined them into one big state fair in Puyallup, so lots of people say they are going to "Do the Puyallup" and that means they are going to the fair.  I'm such a local for knowing that now.

So if I'm going to "Do the Puyallup", I have to do the stuff that people go to the fair for here in Washington.  Here are my notes and comparisons:

The fairgrounds weren't as big, but still a really good sized fair.  They had a gondola going back and forth from one side to another.

There is no butter cow.  Or any attraction that really compared as far as I could tell.

There was no "Depot" aka bar aka entire beer garden.  There was one beer garden/bar area that was roped off and was a new addition in the past couple years.  This is not the place for nightlife.

There is no large building full of huge pigs.  There was, however, an entire building dedicated to cats and cat shows and it was the weirdest most intriguing thing I have ever seen.  Every cage had a theme and was decorated and they were calling numbers and judging each cat on a table with a bunch of people in bleachers watching and taking pictures.  If they have that at the Iowa State Fair, I have never seen it.  There was also a building with "animals of the world" where I admired a small zebra and fell in love with some kind of fluffy llama donkey that I've never heard of before.

They do have a rodeo.  They do have concerts.  I didn't go to either.

I did not see an area of giant competitive squashes.  I did see an area that displayed random collections.  You can just submit your collection to be displayed.  It clearly didn't matter what you collected (some were kind of cool, though).  There was an Iowa corn collection...

I think there were cooking competitions.  I don't know.  I saw competitive dried fruit.  Dried watermelon looks really gross.

There was lots of high school art on display.  I made literally the exact same art in my high school art classes (one display was a giant drawing of Smarties and I honestly have the same thing in a closet somewhere).

Not many stages.  I think I saw one.  The local news was not reporting from it.

It had a huge area full of all that stuff you should never purchase but you still really want to go through and look at.  In Iowa, I always thought this was because everyone wanted to go in the air conditioning, but since there is no AC here and the high was 70 or something, apparently people were genuinely interested in looking at that stuff.

They do sell corn and a wide variety of fried stuff on a stick.  It was a fair, after all.  I ate a blooming onion.  It was greasy and wonderful.

They DO have... Fisher scones and they are SO DARN GOOD.  It is the Washington thing to get at the fair.  I hopped straight on that bandwagon because they were delish (and not super scone-y....they were more like biscuits with butter and raspberry jam).

I really enjoyed myself.  I rode a wooden rollercoaster (and I have the bruise to prove it).  I ate delicious scones.  I wandered about for hours.  It was a happy Sunday.