L K.
Yelp
I just thought about the New York State Fair recently, after seeing a commercial for it on TV. I went to the State Fair once, and this was a million years ago now. My college roommate was from Syracuse and she dragged a bunch of us to the fair the weekend after we showed up at college. All of us were from downstate and had never been to the fair before. I'd actually never heard of it. Sure, I'd been to county fairs in my area before, but never the State Fair. Until that point I'd assumed that State Fairs were the unique business of Iowa and Indiana and other states populating the Midwest. State Fairs brought to my mind images of corn and cows and items related exclusively to farming.
That's not entirely far off the mark, but the New York State Fair is a sprawling, massive amount of fun where you can overload on items of all kinds. They offer enough fried food - yay fried dough! - to clog every artery in your body; so many rides that you can throw up just looking at them; ridiculous games where you can win stuffed animals and generally cheap crap; and a large number of facilities relating to animals, dairy products, and every agricultural product produced in every corner of New York State. In a word: farming. But lest you think that such displays are boring, I'm here to tell you that they're not. The farming and agricultural products are housed in nice facilities where you can browse at your leisure and even purchase what you wish. It's really interesting to see all that items that New York produces, from the wineries to the apples to everything else. And if you don't love visiting the Dairy stand, with its air conditioning and the giant cow sculpted out of butter, then you're not human.
Yes, the State Fair is crowded with people of all kinds, from all over the state, but if you can't handle that - or don't like crowds in general - then don't come here. It takes forever to park your car too, so be prepared. But the average Joe isn't the only person who shows up at the State Fair. I was at the Fair when Hillary Clinton was running for the state senate, and she and President Clinton were making the rounds of upstate New York, and they ended up stopping by the fair. It was something to see the people line up to shake their hands. I didn't envy the Secret Service, who not only had to barricade off certain sections of the Fair so the former president and his wife could stroll and shake hands with people, but they basically had to pat down hundreds of people in mere minutes to make sure that they weren't potential assassins. Should you ever find yourself in this situation, please know that the Secret Service are not especially gentle. If you don't move fast enough for them, they'll move you. But I did get to shake President Clinton's hand, which was pretty cool.
My favorite memory from the State Fair relates to the Clintons. After shaking hands with the crowd, they disappeared into the Dairy stand, presumably to have a look at the butter cow. As a consequence, the Secret Service blocked off the area around the Dairy stand and people couldn't walk past it. This totally pissed off one man, who began shouting, "What the hell is this shit? All I want is freaking corn dog!"
Ah, memories. The New York State Fair: where you can have a wine slushy, gorge yourself on bad food, ride fun but potentially unsafe carnival rides, win random meaningless stuff, see the butter cow, potentially shake hands with a world leader, and listen to people swear openly because they don't have access to the corn dog stand. Fun abounds.