On a Stiiiick, Day One

We walked in through the main gate this morning, I took in a deep breath, smiled, and breathed out "Hello my happy place, it's good to see you again." Maminka just laughed and shook her head.

Today was our old St. Mark group day - PL and Dave, Don and Anita, Maminka and myself.

We began with the breakfast of champions: a pronto pup. I'm actually kind of embarrassed about that, but I overslept and was running a little late, and consequently hadn't eaten anything before I left to meet up with Mom, Don, and Anita at the park and ride. So I was really really hungry by the time we got to the Fair, and Don was hungry too, and he loves pronto pups, and. . .well. . .I too ate a deep fried batter-dipped hot dog for breakfast, I admit it.

Then we walked to the other end of the fairgrounds and ate the true breakfast of champions, the grilled porkchop on a stick:



Seriously, we discovered this completely by accident a few years ago, but if you start your Fair day with all that protein, you don't hit the wall in the middle of the afternoon or suddenly sugar crash in the early evening. I highly recommend it.

Then we made our way over to the horticulture building to meet up with Linda and Dave. Of course, as long as we were there, we had to get a dish of honey sunflower ice cream.



We covered quite a bit of ground today but there is still a lot left to do and see - never made it anywhere close to the DNR building, the Midway, the barns, or Heritage Square. Good thing I'm going back a couple more times!

A couple highlights from what we did see today:

The coolest thing I saw in the Creative Arts building was this huge tinker toy display that looked like the Midway



Look at the detail, I love these Tilt-a-Whirl cars!



The best thing I saw in the Art Show was this painting



It's a still life of a bowl of potatoes on top of a newspaper opinion page, the headline of which is about Minnesota's poor, and the picture in the paper



is Van Gogh's "The Potato Eaters." I believe the title of this painting in the show was "Vincent" - I found it very clever - poignant and political at the same time.


Finally, this picture is for Adri



because she is currently sitting in Dresden impaling homemade pickles so she can pretend she is eating them here with us instead. You should know we ate not merely one but TWO of these ginormous pickles in your honor today, and we missed you and Burki something fierce.