Eastern Idaho State Fair

We took labor day off and headed out to the state fair! Woohoo, we had lots of fun. It's amazing how cheap the fair is in comparison to the California fairs. It cost us $5 each to get in, and Nick was free, and then we only had to pay $5 parking. You can actually park for free if you can find a spot on the road, but by the time we got there, people were parking miles away, and we knew from experience that by the time you are done walking that fair, the last thing you want to do is walk a long way back to your car. So, we parked where we always do. Anyways, it was a great day.
We wandered through the booths first, and found someone selling water filtering bottles for super cheap, so we grabbed several to add to our emergency supplies.
Then, we headed over to the animal section. We saw the biggest rabbit I have ever seen. It was a dutch giant I think they said, or a German giant, something along that line. We then watched went over to the cows, but unfortunately they had just finished milking. Still, we showed Nick the machines and explained how it works, before we headed to the sheep.
When we walked into the sheep building, there were two ladies sitting spinning wool. Nick found that quite interesting, and we discussed how they get the wool, what they do to get it ready, how they spin it, and how they dye it. Then we checked out the sheep. We missed the shearing, but we saw lots of bald sheep and some wool that had just been sheared from one of the sheep. That turned out to be a great learning adventure.
Miniature horses were sharing the building with the sheep, so we wandered and took and look at them. Surprisingly, right after the miniature horses were the huge Clydesdales and draft horses (anyone know what the difference is, they look the same to us).
That rounded up the animals. By this point Nick was getting a bit anxious to get to the rides, but we wanted to see the rest of the fair on the way. We headed out and ended up at ag-venture land. This was new this year, although they've had a few of the activities in it before. It was actually one of my favorite parts and Nick really seemed to enjoy it. Ag-venture land was made up of little activities for kids. There were hardly any lines either, it was great. Nick got to try to rope a "steer" (a hay bale with a head on it) while sitting on a "horse" (a bucket with a saddle on it). Then he played in the bean box (think sand box but with beans instead of sand). Next they had a pretend poop scoop station, but he passed that one up :) as well as a couple of other little booths, and headed straight for the corn box (same idea as the bean box, but with dried corn). He played in the corn for quite a while and hten went over to a little music station where they had found item instruments. Lots of fun!
After all of that it was off to the rides. We sprung for a wrist band for Nick so he could go on as many rides as he wanted, and he sure went on a lot. He's still pretty cautious about which ones he'll go on, but he was a bit more adventurous. Except we still can't get the boy to actually sit on a horse on the merry-go-round, instead he insists on sitting on the little "sleigh" (the stationary seats).
By the time we were done we were ready to drop. We picked up some cotton candy for Nick and tried to head home.

To see pictures of our trip to the fair, click here.