Texas State Fair 2013 Part 1

The last couple of months have been extremely busy for our family.  Our oldest daughter is a face painter so fall is her super busy season. Our middle daughter is testing for her Black Belt in a week, which means three karate classes a week plus hours of practice at home. Then our son is playing his last year of Pee Wee football, and that means practice every night except Wednesday (which we have Bible Study) and games every Saturday.  It kinda wears me out just writing about it.  

In the midst of all this “organized chaos” comes one of our great Fall Family Traditions, not to mention one of the biggest, most popular events in this part of Texas…The Texas State Fair!  We only go to the fair every other year and this was our year to go.  It’s on this day that our children are especially thankful to be home schoolers, because we go on a Thursday…during the day.  My husband takes the day off and we spend the whole day there with little to no “plan” at all.  See, this is the one day every two years that we “fly by the seat of our pants”.  The people in our family are “planners”, which means we like to have a detailed outline for most everything we do.  But on “Fair Day” we show up and wander.

We did take a minute to look through the map when we first arrived.  

This year we took a friend with us, a single young lady from our church.  She’s from Washington state and is here for an internship and had never been to the Texas State Fair.

First stop… African Acrobats.  They were really fun to watch.

This is Big Tex…He’s very famous here in Texas.  He’s gigantic and he’s been around since 1952, that is until last year when he caught on fire!  It was VERY traumatic, but thankfully he’s been rebuilt.  I thought he looked great.  The designers changed a few things like the color of his shirt and gave him those really cool boots.  Evidently, not everyone shared my sentiment because as we were viewing some exhibit pictures, we saw one of the “old” Big Tex.  I commented, to my family, about the changes and a lady standing nearby commented, under her breath, that they “should have left him the same”.  Big Tex evokes some strong emotions! 

Even though we’ve seen this bird show several times, we had to go…it is the last year it will be here.

At the end of the show their birds would take your donations and place them in the box.  As we started to leave, a very nice older lady handed my son a dollar bill to give to the bird.  He thought that was very cool!

We almost skipped this exhibit.  Our friend that was with us really enjoys seeing the livestock.  We were looking for that exhibit hall when we came across this “petting zoo”.  Thinking it was your typical “sheep and goat” type, we almost left but then decided to go ahead and go in.  I think this was my favorite exhibit of the day!  It was filled with all sorts of exotic animals that you could feed and pet…if you were brave enough.  

We got a great smile from the Alpaca!

 Kangaroo and Porcupine…NOT Texas natives!

No Fair in Texas would be complete without a Longhorn….

And a Ferris Wheel…The Texas Star, they call it, and it just happens to be the tallest Ferris Wheel in North America!  They’re not kidding when they say, “Everything’s bigger in Texas!”

O Taste and See…

Being able to take time out for a FUN Fall FAMILY Tradition!

But wait…what about FOOD?  Well, the food at the Fair deserves a post ALL it’s own.