Minnesota State Fair 2025 dates: August 21-Labor Day September 1
We Wait!
With the greatest anticipation, after waiting a long year for a corn dog at the fair, and the realization that no other version of corn dog will do. There is no other that contains the aura and the sites and sounds of eating a corn dog at the fair. Patiently, we wait at the gate for the fair to open. The first day of the Minnesota State Fair, our smiles of nostalgia with thoughts of sugar, deep fried foods on a stick and beer overcoming our senses with heady delight.
We’re in!
As we enter the Minnesota State Fair on the morning of the very first day, we smile at each other with a sense of accomplishment as if we had won 1st Place. We’re in, we repeat as we grin wildly! We proceed with a slower pace, as if to savor each moment of the journey, on the way to the baby animal birthing center which is often our very first stop at the ever-popular Minnesota State Fair. We stop to get a corn on the cob with no thought to the fact that it is early morning, we will get donuts or a crepe later. We pick up a pickle hat, and then a yardstick. We stop to get our first bratwurst, a beer, and go down the giant slide. There are free bottles of water, so we grab one while we buy a lottery ticket on our way to check out the new Mazda.
This is, quintessentially, the fair.
There is no rhyme or reason. It’s a hodgepodge of activity, distraction after distraction, a return to your childhood, if for only a day. And this odd behavior of pickle hats and free things is actually normal, well normal that is, during the Minnesota State Fair.
Why do so many thousands of people go each day, year after year? Many of them are repeat visitors, going numerous times during the 12-day Minnesota State fair?
Is it about the activities, the food, the merchandise, or the memories?
The Activities
There is no way to tell you about all there is to do, but to mention only a few, and among our favorites are the……
The grandstand where two large floors of commercial vendors sell their wares, which include anything, from a handwriting analysis to Broadway show theater tickets to massage chairs.
Down the street from there, you can get all the milk you can drink. The milk concessionaire is across the street from the baby animal birthing center where animals who are due to give birth during the 12 days of the fair are housed for educational purposes of those of us who have not had access to farm animals. Little baby chicks coming out of their shells are so much fun to watch and such a treat for city people of all ages.
Music at one of the many free stages are all around and of course all versions of Brews. The music is very entertaining, entirely free, and sometimes national acts appear. My favorites have included those bands from earlier years, Tower of Power, Gary Puckett of Gary Puckett and the Union Gap, Peter Noone from Herman’s Hermits to name a few. Tickets are sold for well-known Grandstand performers as well, yet, the free entertainment can be very, very good.
Check out the Official Minnesota State Fair Links below for your entertainment options: Entertainment List below:
https://www.mnstatefair.org/about/media/media-gallery-grandstand-artists/
https://www.mnstatefair.org/about/media/media-gallery-bst-artists/
The 2025 Minnesota State Fair dates are August 21-Labor Day September 1.
And across the street from there, the creative arts building, where you can look at the beautiful award-winning crocheted items, the woodwork, and the prize-winning food items. There is so much more to do, and something worthwhile for everyone.
The Food
A lot of people will tell you that they are going to the fair for the food.
Is it about the food?
The food choices are vast!!
I am thinking about a pork chop on a stick, which is arguably the one of the best things at the fair. Everyone likes the cheese curds which are found in the food building, where many other favorite food items exist, such as walleye in a boat. Corn on the cob, bratwurst, and foot long hot dogs are everyone’s fair favorites.
Many new fair items appear each year. For 2025 I cannot wait to try this year’s Land of 10,000 cakes made by Bridgeman’s Ice Cream and Sweet Squeakers at the Blue Barn which is a deep-fried cheese curd in funnel cake batter.
More unusual items include a Hot Honey Jalapeno Popper Donut, Freaky Fryday and Dill Pickle Iced Tea. There are countless food items for everyone’s tastes, including those unusual items from years past that I haven’t tasted such as spam sushi and bacon ice cream.
As you spend your day at the fair you are eating things that you would not eat at any other time but at the fair somehow, it’s ok, and it’s a wonderfully indulgent and just simply a delightful experience.
Check out the Official Minnesota State Fair New Food link:
https://www.mnstatefair.org/new/food/
https://www.mnstatefair.org/new/sips/
The Merchandise
The family members who I usually attend the fair with make up our own challenges.
Challenge Number 1
Who can get the best free stuff!
Challenge Number 2
Who buys the weirdest thing!
Remembering that I bought a garage door one year. Another year, my sister bought a piano. Wooden shoes, a year’s supply of chamois? A magnifying glass, A bow maker, a home distillery, we all laugh thinking about these things, and look for this year’s most unusual purchase.
And then, there’s the free merchandise. We get a pickle hat so we can look silly and get our picture taken and put on a calendar for free, then we collect our other free stuff as we walk through the exhibits, Band-Aids, pencils, pens, a tree sapling, a 90 second CD on Minnesota History, collapsible water bottles, lip balm, We put them in our free bags and walk around the fair, with our pickle hats and yard stick, and somehow, at the fair, this makes sense.
Minnesota State Fair official Shopping at the fair guide!
https://www.mnstatefair.org/guides/shopping/
Or is it about the memories….?
We walk by one of the many local television stations that have their own building on the fairgrounds as I remember many years ago when my daughter’s now husband asked her to go steady. She said Mom, “He just asked me to go with him.”
“Go with him where” I asked, suspiciously.
She said, “He asked me to be his girlfriend.”
“Did you say yes?”
She did.
I looked at him, what I saw was a glimpse into the future. The way he looked at her, I almost knew even then that this relationship would last.
We then walk by the old mill remembering the time it took five guys to get my mother, in her nineties, up out of the boat. We laugh and walk toward the Vegie Fries.
We continued on passed the State Fair police station, and one of the kids said remember the time we lost Grandma. We all smile in a bittersweet sort of way.
We had gotten off the Trolley that year, and I remember checking to make sure Grandma was with us. We walked about a ½ block, and she wasn’t there. We found out a few hours later when we found her at the police station, that she got off the trolley and followed a woman wearing a yellow sweater, similar to the one I was wearing. She went a few blocks before she realized that the woman wasn’t me.
We were happy to find her; she was wearing a new hat that someone bought her to calm her and was eating an ice cream cone that the police had on hand for lost children.
It makes us all sort of sad that we lost her that time, because she isn’t with us anymore, and we all miss Grandma.
Is it about the food, the activities, the merchandise, or the memories?
It’s difficult to explain exactly what it is about the fair, except to say there is nothing else like it. It takes us back and brings us forward at the same time, in a silly and nonsensical way.
When I say Fair Anyone? In my family, everyone smiles and shakes their heads. Yes!
I’m just going to say it’s about everything.
The food, the activities, the merchandise, AND the memories.
It may be our favorite activity all year, and yes, we go several times during those 12 days at the great Minnesota get-together.
There is no other way to explain it,
There is just something about the fair.
Minnesota State Fair Link:
2025 Minnesota State Fair August 21-Labor Day September 1
Image is compliments of the Official Minnesota State Fair Gallery
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