Before I get into the food parade summary I just wanted to let everyone know that I fully understand the risk of traveling during Covid-19 and I have thought about making this post a lot. I don’t take traveling during a worldwide pandemic lightly and took all the necessary precautions while traveling to make sure everyone I came into contact with and I were as safe as possible. I stayed with my parents and my best friend of 10+ years, all who also completely understand the risks of Covid and traveling and we all decided it would be okay to travel. I feel like cancel culture is so toxic and so ready for the kill that people don’t hear everyone out before making their decisions. Let’s all be willing to have conversations first instead of casting rapid fire accusations and solidified impressions of people before we actually understand where people are coming from. (lol too much to ask for in an election year?) I also thought it was super important to share the good that is going on even in dark times, the community that is being built, and the memories are being made.
Now that that is out of the way, onto the food parade.
There are few things I love more than the Minnesota State Fair. My friends and family, the cats, and the fair might be my holy trinity. The last time I was up north during the same time as the fair, I was covered in fire ant bites and there was absolutely no way I was going to walk all over the fair grounds while on Benadryl and after a miserable three hour flight. 2020 was supposed to be the year I would make it back. It was going to be great, I was going to walk a million miles, eat all the delicious food and hit all my favorite stops over the course of a day or two. And then Covid hit the fair was cancelled. I was devastated. This was supposed to be my year back to the fair! And with my short sightedness, I thought it was all over. But Minnesotans have a resilience that is unmatched, and in true form, the show would go on. They came out with the 2020 Minnesota State Fair Food Parade – a drive through experience for the fair to get some of your fair favorites and help the fair keep a pulse during this trying year. The tough part would be getting tickets.
I feel like generally, I’m a pretty lucky person. But there would be hundreds of thousands of people (millions of people??) trying to get tickets to this food parade and with only 19,000 cars being allowed in, I knew I had my work cut out for me. The morning of the ticket sales I texted my fair crew (my best friend and her twin brother who I’m also friends with) and asked what our strategy was. Turns out, the strategy was patience, and after an hour and a half of trying for tickets and the website being overloaded with traffic, I had secured two tickets for September 5th at 9:00 AM. It was perfect, the date and time I had wanted – Labor Day weekend and the last weekend of the experience so all issues would have been worked out by then, and first in the morning so we could be first in and first out. I booked my flight and I was set.
Fast forward to Saturday morning of Labor Day weekend. We were ready! We had our game plan! Kathryn, her mom, her brother and I took off to the MN State Fair grounds which share a border with the beautiful University of Minnesota campus (Go Gophs!). We drove up to the entrance, scanned our tickets, got our Friends of the Fair flag -which we left on the car almost all weekend, two goodie bags, and waited in our queued up line until it was go time. We had a strategy, it was a marathon, not a sprint, and we were ready, or so we thought. In the goodie bags, they gave us bingo cards to fill out along the route, swag from the vendors (including the popular state fair lip balm – cheese curd flavored this year), printed of food menus with pricing so we knew exactly what stop was next and how much things would cost if we wanted to indulge, and option to bring food for Second Harvest Heartland, a Twin Cities food bank which is also a part of Feeding America. We forgot to bring food with us for Second Harvest, but it was super easy to donate directly to them and I donated $100 for our car. As a person who loves food, I think donating to local food banks is a great way to support your local community, and since I consider the Twin Cities a second home, I wanted to show my appreciation.
And this is where the food part begins.
Luckily we had a few friends who had previously attending the food parade, along with the wonder of social media, we sort of knew what to expect. We had brought our own condiments, a few diet cokes, plenty of paper towel, and a spare trash bag to fill along the way. The fair also had trash and recycling set up at every vendor so you could get rid of items before you received new ones if needed.
Like I wrote earlier, we had a strategy. We were on a food marathon, not a sprint. LOL were we wrong. The food parade was so efficient that even though we thought we would be there for multiple hours, we made it from start to finish in under an hour and a half. It felt like as quickly as we were eating the food, we were being handed food through the window of the car twice as fast. Over the course of the parade we got a turkey leg with cajun shake, Tom Thumb’s donuts, diet cokes, The Mouth Trap cheese curds, Que Viet garlic cream cheese wontons (INCREDIBLE!!!), a funnel cake, Pronto pups, malts from the dairy barn, deep fried oreos, and of course, Sweet Martha’s cookies.
I couldn’t have asked for a better experience or a better group to go to the parade with. I’m glad I was able to get tickets and make the trip and hope that the fair is back in full force next year. Obviously, not all of my favorites could make it to the fair and I can’t wait to go back in 2021 to get those (looking at you all-you-can-drink-milk stand and the fish pond!) wonderful vendors.
Its easy to look at this year as a wash, that it’s terrible because of Covid and that it’s really restricted a lot of good things. I think that it’s a year of reflection, to really enjoy the slowed speed of “traditional” life and figure out what we really want and what’s important in life. To me, I’ve always appreciated good food and good company, and this little trip allowed me to see that good food and good company still exist, even in these challenging times. I highly recommend you find things that you thoroughly enjoy doing and focus on those. I will always love the fair, the sense of community, the positive energy, the delicious food, the horticulture, the agriculture, the nasty smell of the swine barn, the shared experience of the great MN get-together. Though the world’s day-to-day operations have changed, your priorities shouldn’t. I am hopeful for the future, but I’m also enjoying the present. I am learning, growing, sharing, eating, and living my best life even if the world doesn’t want me to be doing that. And I encourage you to do the same.
Happy eating! Kelly
