Today is our first activity day of summer vacation with our grandkids. One of the things we like to do every year is go to the San Diego County fair at the Del Mar fairgrounds. Like much of California, San Diego County is truly a blend of urban coastal elite areas with expensive homes overlooking the Pacific Ocean and rural ranch country where cattle and coyotes are still the main topics of conversation. In between (at least here in Southern California) there is a whole lot of shared appreciation for Mexican food that comes as a result of San Diego having Hispanic/Latino residents that make up about 29.8% of the city population, roughly 414,000 people out of 1.39 million total. This is even more prevalent in the broader County where 34.6% of county residents are Hispanic, totaling about 1.14 million people. The vast majority are Mexican American, which makes sense given San Diego’s geography and history as part of Mexican territory until 1848.
The San Diego County fair is probably not so different from state and county fairs all around America but I’m not sure. I’m not a good judge of that since this is the only fair I go to these days. I do recall a few years ago, going to the New York State fair and finding it to be far more 4-H-like with a greater array of livestock and cooking contests, not to mention huge turnip judging and such. The San Diego County fair has some traditional livestock pavilions and contests, but instead of Apple pie baking contests, the food at the fair is best characterized as turbo charged carnival food with a decidedly Hispanic overtone.
I’m not sure Kim and I saw enough of the fair to be accurate in this description, but from what I saw, other than a few buildings with a few animals, the vast majority of the space at the fair is dedicated to high-calorie comfort food, and fun food and pavilions, where the commercial thrust is geared towards selling high-tech beds, high-tech massage chairs, high-tech home improvement services, and any other high-tech products for the home that gets purchased on a whim and then create a “what was I thinking?” moment for the next year every time you see it. I am currently the proud owner of a super-duper high-tech space-capsule-like massage chair purchased as a floor model on the last day of the fair two years ago. It was a great toy for about a month and now sits in my garage gym on the theory (and I do mean theory) that it goes hand-in-hand with all the muscle burn I generate in my little gym.
The fair opens at 11 AM, five days a week, and even though there’s still a few days left in it’s run this year, there was a line to get into the parking lot at 10:30 AM that was not insignificant. I had pre-purchased our tickets online and had pre-purchased a spot in the preferred parking area (definitely worth the extra). The interesting conundrum is that while the preferred parking area is right at the entrance to the fair, the line to get in stretched all the way back to where the regular parking was. After a couple hundred feet of walking in that direction to get to the end of the line while others were moving in the opposite direction in broken field fashion, I turned to Kim and said “let’s just do an about-face and start walking back… this is crazy.” it took about 50 feet for me to prevail on Kim’s instinct to not make waves in the crowd, but even she could see that walking a quarter of a mile back just to turn around and walk a quarter mile to the entrance made no sense at all. And of course, the crowds were such that no more than two or three people took notice of my maneuver and even they were reasonably indifferent. My justification (and that is all that it was) was that we paid enough extra for the parking that we deserved the ability to enter in some sort of timely manner. That’s my story and I’m sticking to it.
Once inside the fairgrounds we tried to look at the map to see where we wanted to go, but the inundation of food stalls, all with garish and bright signage announcing every culinary fantasy imaginable was overwhelming. There was no particular rhyme or reason for the grouping of stalls such that there was one section for entrees, one section for snacks, one section fried foods or one section for deserts. Everything was as random as could be with a few covered areas with PVC picnic tables, but otherwise no convenient seating. Theme parks have lots of benches, but the county fair wants to keep you moving…and that brings me to one of the most notable features of the fair. When you go into the various pavilions, you expect to see interesting exhibits, but instead what you see is one convention-like showroom set-up after another. My far the most dominant item for sale at the fair seems to be automatic, adjustable, temperature-controlled, vibrating, and God-knows what else temperpedic mattresses in all shapes and sizes. Based on the number of pavilions with mattresses and the number of salespeople hawking them, there must be a lot of people who go to the fair to buy a mattress. I can’t believe that many people make mattress impulse buys by chance. No savvy marketer would put that much horsepower into a venue like this on the off-chance that their salespeople could browbeat an unsuspecting person into buying a mattress. This is not picking up a $5 Needoh near the cash register…it’s making a $5,000+ purchase that has to be delivered to your home after the fair is over. That takes a helluva salesperson if the predisposition isn’t there already…and by now anyone who has been to the fair knows this is coming.
Kim and I agreed that we would not be buying another massage chair, or a portable hot tub (another big fair item), or a mattress of any kind. That took all of our resolve, which left us little to avoid the crazy carnival food. Arriving just before lunch time worked to our disadvantage. The first thing Carolyn spotted was a stall selling a cup of corn. We all love corn and the sausage and peppers, turkey legs and countless grilled meats and poultry were just getting cranked up. We all had a cup of corn of one type or another except for Evelyn, who opted for the loaded fries. About three bites in and both Kim and I were done in, but everyone else seemed to enjoy the fair fare. Later on Carolyn found a gluten-free funnel cake (my thought was that some carney just bought some paint and painted on “Gluten free” and figured “what the hell”, but Carolyn knows her gluten and she said it was both free of gluten and good). I guess powdered sugar cures all ills. As we walked through the fair I kept seeing one more intriguing food stall after another. It truly was a study in how many forms of junk food people can think of…and that is a lot. While we did not completely avoid the food stall, our GLP-1s did their job and kept us out of trouble. And thanks to my space-age massage chair in the garage, I managed to avoid going to the mattresses.