A State Fair Report..........

This one is for you Sunny!

One of the newer buildings at the Iowa State Fair is one that is dedicated in teaching Iowans about animal reproduction or should I say birthing.  When I was a young lad, most of us in the state were from the farm and we knew about baby animals.  Today, the whole facility is dedicated in showing how chickens, ducks, turkeys and ostriches are hatched.  They raise ostriches in southern Iowa for the selling of the meat to eat.  One can also see cows, pigs, goats, and sheep giving birth on the large screen up above in the auditorium.  The little ones that were born near on during the week of the fair are all there to see. I will post more baby animals later.

One of the older buildings at the fair used to be called the Women's and Children's Building.  It is now called the Agricultural Building.  It is filled with vegetables and plants that have been judged.  You can see the wonderful windows that face all four sides and the balcony that one can walk around to see exhibits.  It was a perfect day for the fair and it was so crowded that we didn't stay very long in this building.  I really like the building.  It has large carved columns and pediments at two of the entrances that make it  look like the Parthenon.

My wife loves to paint works of art with horses in them so we sat though two different show during the day. She took hundreds of photos. The shows for the day were called English Horses but the categories were quite diverse.  This show above was about western themed costumes on horses that were full Arabian or half Arabian horses.  The costumes actually were subtle in style but the guy who showed up with the white shirt and vest with mustache and black hat won second place with his beautiful horse.  The horses were ridden around the ring doing various speeds to show their training by their owners.

We visited the art and photography competition at the fair in the Cultural Arts building.  This is a wooden piece that was created on a lathe.  They glue all of these wood pieces together, creating their design by how they arrange them.  The then place it on a lathe and carve it on the outside to get the shape.  Then the reset it on the lathe and carve out the inside of the pot.  PBS is showing a guy who teaches us how to do lathe work and I just happen to see him do one of these a few weeks ago.  It is a beautiful art work.

Our fair grounds is a very old site and they have left the terrain unchanged in the most part.  At the east end of the grounds there use to be a farm house that sat on the top of a hill.  Now I am not saying hill lightly as it is a very steep incline to walk up to the top of this hill.  Up there is the original farmhouse, barn and a fair building that they put up called Pioneer Hall.  It is full of antiques and a stage area for whistling contests, yodeling contest, longest beard contest,  husband calling contests, pig and chicken calling contest, fiddling contests and anything else you can think of that we use to do in the old days in Iowa.  Oh yes, they throw cow chips down that hill also as a contest.

So at the top of the hill they had about a dozen or more older cars to view.  The hill didn't kill me but I did have to stop once to get my breath.  I don't know how those cars were able to drive up there but maybe the road had a longer incline.  I have a friend blogger who has many wonderful old car photos but I though I would show you one that I took since I walked all that way to see them.

This will be my first installment about the fair.  I actually didn't take as many pictures this year as I did last.  The economy shut down a lot of the novelty acts that they use to have traveling around the fair grounds.  No one man bands, no goose herders, no jugglers, no monkey grinders, so it was a slow picture taking day.   Thanks for stopping by today........