To quickly sum up our experience at the second annual Denver County Fair: it was fun, but it was not worth the money.
The Denver County Fair is at the National Western Complex in north Denver all weekend. I heard a blip about it on NPR. From what I gathered, they're trying to mix a traditional fair (picture pie-eating contests, baking competitions, and prized animals) with something a little more modern (cupcake booths, red velvet funnel cakes, gourmet shaved ice, and texting competitions). It sounded like a lot of fun. So, we went.
The prices were astronomical. I mean, seriously, we might as well have gone to Disney Land. We took one car, and Andrew's friends took another. It was $10 for each car to park, but there was no other parking available. The light rail doesn't go that far north, and so we had to fork over the money to park. Then, to get into the fair, it was another $10 a person.
Everything inside cost money. Basically, we dumped about $100 to get into a place to spend more money. Our friends were interested in trying out jousting. They had jousting--American Gladiator style! It was $14 to joust. I'm dead serious. We watched other people joust instead. Oliver was interested in a bouncy castle. It was $2 to go into the bouncy castle. He ended up being too afraid to enter, but they kindly let us walk him through a little obstacle course instead.
The Denver County Fair is at the National Western Complex in north Denver all weekend. I heard a blip about it on NPR. From what I gathered, they're trying to mix a traditional fair (picture pie-eating contests, baking competitions, and prized animals) with something a little more modern (cupcake booths, red velvet funnel cakes, gourmet shaved ice, and texting competitions). It sounded like a lot of fun. So, we went.
The prices were astronomical. I mean, seriously, we might as well have gone to Disney Land. We took one car, and Andrew's friends took another. It was $10 for each car to park, but there was no other parking available. The light rail doesn't go that far north, and so we had to fork over the money to park. Then, to get into the fair, it was another $10 a person.
Everything inside cost money. Basically, we dumped about $100 to get into a place to spend more money. Our friends were interested in trying out jousting. They had jousting--American Gladiator style! It was $14 to joust. I'm dead serious. We watched other people joust instead. Oliver was interested in a bouncy castle. It was $2 to go into the bouncy castle. He ended up being too afraid to enter, but they kindly let us walk him through a little obstacle course instead.
We spent $5 to buy a single, plain hot dog for Oliver for lunch. I sneaked one of the chips it came with and found it to be stale. Really stale. The "best by" date on the bag was July 3. I went to toss them but couldn't find a garbage can anywhere. There were two lunch areas with picnic tables, but no garbage cans in sight. We later learned the only garbage cans were near the bathrooms. I'm not sure what our $10 entrance fee paid for, but it wasn't adequate AC or garbage cans.
