Pepsi Day At The Fair Sucked

Wednesday we made the trip to the Deschutes County Fair in Redmond, Oregon. My wife volunteered to work in the art/photo/craft exhibit building from 2-6pm, so we had a plan to meet her around 5:30 or so (we being my mom and daughter). On the way out of town we hit Carl's Jr. for a quick bite so that we didn't arrive at the fair hungry only to find $8 hamburgers that were worse than the 99 cent special at Carl's Jr. We got close to Redmond around 5:15pm and needed to pick up my dad's car at the airport. We made the mistake of doing that first. Traffic was Jam-Packed NOT Fun, and we made it worse by getting my dad's car first. After looping around, about 45 minutes later we were allowed to park about as far away as possible. I could swear we were parked closer to the Crook County Fair, but maybe that was the heat.

On Pepsi Day, it basically means that ride tickets don't cost an arm and a leg, they just cost an arm. The deal is you have to buy you discount tickets before 6pm. My wife got there around 1:30, so she had little problem getting them, except for the line (which turned out to be the theme for the day: lines). Around 7pm we started hitting the rides. The lines were long, but reasonable. A few rides weren't running and there was no ferris wheel this year. How you can have a fair with carnival rides and no ferris wheel is beyond me also. All and all there were only about 5 rides that were beyond lame or for younger kids. The lack of rides was part of the problem, the non-lack of people was the other part of it.

As it got later, the lines got longer and longer. We had a good plan: spread out and each stand in a ride line. My mom and wife had little desire to ride anything, so basically my daughter ran to whichever line one of us reached first. Around 9pm my wife realized we had too many rides tickets (or scans on the card) that night. They were only good for that night only so quickly she went over to the ticket booth and sold them to someone willing to pay regular price for tickets. We reduced our ticket inventory to something reasonable to the lines that were now taking about an hour to go from the back to the front. It was irritating, and the lack of variety of rides was making some people downright pissed.

Around 9:45pm I was in the line for the bumper cars, which happened to be right next to one of the customer service booths. After about 10 minutes the line at the customer service booth was almost as long as ride lines. People were asking for their money back and for good reason: they had tickets they paid money for but had no way of using because the lines were moving so low, because of the limited number of rides. Three Sheriff Officers arrived at the booth and I basically saw them as riot control, incase people started getting too mad. Luckily for us we hit our last ride at 10:15 and had about 30 minutes to quickly see some rabbits, chickens and goats. We did manage to get an elephant ear and munch on that, and then hit the road back home. This was a fair experience were I honestly remember nothing but standing in lines: no lame fair schwag, no boring games for lame prizes and no overpriced fair food (mostly). Somehow it didn't feel real.