The State Fair of Texas is always a huge event!! It’s been a long, long time since we have been to enjoy the food and fun at the fair. We decided to go!! So we bought a package deal online in an attempt to save some time at the gate. We booked a hotel and loaded up the dogs and hit the road.
We drove straight to the White Rock Lake Dog Park to let the dogs play. We go to the dog park here in Longview quite a bit and the dogs love it but we were astounded at the number of people and dogs at this dog park. I would even describe it as a feeling of being overwhelmed. We immediately noticed that there were 3 separate parks – small dog, large dog, and water access.
Our first instinct was to go to the large dog park because it was October and we figured the water was too cold. We walked all over the park, talking to various people, and laughing at the antics of Kai and Auggie playing with all the other dogs. The not-so-fun part was keeping your head down to watch for poop piles because apparently there are an amazing amount of people who do not pick up behind their dogs. That is so lazy. I could go on and on about it but I won’t. I would like to hope that most of the piles were left because the people didn’t see their dog dropping logs.
One dog, Andy, was spending the day destroying the fun for other dogs in the park. I only know his name because the only thing his owner did was call his name. No matter where you spotted Andy, he was mounting any dog that was near by, no matter the gender. If you lost sight of him, you could follow the hollering of his mom. “ANDY!!” “ANDY!!” Not one time did I see her go remove him from the dog he was humping. Not. One. Time. We were unfortunate enough to be near him when he was between humps, so our dogs also got mounted. Luckily there was no “action” during these episodes but it was still annoying and put a damper on our day.
Water Acess
After walking around for more than an hour, we decided that we should let them play in the water access park because we do not have anything like that in Longview. The area was fenced but the dogs could get in the lake anywhere they wanted to. It was set up so we didn’t have to worry about the dogs escaping while they played in the water. If you will remember, we wouldn’t let them off leash to play in the water in Arkansas because we were worried about them escaping.
It took a short while before they would get in the water. Other dogs were fetching sticks and toys from the water so we figured it couldn’t have been too cold. Kai finally got in and swam around. It took Auggie a little longer. And wouldn’t ya know…..as soon as she built up the courage to get in, Good Ol’ Humper Andy decided to get in and try the water moves on her. “ANDY!!” “ANDY!!” I turn around and she is standing some distance away, doing nothing but yelling at him. IT’S NOT WORKING LADY!! We were done with it, again. So we leashed up the dogs and went back to the large, dry dog park.
We knew it would give the dogs a chance to dry out and play a little longer. They rolled and ran and played for a while longer. Finally we took them back to the car, used some towels to dry them off further, and drove to the hotel. We spent nearly 2 hours at the dog park and they were exhausted. We left them at the hotel to sleep while we went to the fair, knowing they would sleep for several hours.
Let’s Go To The Fair
The hotel was only about 15 minutes from the fair so we expected to start our fair fun rather quickly. We were wrong. The traffic to get into the fair was atrocious. We drove around for more than an hour trying to find a parking lot that wasn’t full. This was not a good sign but we trudged on because we had already purchased the tickets and food coupons online. We had sadly underestimated how busy the fair would be on a Sunday. What we didn’t know until it was too late……it was the weekend of the Texas vs OU game at the Cotton Bowl AND the following Monday was Columbus Day.
I can’t even say there were tons of people. That would grossly undercut the magnitude of the amount of people that were there. Large crowds don’t bother me, but I was completely off kilter. We got in and got our food coupons that we had purchased prior to arrival. We could not move freely through the fair, we had to move where the crowd took us. We stopped to get some lunch and found ourselves standing in a line that was more like a Six Flags line instead of a State Fair food line. The sea of people continued to flow around and through the line. We could not get out of the way of the crowd and there were too many of them to go around so they had to squeeze through the line and meet back up with their group on the other side. We got our food but there was no where to eat it so we decided to walk and eat. More fun. You had to hold your free hand up and slightly in front of your food to protect your food from the people that were so close as we shuffled from one place to another. I didn’t want anyone’s hair or clothing floating into my food and that is exactly how close we were grouped together – moving as one. Once submerged into the moving sea of people, it wasn’t easy to exit when you found somewhere you wanted to go.
Done
After an hour and a half, we hadn’t made it very far into the fair and hadn’t seen anything. That amount of time was spent walking, in a sea of people. We finally found our way out of the group and stopped to take a picture with Big Tex. We were so done with fighting the enormous amount of people and we called it quits. Crowds don’t typically bother me but the magnitude of this crowd had me throwing in the towel. We had lots of food coupons left so we started buying whatever we could get close to, just to spend the money so we could leave. It took us another hour to get back to the front gate so we could leave. Done. I was done. I didn’t get to enjoy one single thing at the fair. Not even the food. We didn’t get to taste the 2019 food winners because we absolutely could not get to them through the flurry of people.
Plan Better
I can completely agree with what you are thinking right now…..this was terrible planning on my part. I never considered what was going on that weekend – we just “up and went”. Many of you know that this goes against my better judgement. I am a planner who likes to have all the information and be completely prepared. And this is exactly the reason why – because so much goes wrong when I try to wing it. Such is my luck. Next time we go to the fair, I will research a lot better to try to avoid the enormous crowds.
We felt a wave of relief as we left. We decided to go to Central Market, my favorite grocery store, before we back to the hotel. The dogs were still recovering from the dog park when we arrived but they were so excited to see us. We ate and relaxed in the hotel for the remainder of the night.
I wish I could give you something worthwhile to take from this so that you don’t make the same mistakes. My only suggestion would be – make a good plan, check the events of the fair around the time you want to go, and do not buy tickets before you arrive. That was the worst mistake we made because we felt obligated to go since we had already spent the money and didn’t want to lose it. If we hadn’t bought the tickets beforehand, we would never have gone into the fair.
