A Visit to the State Fair

We’ve now lived in Davis for 10 years and have never made it to the State Fair, just across the causeway in Sacramento. Partly this is a horror of crowds and partly it’s a causeway thing — not proud of it, but it’s the truth. We tend to stay this side of the causeway.

But I really wanted to go this year because my spinning teacher was showing her Jacobs sheep, two of which gave birth during the fair (triplets and twins, and little black-and-white beauties they were too). The trip turned out to be a sheep-type pilgrimage. (The Fair is too big to do even a significant portion, so if you limit yourself to one thing you can do it well. I think this is why you go more often than once every ten years.)

We saw the Columbia (an American breed from the 50s) yearling rams being judged; saw Cheviots and Dorsets (meat sheep) and Romneys and Ramboullets. But my favorites were the merinos, incredibly soft, from Mendenhall Wood Ranch up in Marysville. (There were many, many blue ribbons at these pens.) I was able to sketch this lamb, born in January, name of Marissa. (We also saw lots of llamas. What do you do with a llama??)

We ate fair food including the obligatory frozen banana dipped in hot chocolate with almonds. We saw the vertical teetering sculpture of San Francisco made out of 100,000 toothpicks over the course of 35 years. And we saw this giraffe, made from recycled metal, which I sketched and sent into the One Million Giraffes project. Ola now has over 239,157 giraffes, including mine. Do send in a sketch or two if you can.