Ginny from the Blog

You might have to take my reviews of the N.C. State Fair with a grain of salt because I’m such a fangirl. I spent three hours at the fair tonight and I only have two complaints: It was difficult to find the chocolate covered bacon and I didn’t win a goldfish.

Tonight my sole mission was to try chocolate covered bacon. I wandered past all the food vendors, and even asked a woman at the information booth and two girls at the Kiwanis booth. No luck. I tweeted that I was looking for it, and the ever-responsive @NCStateFair twitter handlers quickly responded that I needed to go to the Murphy booth in the commercial building. For those of you familiar with the fairgrounds, the commercial building is the one that houses all the vendors during the flea market.

I paid $5 for four pieces of the bacon. I tried my first bite on camera so you can see my legitimate reaction. I did the same thing with last year’s signature deep fried mac and cheese. So, here’s my initial, unedited reaction to the salty-sweet treat:

So, as you can see, I was pretty excited about the combination, but I definitely spoke to soon about wanting to eat it more than once during the fair. I ate a piece and a half and that’s all I could get through. It was really rich. But the semi-sweet chocolate is fantastic. It’s definitely worth the five bucks, especially if you have someone to share it with.

Other highlights from tonight:

* I won a pink elephant playing Whack-A-Mole. Most of the games are $3, but they actually range from 50 cents to $5. The best value game is probably the derby game where you roll the balls into colored holes (similar to skee ball) to make your horse move.

It’s a great value because you can practice while the announcer lures more players over.

*I got to hold a baby chick in the poultry tent. I could’ve held that chirping chick forever, but my hands were frozen and I felt guilty because I’m sure it was scared to death.

* I rode the world’s largest portable slide. At 200 feet long and 72 feet tall, the slide is worth the $4 ticket for novelty’s sake. The ride down the slide was surprisingly slow until the very last two humps, then you fly down the straightaway.

* I paid $1 to see the world’s largest alligator. He was definitely bigger than any alligator I saw when I lived on Hilton Head Island. But mostly it was pretty sad.

* I watched the fireworks. The explode EVERY NIGHT at 9:45 p.m. You can see them anywhere in the fairgrounds.

I plan on going to the fair a few more times. I still want to look at the winning cakes, watch the pig races, and see the goats vie for the top hay bale inside the Kelley building. And, of course, I have to sink a ping pong ball in a fish bowl so I can win that damn goldfish.

One of my coworkers admitted to me that he hasn’t been to the N.C. State Fair in 20+ years. I asked him why, and he pointed to the traffic and parking problems. There’s no doubt that busy fair days require a little bit of patience to get into the fairgrounds, but the promise of a ride down the world’s largest portable slide and giant turkey legs are worth the wait.

Traffic is iffy for the N.C. State Fair. Sometimes there’s very little backup, sometimes it can be slow going, and sometimes it seems like there’s no rhyme or reason to it.

But no matter what, it’s guaranteed to not even come close to sucking as bad as traffic at this month’s U2 concert. So don’t let traffic be an excuse for not going to the fair.

Here’s everything you need to know about getting to the fair:

IF YOU DRIVE: Parking is free on state-owned parking lots. The fair’s website warns that, unlike years past, cars parked on Wade Avenue and Edwards Mill Road will be towed. Neighboring residents often will charge to let you park in their yard, and fair organizers warn they have no control over this.

Road Closures: If the fair gets particularly busy, officers may close exits from Wade Avenue to Blue Ridge Road and from the inner beltline to Hillsborough Street to encourage traffic to go to Edwards Mill Road. This doesn’t make a lot of sense to me, but whatever. Just be aware of it if you’re going on a sunny Saturday (good weather + weekend usually = especially busy fair days).

Uh-Oh, Where Did I Park?: This is so awesome. If you’re leaving the fair with a belly full of deep fried Ho-Hos and chocolate covered bacon and you suddenly realize you’ve exited out the wrong gate, have no fear. A free tram will circle the fairgrounds and shuttle you to your parking lot. Details here.

TAKE THE BUS: The N.C. State Fair coordinates special bus routes and rates with local public transportation providers. This is the easiest,  no hassle way of getting to the fair. Bonus, if you take the bus, you get a $10 coupon Subway coupon book, and some bus routes even have express lanes so you can pass the suckers sitting in their cars.

Bus from Raleigh: For $4 adults can ride the CAT from downtown Raleigh or from a park-and-ride lot in north Raleigh. The bus will run these routes from early morning to midnight. Children under 40″ tall ride free with a paying adult. Details on the Raleigh route here.

Bus from Cary: Climb aboard the CAT at the WakeMed Soccer Park anytime from 8:30 a.m. to midnight. The same fares apply as the Raleigh route. Details on the Cary route here.

Bus rom Durham: A DATA bus will shuttle fairgoers from the new downtown Durham Station to the fair for a bargain $2 round-trip fare. Children are free, and some bus riders qualify for a $1 rate. Hours and details on the Durham route here.

Bus rom RTP and Chapel Hill: The Triangle Transit Authority will shuttle passengers from two stops on both Saturdays (Oct. 17 and 24) and Sundays (Oct. 18 and 25). The ride is $5 roundtrip, but free for kids 12 and under. Details on the Chapel Hill and RTP park-and-ride lots here.

TAKE THE TRAIN: Yep, the State Fair gets a special stop on Amtrak. There are more time limitations, but it only costs $5 to ride Amtrak from Durham, $11 from Greensboro and $25 from Charlotte. Carefully read details here before you book your ticket though.

Wishing you safe travels and a lot of deep fried goodness!

I’m not positively sure why I’m such a State Fair Geek. I think it started when I was a college intern for The State-Journal Register in Springfield, Illinois, about three hours from my hometown.

I had to cover several events at the sprawling fairgrounds, and it was the first time in my 21-years that I had been to the real State Fair.

You see in Illinois there are two state fairs: The Du Quoin State Fair in southern Illinois and the Illinois State Fair in the capital city, Springfield. I’d been to the Du Quoin State Fair (to see Hootie in the Blowfish), but it had nothing on the Illinois State Fair. It was at the Illinois State Fair where I first tried a weird fair food: alligator on a stick (ick) and threw back Bud Lights in the beer garden with my fellow interns (after the work day was over, of course).

So when I moved to the Triangle and had my first taste of the N.C. State Fair I was already a fan of the smells, people watching, animals, etc. But since then, I’ve become obsessed with the fair.

It might be because I had to spend time at the fair during the day as a reporter for The Herald-Sun and later as a blogger for NBC17.

It might be because I was so thrilled the PR folks behind the N.C. State Fair jumped on Twitter last year and started blogging, authentically engaging potential fairgoers with giveaways, anecdote sharing and near real-time answers to questions.

It might be because my boyfriend and I had our second date there last year. We shared chocolate-dipped cheesecake on a stick, and then, when we got up to wander the grounds, he gently took my hand for the first time.

Actually, there are probably dozens of reasons ranging from goats to deep-fried Snickers to pig races. At any rate, let there be no doubt: I am a #StateFairGeek. You may see me use that hashtag on Twitter several times between Thursday and Oct. 25.

In the meantime, follow @NCStateFair on Twitter and get behind-the-scenes access via the fair’s Deep Fried blog.

If you haven’t been to the fair lately, make this the year that you change that. You can buy discounted tickets online are at the fairgrounds between now and midnight Thursday. Order them here.

And if you’re on Twitter, don’t miss the Deep Fried Tweetup on Thursday, Oct. 22 at the Fair. It sounds like it’s going to be the best Triangle Tweetup yet, and that’s saying a lot because the Triangle has the best tweetups! Sign up here.

Now that I’m among the thousands of people who get to creep down Interstate 40 on the commute home from RTP, I have few things to look forward to other than a compelling story on NPR or low-flying planes near RDU.

So when something like The LEGO Experience Tour truck passes me on the Interstate, believe me I take notice.

When the semi truck crept passed me today, my mundane drive was suddenly filled with colorful LEGO pirates, spacemen and every character in between. As the truck passed, my mouth dropped. I was on the phone with my boyfriend and told him I had to go. I had to get a picture of what I was seeing. My geek friends wouldn’t believe it without a photo. There on the back of the truck was the URL for “The LEGO Experience Tour” and it was a Blogger address. Yep, plastered on the rear of the LEGO semi was thelegoexperiencetour.blogspot.com.

Seriously, LEGO? Seriously? You couldn’t drop ten bucks and buy thelegoexperiencetour.com and set up a redirect to your Blogger site? Didn’t someone at LEGO see that long ass blogspot URL and raise a red flag? I mean certainly the graphic designer responsible for designing the semi trailer thought of it and passed along the suggestion, right?

And please don’t take offense to this if you have a Blogger domain of your own. That’s fine. I’m not picking on you.

But LEGO is a 51-year-old brand with sales netting $825.4 million in the first half of 2009. Certainly, LEGO can afford to buy a domain, pay for hosting and customize a blog template to communicate a message to the millions of people who see the semi as it tours the country. The blog itself, actually isn’t that bad. It’s clearly written by the lucky 20-somethings who get to pimp LEGOs around the country. It’s raw, it’s simple and it has cute pictures. But it only has 2,161 visitors as of this writing (according to the visitor counter in the sidebar).

LEGO doesn’t even hold its own Twitter domain. @LEGO belongs to a self-described art nerd in San Francisco who has 62 followers. (Flickr fail whale photo from @tveskov).

Ex-LEGO employee Jack McKee did make major headway for the company during his tenure. He helped integrate LEGO into existing forums and websites where grown-up LEGO fans were already sharing building tips, discussing their love for the plastic toys and more. You can watch McKee discuss his efforts in a presentation here. To hear him tell it, McKee made big breakthroughs in convincing the corporation to lighten up and engage its fans instead of trying to sue them. Cheers to that. But McKee has since moved on, and now LEGO’s online strategy seems lost.

Maybe LEGO doesn’t need to engage its customers in mainstream social media outlets. Maybe the company wouldn’t make a dime from encouraging folks to tweet pictures of their latest LEGO creation. Maybe the LEGO Experience Tour will be just as successful with free web hosting and a generic blog layout. But it sure seems like there’s a helluva lot of potential for a social media consultancy to help the longtime brand engage even more customers online. If not for business, then at least for the fun of it.

BTW, you can see the LEGO Tour semi truck for yourself at the N.C. State Fair, which is hosting the tour from Thursday through Sunday. In the meantime,  thelegoexperiencetour.com was purchased tonight, and not by LEGO.

It’s easy to take the flea market at the N.C. State Fairgrounds for granted. Each weekend you can count on dozens of vendors to set up their goods in two domes, seven small shops and throughout the grounds.

But this weekend is your last chance to browse the tables before the N.C. State Fair, which opens Oct. 15 and runs through the 25th. So if you’ve been meaning to go out there to look for a rare antique, costume jewelry or some other doodad, consider yourself warned.

You can keep up with the activities and bustle leading up to the State Fair on the N.C. State Fair Deep Fried blog.