It's Fair Time Again

Summer's running its course pretty quickly here with August almost half over. Fair season snuck up on me pretty quickly. And to think I only have a few weeks until I'll be jetting over to Europe for vacation and work. My summer is, for all intents and purposes, done. Part of my summer routine is attending the county fairs and hitting up the demolition derbies that are held. This past weekend I went to the Mower County Fair and caught their derby.

To be completely honest, it feels like the Mower County Fair has gotten worse and worse each year. There are less notable events at the grandstand, there aren't as many things to see, people don't seem to be that enthused to be there, and there just aren't as many people coming to the fair. This might have to do with fairs in general not being as popular any more, but it was definitely pretty apparent at the Sunday demo derby.

Usually you can depend on having a good few hours of Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome styled car crashing goodness, but this year there was only a little under 2 hours' worth of action... and there were some significant "intermissions" spaced throughout that time. They even stretched out the classes into multiple heats when there were barely enough cars to fill one full heat.

I hate to think about it, but demo derbies might be on their way out. With less and less cars being manufactured to have metal frames (everything is plastic now) and fuel prices growing and growing, there might not be as many demo worthy cars available and those that are might be better cut up and sold as parts than destroyed for fair entertainment. I really hope this isn't the case, but it feels like it really could be. The true test will be the Owatonna derbies the coming weekend. They're usually the largest and most entertaining in southern Minnesota and I hope that continues through to this year.