Live from Peoria, Illinois it’s Saturday Night starring this week’s host, The Heart of Illinois Fair with special musical guests, Eliminator. Now please welcome this week’s host, The Heart of Illinois Fair!
Here we are at Expo Gardens, home of the HOI Fair for the last 69 years. That’s one of the things I love about the yearly fair, it’s one of the few things older than I am!
The first stop is the beer garden and that’s Phil and Randy serving up the first beer of the evening. Randy has been reading my blogs since the 365 bar crawl, so I thanked him for being a loyal reader, that means a lot to me! You can now wander around the fair with an open beer, so let’s go wander and get our Saturday night dinner!
Right after I took this photo of a Funnel Cake vendor, I ran into my friend and one of the board members of the fair, Roxy Baker! In addition to HOI Fair duties, you can hear Roxy on WWCT's Morning Blend show. That funnel cake looks fantastic and it’s making me even more hungry. Let’s go get our Saturday night dinner from the Heart of Illinois Fair!
As you can see, there’s a lot of vendors and different types of food to sample here at the fair.
I decided to start off with a soft pretzel that’s served up with a nacho cheese sauce. It was soft and delightful and the cheese sauce had a nice spicy zippiness to it. It reminded me of getting a pretzel from a cart in New York City. A wonderful appetizer!
For my main course, I went old school and got a jumbo corn dog served up by this smiling woman. You have to have a corn dog at the fair, it’s the rules! Okay, now that the food portion is complete, let’s wander around and see what’s happening on this final evening of the 69th Heart of Illinois Fair.
There’s lots of festive games and activities going on here at the midway section of the fair.
I tried my hand at this shooting gallery game and won a furry stuffed insect. I’ve never had a stuffed insect before and I will treasure it forever!
I have a phobia about going on the rides but I love taking pictures of them. And as you can see in the last photo, I’m not the only one!
There’s live music for free every night in the beer tent and tonight’s act is about to start. I got a beer from Roxy and Greg and Greg instructed me to take a photo of Miranda and Michael and so that’s exactly what I did. The bottom photo is Brenda and Ryan and Brenda is Randy’s sister who we met while getting the first beer of the evening, for those of you keeping score. Brenda and Ryan live in Houston and they read the MBIP blog all the way from Texas and I appreciate that! Ryan is a talented writer, illustrator and filmmaker and you can check out his work right here at his website!
This evening’s live band is a ZZ Top tribute band called, Eliminator and they were really entertaining! Usually I’m not a big fan of tribute bands but these guys were fantastic. If you didn’t know better you’d swear this is the real thing. The music was top-notch, the beards were real and they even had furry guitars! It was a wonderful and fun show.
And before you know it, another fair has come and gone. I’m anxious for next year’s already because that will be the 70th anniversary of The Heart of Illinois Fair! We’ll see you all tomorrow!
Related Posts: Saturday Night @: Sangalli’s Italian Steakhouse, Paparazzi and The Fish House.