The Minnesota State Fair, also known as “The Great Minnesota Get-Together,” is the most popular state fair by daily attendance in the United States. The State Fair of Texas has a larger total annual attendance, but that’s only because it lasts much longer.
I was there for the opening day this year in St. Paul, hoping that it would set a new first-day attendance record, and it did. On Thursday, August, 23, 2018, a new record of 122,695 attendees was set. The previous record of 119,145 was set in 2010. But the all-time daily attendance for the fair is 260,374, set on the final Saturday in 2016.
You might notice I’m posting this update two days after this record-setting date, on Saturday instead of Thursday. That’s because I upgraded to Ubuntu 18.04 LTS from 16.04 LTS last week. But the update (which I did within Software Updater in the OS) did not work when I wanted to upload the photo on Thursday, and I ended up having to do a clean install this morning (which only took a little over an hour). I did end up losing the original JPEGs of all my photos that I started putting on this computer earlier this year, but that doesn’t matter all that much because I keep large versions of the best files on this site. At least now I know that whenever I upgrade Ubuntu, I should back up everything and then do a clean install of the OS.
Here’s a crowd shot I took on Thursday.