Welcome to year four of Josh and me going to The Big E—New England’s state fair on steroids. It always takes place during September, and we set aside one Thursday to go. Going during the week is usually a lot better than going on the weekends, unless you want to spend time with tens of thousands of your closest friends on a Saturday afternoon.

We take the backroads and have been parking in the same spot in the next town over, but it’s about a half-mile walk from the lot to the fairgrounds. And it’s only $10. (You can park on people’s front lawns across from the fairgrounds for like $40 if that’s more your vibe.)

I didn’t take any pictures of the buildings, but here’s a quick rundown of what’s there:

• Avenue of States: Each of the six New England states—Rhode Island, Connecticut, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Vermont, and Maine—has its own state building full of vendors from the state.
• Better Living Center and Young Building: The Better Living Center, and it seems more recently as well, the Young Building are basically in-person infomercials. There are a ton of booths inside full of random products and the number one rule is that you don’t make eye contact with anyone because they’ll try to sell you something weird.
• Farm-a-Rama: This building has a lot of live farm animals, like chicks, chickens, goats, pigs, and alpacas. Two years ago, there were dogs, and Josh pet every single one of them. We haven’t seen them since.
• Mallary Complex: This building is where the cows and sheep for showing are kept. You can walk through the different pen areas and see the animals. We also watched a woman milk a goat, so that was interesting. She asked for volunteers, and while others went up, I didn’t feel super qualified.

But more importantly, here are all of the things we ate!!! Our game plan is splitting mostly everything, unless one of us wants something in particular.

All of the above were from the state buildings (starting in the top left):

• Cider slushie from the Vermont building
• S’more from the Vermont Marshmallow Company
• Dell’s italian ice in green apple from the Rhode Island Building (Josh also got a pink lemonade from them earlier on)
• Apple cider donut sundae from J. Foster’s in the Connecticut building (this was my absolute favorite thing we had all day)
• Frozen rosé from the Connecticut building

On the left is a maple cremee cannoli from Ferrindino Maple (new to us this year) and on the right a returning favorite from Angela’s Pizza: giant mozzarella stick and pickle pizza.

Like last year, we wore t-shirt and shorts and still sweat a lot. New England in the fall is the best because you never know what the weather is going to be like. Two years ago, we went in jeans and long sleeves, and this year, we were always on the lookout for shade. But it’s something we put up with to go.

We got home after 8:00 pm and were both in bed by 9:00 pm since we were so tired from walking around. And like I said in my Instagram post, If you walk 18,000 steps, the food you ate doesn’t count, right?