We tried to do it on the cheap, although we spent $21 on corndogs, lemonade and chicken-on-a-stick to feed our family of 5. Not bad. Of course, some of our people are still very small. Your family might require more than a $3 corn dog for dinner. Alternately, your family might be more vocal about their demands for a more filling meal. Ours are still pretty distractable.

We were at the fair for about five hours, and we probably didn't do a third of all we would have liked to. We're going back on Wednesday (our oldest two kids are performing at the bandshell) and so we have plans to hit a few more things then.

Here's what we did, what we didn't do, and what we're planning to do.

But first, we drew the names of the State Fair contest winners. Three lucky Okie Tourist readers will get four tickets each to go and enjoy the state fair themselves! One winner came from okietourist.com; the other two came from our Facebook page. All three shared what they liked best about the fair.

To enter, just leave a comment on this post, answering this question.

This being our first drawing, we wanted it to be as fair as possible.

We went through each post and numbered each comment in the order it was received. Then we weeded out the relatives' comments and any doubles on one post. We got 49 eligible comments!

Then we went to an online number generator and asked it to pick a random number between 1 and 49.

The number selected was 17.

And that lucky winner is...

We're going on Saturday and then reviewing it, but here's your chance to check it out for yourself!

All you have to do is comment on any of the reviews or posts on The Okie Tourist. On Sept. 12, we'll draw one name from all commenters and send that lucky person four free tickets to Frontier City! You can comment as many times as you like, but only one comment per post will be counted. So you can comment on each post and get several entries, but if you comment several times on one post, you'll only get one entry.

Clear as mud, right?

Regardless...enter now! We'll announce the winner on Sept. 12!

I did my regular online search beforehand, and the reviews I saw didn't shine a good light on the place. I read about broken rides, awful lines, smelly astroturf and rude staff.

But we gathered up the sunblock anyway, and went to see for ourselves. And we didn't see any of those things. Not even one.

So, the five of us, along with my mom, dragged out of bed this morning while it was still dark and left the house by 6 p.m. We were on a mission - a mission to get to the media's sneak peek of the Christmas Carol Train Tour with time to spare. The event kicked off at 7:30 a.m., and I didn't want to miss a moment.