Garth Brooks draws 10’s of thousands of people to California Mid-State Fair

Fair officials spent the day bracing for a possible record number of fair-goers Thursday – many lining up for the main attraction — Garth Brooks.

The fairgrounds in Paso Robles were mostly jam-packed all day – some people saying this is the busiest day in the history of this fair. With that comes some parking and crowd challenges.

“We’re from San Luis, we’re SLOcals,” Mark Henderson said.

Even these SLOcals had a bit of a commute to the California Mid-State Fair.

“There was some traffic coming up the grade, stop and go, took 45 minutes or more when it should only take 30 minutes,” Henderson said.

Once they made it into town, their second journey to the fair began.

“We come here and normally look for neighborhood parking and hoof it in but tonight we knew it was going to be full, we did park at the library in Paso Robles, two miles away, pulled in, saw the big yellow bus.. hollered out,” Henderson said.

Once he hollered out, they made the 10 minute shuttle ride to the fairgrounds and got ready for their long awaited Garth Brooks show.

The line to get into these shows was no joke as they shuffled 15,000 people into each show – the line backing up hundreds of feet.

“Well we went for beer,” fair-goer Kirstin Kind said.

There was no line issue for Kirstin and Tricia who had a plan for avoiding that massive line.

“We just hungout and had fun til it died down and now we’re going to the concert,” Kind said.

They were a little late, but say their drive from Bakersfield to see Garth is all worth it.

“Bucket list for sure, we saw them in Bakersfield years ago when we were teenagers,” fair-goer Tricia Myers said.

Tom Keffery with Publicity for the fair, says so far the crowd and parking challenges have gone off without a hitch.

“One of the things we did was increase our shuttle busses to and from the fair, there’s a lot of people from a lot of walks of life, young and old, looks like it’s a fabulously diverse crowd here and it looks like folks are having a great time,” Tom Keffery with Fair Publicity said.

“Well we want to thank Garth Brooks, for coming to the fair, the biggest little fair anywhere.. and adding the second show because that really shows as a performer that he wanted to perform,” Henderson said.

Those shuttles were expected to be going until about 4 am. The fair goes until Sunday.