Back to the 50's St. Paul, Minnesota Day 1

This past weekend I joined the CCC Crew at the Back to the 50's weekend yet again. If you love classic cars, this is definitely one of the best shows in the country. The event attracts 11k+ cars and over 100K people to the Minnesota State Fairgrounds over the 3-day weekend.

There were so many cars to see and sights to check out that I am breaking up the photos and notes from the weekend into a few blog posts this week. The California Car Cover booth was busy all weekend, but I was able to sneak out for a few minutes here and there to take some photos of the cool cars and unique sights of Back to the 50's.


Below are the photo highlights from Friday at the show. Cars started pulling into the fairgrounds at 6am to get a good parking spot. The streets were already packed when vendors were allowed to pull in and starting selling up.

The weather was perfect the entire weekend, except for just a few minutes of rain. This meant that there were a lot of convertible tops down all weekend. The show is open to 1964 and earlier classic cars, so it is impressive to see that many cars at an event without any Camaros or Mustangs cruising the fairgrounds. There is always a nice variety of classics at the show, many of which you do not usually see at shows in Southern California.

The Minnesota State Fairgrounds is one of the nicer venues for a car show that California Car Cover attends during the year. You can see why in the photos. There are paved streets and plenty of trees to make hanging out at the show enjoyable for the entire day. The event also attracts a few hundred vendors and has plenty of food and beverage options for show goers.

 There are thousands of people walking around the fairgrounds, but the preferred method of transportation is cruising. All day long you see cars full of people driving along the roads of the fairgrounds. The fairgrounds is probably the size of a small town, so there is plenty to see when you hop in your car.

 These guys are members of a car club that drove down from Canada. They were looking for matching shirts to wear at the show and decided on one of our Holley performance apparel shirts.

Clean Cadillac

 To give you a better idea of the size of the show and the fairgrounds I took a ride up in the Space Tower to get a bird's eye view of the show. You can see that classic cars are parked everywhere.

From the Space Tower

 This had to be one of the oldest cars at the show. It was small enough to drive on the sidewalk with room to spare.

 It was nice to see quite a few Ford Econoline and Falcon vans at the show.

 Besides cheese curds and pork chops on a stick, vintage gassers were another popular sight at Back to the 50's. About every hour another one would cruised down Underwood Blvd. You could here them coming for quite a while.

 When the sun starts to set the cruising really begins. Everyone hops in the bed of a pickup and goes for a cruise around the fairgrounds. Classic car lovers line the streets with folding chairs to see all the action.

Code Blue Roadster

 People were strolling up Underwood and checking out all the cars all night.

Enough said.

Custom pinup collage headliner

 Those are the highlights from Friday at Back to the 50's. Check back later in the week for more photos and video from the show.

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