It's State Fair Eve and I made my annual walk around the grounds. Fifteen thousand of us turned out today, just to be there before it officially begins.

I wandered the barns first. The hen house exhibit, a sow asleep under a heat lamp with her piglets stacked up beside her, hogs sprawled flat out in the sawdust. Everybody resting up for opening day.

But this year's favorite was the Percheron horses, napping.

I also had a soul connection with one. We stood nose to nose, staring into each other's eyes. I blinked first. So majestic.

The breed originated in the Perche province of western France, where it was first developed as an agile war horse, strong enough to carry an armored knight into battle. As military needs shifted, breeders adapted them to pull the stagecoach. Later, selective breeding turned them into the heavy draft horses that plowed fields and hauled freight.

They stand between 16 and 19 hands high, the tallest of them over six feet at the shoulder, and weigh up to 2,000 pounds. That immense size was the raw horsepower behind heavy industrial loads and farm equipment, back before tractors and trucks took the work away from them.

Now they nap in the straw while thousands of us file past. And one of them will look you straight in the eye until you look away first.

By late afternoon I had walked myself out. I found a bench in the shade, watched the Ferris wheel turn and the sky ride float people over the top of everything, and stayed there longer than I meant to. In a few days this place will be shoulder to shoulder. Today it was quiet enough to notice things.

I stopped at the big blue MN letters with my copy of Live Well, Travel Far book in my hands. It felt like the right spot for it. The whole idea behind that book is that a life of purpose and adventure does not wait for the big trip or the perfect week off. Sometimes it is an afternoon at the fairgrounds ten minutes from your house, on a Wednesday, standing nose to nose with a horse.