About an hour’s drive southeast of Merced, you can find the city of Fresno where in October, the annual Fair is held. The annual Big Fresno Fair is Central Valley’s largest event that attracts over half a million visitors each year in October.

It is a 2-week event (October 2 until 14) that features livestock shows, exhibits, horse racing, musical and other cultural entertainment, and interesting educational programs, just to mention a few of the activities.

The Fair is providing a link between rural and urban California and serves as an important tool in educating the residents of Central Valley about the rich agricultural history and the importance of the agricultural industry in the area.

The Fair aims to highlight the often not understood vastness and importance of this commercial activity for the region, for California, and for the entire United States. This year is the 136th Big Fresno Fair that runs in East Central Fresno until October 14th. It truly is one of the area’s biggest events of the year!
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Merced City, a dynamic and thriving community of more than 80,000 people, offers friendly living with a small feel in a great medium-sized town where you still can find and enjoy an interesting blend of rural and urban environments.

Merced County is centrally located in California, and both the city and the county offer a rather convenient, central location and a host of economic, educational, and entertaining opportunities and options. So here, we’ll look a little closer at Merced County jobs and economic developments in the area.

The University of California opened the Merced campus in 2005, which led to interesting new educational, cultural, and economic opportunities adding more activities and challenges to the region’s already-established growth and development.

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Castle Air Museum

Castle Air Museum in Atwater represents history in a way the whole family can share.  While there is nothing glamorous about war, our majestic warbirds are awe-inspiring reminders of how fragile our freedom can be and how men and women have stepped forward when that freedom was threatened.

To stand under the wing of a B-17 Flying Fortress is an incredible experience.  You can imagine the sky around the bomber filled with enemy fighters.  And yet, somehow, the sturdy flying Fortress survives the onslaught and continues her mission.

Then there’s the B-25, similar to the planes Jimmy Doolittle led off the Carrier Hornet during this country’s first desperate attempt to bomb Tokyo.  You’ll see the B-24 Liberator, the plane that was chosen of the 2400 mile round trip flight to bomb the Ploesti oil fields in 1943.  The B-29 is here too… the bomber that ended World War II in the Pacific.

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