The Shockingly Easy Way To Lose All Your Money At The Western Montana Fair

It's the Monday after the annual Western Montana Fair - the rides are packed up, the food is taking off for another year, and a lot of people in Missoula are walking around with wallets that feel a lot lighter than they normally would.

I was there a couple of times over the five days the fair took place at the Missoula County Fairgrounds, and it's no surprise to anyone that the fair can be expensive. Between rides, games, food, and other events like the rodeo, the cost builds up pretty quickly.

But you know what we ended up spending more money on then anything else at the fair this year? Soroptimist Bingo - and I'm betting we're not the only ones.

Soroptimist Bingo is at the fair every year, and this year they had a small tent which you would come across pretty shortly after you entered the fair. At one point, we got some food and needed a place to sit, and we thought this would be as good a place as any - we figured we could eat, play a couple of rounds of bingo and we'd be on our way.

Cut to an hour later, we're still playing bingo. It's surprisingly addicting! And the game moves fast - they rattle off those numbers quickly, so you've got to be paying attention. And the cost is $1 per bingo card per game, but you can play as many cards as you want - between my girlfriend and I, we were putting down $5 a game. And each game only took a couple of minutes, so that builds up pretty fast. I'm not sure how much money we spent overall, but I know I had to make a return trip to the ATM after we finally tore ourselves away from the tent.

We didn't win a single bingo game, so that money is gone - but hopefully, if you played bingo at the fair this week, you had better luck than we did. I expected to take a loss at the ring toss or the shooting range - I had no idea that I'd be spending most of my money at the bingo tent.