I want to make cupcakes for a local fair this summer.  My question is how to make 500+ cupcakes at home in a regular oven (not convection).  I want them to be fresh when they arrive, so I dont want to make them too far in advance.  I'm thinking it will be about 20 batches of cupcakes and should take about 7 hours to bake them all. I can do about 24 at once unless you have a suggestion on how to speed up this process. 

Of course, then I have to figure where I'm going to set all of them, but that's another bridge.  Any suggestions from anyone that has made this many at home?

Thank you in advance for your help.

I would definitely freeze the cupcakes as I made them. Wrap them well and pop them in the freezer, then your only challenge would be to find a place to put them all when time comes to defrost :-)
 

I would freeze them as they are baked as elisaber suggests.  The day before the event take them out of the freezer and put them into large, short plastic totes or your boxes or whatever you are transporting them in and put a simple swirl on them right in the box.  I think you should do some calculating and figure out how much space all these cupcakes will take so you can figure out the storage/transporting logistics.  Do you really have the counter, freezer, vehicle space to deal with so many?  How will you get them from the vehicle to the event?  How will you store them at the event without the weather damaging them, etc, etc.