After that wondrous set of carousels and fairground art and all --- including, as ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
bunnyhugger noted, a Bayol carousel rabbit, larger than hers, which revealed that we'd been saying Bayol's name wrong or at least different from how Marianne(?) said it --- what was there to do but get back to the Gare de l'Est so we could wait for our train? Also to sit down a little after we'd been going for so very long. Also to get something to eat. There is no way to guess how much we had eaten in our journeys since the last time we had been in a bed but that's all right; this would be our last food for the day and we didn't go to bed hungry.
You know what Gare de l'Est could really use, though? Chairs. Or benches. Or a lot of seating because for all the people that were there there weren't enough places to sit. Just a bit of advice for French railway authorities there.
The train we got on was one of those high-speed things; we got to see cars on the highway hurtling backwards at highway speed, relative to us. I finally realized where on the screens they showed the speed and could see, we got up to like 150 miles per hour on the ride over, and we would again a couple other rail trips. It hardly felt that fast. We also were not positive we were sitting in the right coach because we went to the coach numbered 9 (or whatever) and while seat numbers larger than and smaller than ours were on it, our actual numbers weren't, so I kept walking in a direction until I found our numbers. We got away with it, at least.
We got off the train in the small town of Bar-sur-Aube, at something like 7 pm on a Sunday, when the place was even more quiet and asleep than you might imagine for a tiny French village late on a Sunday. Question: how to get to Dolancourt and our hotel? I had insisted, it's a train station, there will be a taxi stand. So there might be, but the station was closed up and deserted. Fortunately, they had posted signs with taxi services so I borrowed bunnyhugger's phone and after wrestling with it to allow me to make the local calls that she had got European service for, had a halting conversation with a taxi dispatcher who was running everything through Google Translate. None of this reassured bunnyhugger, but the taxi arriving in about the promised half-hour did. The driver asked if either of us wanted to ride in front and I gave the seat to bunnyhugger, giving her the chance to see the countryside --- beautiful as you'd hope --- and get the first glimpse of Nigloland park. It's got a huge drop tower, it's easy to spot.
Our hotel, the former water mill, was a lovely spot and gave us Chambre number 1, just past a small stairwell up and then another right back down. We turned down the dinner reservation offered us; between fatigue and a great number of small snacks over the day we weren't hungry. And then for all that ... well, bunnyhugger hadn't yet taken her daily half-hour walk. What better thing to do than pace out our journey tomorrow, to get to the amusement park?
We set off in the wrong direction at first, retracing the taxi's steps because we had seen a sign for Nigloland and the Hotel des Pirates from the road. Realizing we were getting only farther from the tower, I started walking along a gravel road past grapevines that possibly was private property? But finding an arrow sign pointing to Nigloland reassured us that if we were trespassing, it was a generally forgiven trespass. We stumbled our way through, trying to take whatever path led us closer to the tower, until we found a side street facing a big park sign, one of the landmarks we'd seen on google Street View. From there --- and now, suddenly, I somehow knew exactly where to get here from our hotel and how to get back efficiently --- we walked to what we took to be the gate of the park and then back to our temporary home.
Reentering I asked the desk clerk for the Wi-Fi password and he told us that was impossible. We have no idea what that meant. The next morning I would ask a different person at the desk --- I remembered enough French to say, ``je voudrais le ... [ fumbling, sheepish expression ] Wi-Fi password?'' --- and she wrote the password down for me, and did not explain that it was written on the back of our room's key card as we would have known had we ever turned that over. The first clerk doesn't seem to have taken a dislike to us or anything either; he was the host when we went to dinner the next day and was as pleasant as possible, and was the same at breakfast the day after that. Maybe I expressed myself poorly.
But for that night, we were on our own without Wi-Fi. Fortunately bunnyhugger had her cell phone and could use it to look up the most important thing: when would Nigloland be open tomorrow, so we knew just when to get up, and how long we'd have to kick around after the park closed. 1 pm to 6? Noon to 5? 11 am? 10?
The answer was nothing we had anticipated.
So with the Jackson County Fair done you know what that leaves me ... that's right: looking around the fairgrounds as they clean up, when I went down to pick up bunnyhugger's pictures! And ribbons! So here's the same spots you were just looking at but with even fewer people somehow!
Here's my car, parked where all the food vendors and picnic tables had been just like fifteen hours before.
The canopy to the right is where, I think, the magician had been set up. I don't think it was that Aaron guy bunnyhugger's been following.
Inside the exhibition hall, with the now-empty booths and false storefronts.
It wasn't just vegetables that got the card instructing people to throw them out. Baked goods got one too. In the window you can see a couple miniature sets not yet picked up.
And here's the vegetables waiting for their owners to come, take the ribbons, and throw them out.
This is not where they're to be thrown, but it is a depression that caught my eye.
Trivia: While fleeing New York, after the duel that murdered Alexander Hamilton, Aaron Burr stopped in Philadelphia at the home of old friend Charles Biddle. Present was also Charles's son, Nicholas Biddle, who would be the head of the Bank of the United States who warred with, and lost to, Andrew Jackson. (Nicholas was home from college and waiting to leave for Paris.) Source: The Money Men: Capitalism, Democracy, and the Hundred Years' War Over the American Dollar, H W Brands.
Currently Reading: The Invention Of Air: A Story of Science, Faith, Revolution, and the Birth of America, Steven Johnson.
