Nigloland was closed.
Not just for the night. They would not open Monday, the day we had planned to visit. Nor Tuesday, the day we were leaving town. They would not be open again until next weekend, a time when we were scheduled to be out of the country of France altogether.
This threw our night for a loop.
So here are the mistakes we made. The first was forgetting just how late the European amusement park season starts. Even when we were in the Netherlands for our honeymoon, in early July, parks were still closing at 6 pm. This early in the year they haven't even gone to full-week operation. The first week of June they weren't even open outside weekends and holidays.
Holidays. This was the mistake we made. We knew they were open the following Monday, the day after Pentecost, because that's when every park in France was expecting to be slammed with people. This is why we changed our trip plans, moving a park from the Monday after the academic conference to the Monday before. We failed to think to check whether the parks would be open.
We had come close to this mistake before; our big Pennsylvania Parks Tour in 2013 originally saw us going to Waldemeer on a Monday when they were not open, but ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
bunnyhugger caught her error the night or two before we set out and rescheduled the entire trip to avoid this. This time ... well, we didn't imagine anything was up until the night before our visit, and there was no rescheduling things to match. To do anything at all we'd have to rebook our plane flight from the following Monday morning and get a hotel room that we now realized would be much more expensive than we had gotten here.
My joke about the Walley World photo stopped being funny and we won't be doing that again.
It wasn't an easy night of sleep, as nice as the hotel bedroom was. But what was there to do?
Besides breakfast, I mean. We got down, late but not before the end of service and could have a petit dejeuner to ourselves. This would include the softest, runniest brie we've ever seen; it was more of a puddle than a cheese and I would not be disappointed if I ate that nonstop. Also crepes and what sure looked like locally-made jams, and an all-kinds-of-fruit juice (mostly grapefruit) which revealed to me that I really like grapefruit juices. So many pastries. More cheeses, too. Even champagne, though I didn't partake, for not much good reason. We ate a good-sized breakfast like we would every day of a trip that saw us both somehow losing weight.
After that, and with le Wi-Fi Password in hand, we went back to the room and I confirmed the sad news about Nigloland, just in case we had somehow fallen prey to an astounding hoax. I did a little Internet stuff on the balcony a bit, enjoying the air and the sunlight and tranquility and a couple people wandering into the Parc du Chateau garden around the hotel, and bunnyhugger searched to see what could possibly be done locally without a car. We couldn't even put together a picnic and go off to the river or something; there's no grocery stores in town, and only one bus that runs once a day to a town that has anything. Nor would we be able to eat dinner unless it were at that hotel, a place we had feared was too formal for the likes of us.
After an hour or so of that, though, I was hit by sleepiness, and decided to lie down for a nap. This turned into a two-hour nap and then I got up and went back to bed for another hour. And then got up and went to bed for another three hours while thinking, oh, I would have been an absolute zombie if I were walking around Nigloland all day. ... Well, maybe not; being out in the sun and doing things instead of sitting would keep me going, and coming home to fall asleep would be normal enough. But my did that show how we maybe should have planned on some recovery time after all our transit.
bunnyhugger slept too, not as much as me, unusually. It felt good to have done and I guess it left us well-prepared for the rest of our week six hours ahead of our home time.
With the Jackson County Fair sinking slowly into the past what could possibly come up next but ... oh, the Calhoun County Fair which, as you'll see, was quite different:
We got there late in the day so here's the Nuf Edils already in evening glow. Also the slide was in a different spot this year!
Advantage of getting there later is everything already had lights going, and visibly so.
The Nuf Edils makes a natural angle over the Haus.
Getting here a slightly better look at the fun haus because the art is ... not exactly folk, really, but it's got a fun vibe.
Center of the funhouse that's going pretty hard for the Fun Bavarian German vibe. Note the 'Outhaus' sign reading 'Ocupado'.
And finally, off to the left, the Biergarten hause with a bunch of fun-looking animals all over the place.
Trivia: In the early 18th century, shortly after the invention of champagne, the craze for it was such that a bottle might sell for up to 8 livres. At the time, all the wine drunk in a day by a great lord's household --- including 35 to 40 servants, some of whom had allowances of up to three bottles per day --- might cost only 6 livres. Source: The Essence of Style: How the French Invented High Fashion, Fine Food, Chic Cafés, Style, Sophistication, and Glamour, Joan DeJean.
Currently Reading: Mission to Jupiter: A History of the Galileo Project, Michael Meltzer. NASA SP-2007-4231.
