My birthday we observed in the traditional manner, going to Kokomo's Family Fun Center in Saginaw. We couldn't do it on my actual birthday because of ![[profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
bunny_hugger's work schedule (and pinball league!), but we could get to it close enough. It was a chilly but not actually cold day. Still the center was all but abandoned. I don't think there was anyone else on the miniature golf course while we tried our traditional round on it, and I don't think that's ever happened before.
While golfing I managed to hit a ball that rolled into this weird little crook in the rocks lining the green and get surrounded on two sides and partly on top by stone. bunny_hugger took a picture of me kneeling beside it and looking perplexed, with the intent of creating a meme about ``Now that's an unfortunate lie'' for when that is a thing that needs to be said. Not sure if she ever has. It was a rather unfortunate lie. It is such a weird miniature golf course. We found more evidence of abandoned former holes; how often do you see even one abandoned former hole on a miniature golf course? And the three-tier hole was still as impossible.
Something that has happened before: we saw rainbow-painted clouds past the waterfall. It's a meterological phenomenon whose name I forget, that we saw once on the way to Morphicon, and that we'd seen before at Kokomo's when visiting for my birthday. The clouds on either side of the sun, a good way away, were covered in rainbow arcs. It looked literally as if the clouds were these arcs of color. I understand that these sorts of arcs are seasonal affairs. I don't understand why Saginaw, Michigan, in late September is apparently a hotspot for them.
Not sure if it was the weather or it being the middle of a school week that left the place so empty, though. It was slow enough they just asked what attractions we meant to go to --- we would get several roller coaster rides in --- and sent employees out to meet us there. After we had our break, at the Hello Sushi that everyone in Saginaw and a few people outside know is the place to go for sushi, we came back to find employees screwing around on the go-kart track, racing one another.
I drove --- bunny_hugger drives enough for her real job --- and the satellite navigator took me through Owosso, a town we only knew by virtue of sometimes car dealership ads mention an outlet in Owosso. Along the way bunny_hugger spotted a wild-looking little castle and wondered about this folly. It turned out to be Curwood Castle, built by James Oliver Curwood, at one time the highest-paid (per word) writer in the world, and author of something like three dozen novels and the stories behind at least eighteen movies. Apparently the place also hosts memorabilia from another famed Owosso citizen, Thomas Dewey. We had no idea. Also an Owosso resident: Diane Carey, who apparently quit her job writing Star Trek novels by trashing Enterprise in the novelization she wrote of its pilot episode. Happening town.
Trivia: Joseph Lavallée's 1792 Voyages dans les départements de la France, the first guidebook for the modern tourist, was intended to show Parisians that the provinces were at least as interesting as the capital. It traced a course through all the nation's departments without passing through the same one twice. Source: The Discovery of France: A Historical Geography, Graham Robb.
Currently Reading: Descartes' Bones: A Skeletal History of the Conflict Between Faith and Reason, Russell Shorto.
PS: Six Flags over Texas. Flags not pictured.
Transfer track that they have outside the launch for the Mini Mine Train. Also they have multiple trains for that I guess, huh.
Gotham City Park, with a Faintly Burtonesque Batmobile, uncannily like that of the Gotham City Park at Great Adventure. The tall vertical red-and-blue coaster in the background is the outside portion of the Mr Freeze Reverse blast ride.
Outside the path to one of the Batman/Gotham City rides is this ``abandoned'' cop car that patrons clearly try to flip their event schedules or park maps onto.
