Laying out the attractions at the Billy Jones Wildcat Railroad and W E 'Bill' Mason Carousel also gives you a fair idea of how that part of the day went. The place is located in a county park in Los Gatos, a city we found to have neat statues of wildcats as you get off the highway to the surface roads. We did our best following directions that seemed ambiguous and parked in a lot that didn't seem to have much of anything near it. But we walked along our best guess and heard and then saw the train going, a welcome reassurance.
If I remember the order of things right, we got tickets for the next train ride first, and then some lunch. The snack stand promised a veggie burger that we thought might be literally anything from those awful gardenburgers served up as punishment in the 90s through to the almost-too-good fake meats of today. What it was, was sold out. This was the most vegetarian option on the menu, so we got pretzels instead, which needed cooking. So much cooking we got worried they forgot about us, but when I finally went to check they were ready for us.
The train ride was on a nice long loop, in cars that didn't have tops, like trains we've seen at many amusement parks. The train takes a path that goes out and comes back backwards; the engine decouples from the train and uses a side path to come around in front again. We were fascinated watching the rail traffic controller guide by hand motions the engineer into coupling the train to the now-front car.
The train goes out along a broad loop that we naturally compared to the Crossroad Village train, the one we only ever ride at Christmas. This one takes a more complicated path, weaving back and forth along some very slight hills, and --- we would discover on our second ride --- has a switch so that the train can take the main loop in either direction. Shortly after getting to where we'd first seen the train, in the distance, we saw little traffic signs warning 'Squirrel Crossing' ... and soon enough, indeed, saw squirrels. Not the familiar Eastern Grey squirrels of back home. These were the exotic Western Grey Squirrel, a bit darker and, to my eye, smaller than the Eastern Grey. (At least the non-black-squirrel variant.) They also seemed thinner and to have much less fuzzy tails, likely reflecting that they endure less harsh winters than their Michigan relatives. There were also geese hanging around the tracks, including one that seemed determined not to get off the railroad before the train arrived. (This one did.)
The carousel, visited and ridden --- twice --- is a cute one. It has a band organ, tucked inside a structure decorated with carousel-animal wood cutout figures whose design ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
bunnyhugger recognized. The animals are a mix of several carvers, and the ride goes clockwise, in the British style. The scenery panels look home-painted, with the ones at the center showing off animals like a giraffe or zebra or lion or bear or such, some of them saddled. (The ride doesn't have a giraffe, zebra, or bear figure, and the lions are just art on the chariot side.) The rounding boards, on top, have similarly home-painted art, but in several different styles. Many of these panels have circus themes, like one with a parade showing a clown and several elephants and horses and such. One of them --- a very plain one, evocative of a post-UPA theatrical cartoon --- has a couple circus animal wagons in a row, followed by a clown and a horse with acrobat standing on top, and trailed by a cat walking on crutches, leg in a cast. There's a story there but I don't know what it is.
We got ice cream from the snack stand and sat on a bench just outside the carousel building for a while, near a collection of folded-up picnic tables that must have been meant for a 4th of July event. While we watched, the ride operator went around the carousel with a long pole and untangled the American flags, attached to the rounding boards, which had gotten jammed in the breeze and in the ride's own motion.
As referenced yesterday we didn't get any T-shirts, though I did like the wildcat mascot logo. We did also find (in the maintenance shed) signs promising where to go for the holiday lights show, validating our jokes comparing this ride to Crossroads Village's holiday train. And we did some walking around the park, which has much more space than just what these two rides demand, despite the considerable heat and the sun untempered by clouds. We also agreed there ought to be a letterbox here, but there wasn't, and we couldn't very well plant one. Shame.
With the pictures now we're back to the Fairy Tale Festival.
Finally, something interesting at the fairy tales: bunnies! The Capital Area Humane Society had a table there with a couple pocket pets to help draw attention or at least packs of children in wondering if they can pet the rabbits and guinea pig.
This bunny's just in after a hard day of being a surfer dude.
Bunny trying to get the manager's attention, please.
Bunny instead gets the attention of a butterfly-dressed child whom I'm pretty sure applied head-petting shortly after this picture.
The other rabbit was having some time off; they'd swap positions as display bunny.
And here's the sadly best picture I got of the American guinea pig on display.
Trivia: On 27 August 1973 NASA discovered cracks in an upper ``E'' beam forging on the S-IB booster intended for Skylab 4/3. Repairs would continue until the 3rd of September. Source: Skylab: A Chronology, Roland W Newkirk, Ivan D Ertel, Courtney G Brooks. NASA SP-4011. It's not just you; there were a lot of mysterious cracks on the Saturn I-B's, which had been in storage since 1968. I don't recall if anything was determined about whether the long time between construction and launch was the reason.
Currently Reading: The Billionaire's Vinegar: The Mystery Of The World's Most Expensive Bottle of Wine, Benjamin Wallace. So the chapter I started with today began with someone wondering what they were doing with the used bottles and corks from all this old wine, and that led into a section about the counterfeiting problem, and from the title of the next chapter I'm hoping it's going to be a bit about the Koch brothers getting swindled.
