So we'd closed out Gilroy Gardens. They didn't close the gift shop right away, giving us the chance to think very hard about what we wanted to bring home. I got a T-shirt that's probably cryptic to people who aren't specifically from the Bay Area. And we slow-walked our way out, as you'd expect from us. Our only mild regret was that we weren't confident we had seen all the Circus Trees.
The exit lane's a separate gate from the entrance, and between the exit and entrance is a bathroom and we weren't going to pass that up. While waiting for ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
bunnyhugger I noticed something funny about one of the trees leading up to the entrance. It had a really deep knothole low down in its trunk. And ... come to it, the first branches were more horizontal than I'd expect. Then I realized another tree ten feet down or so had two holes going all the way through. These were some of the Circus Trees!
By the time bunnyhugger came out, and wondered why I was nowhere near the bathrooms, I was over by a tree that had a sign beside it, 'Do you love my CURLY CURVY shape?' (You can see the ash-or-maybe-Box-Elder and even that sign in that link.) Some of the other trees have signs and I don't know how two hyperlexical people, incapable of not reading any words in front of us, missed that as we went in. Some have signs that don't quite explain what's going on, such as this one that talks about being ``a spring vine ... without GRAPES!'' It used to have 'vines' that spiraled around the upper trunks, but with those having ... withered away? I guess? ... it seems more like just a wide-trunked tree that splits into a Y. Nature of having something made from nature, I suppose; they won't all stay as dramatic and immediately obvious as the Revolving Door.
My camera metadata tells me we only spent about fifteen minutes exploring the entrance, and the last ten of the Circus Trees. I would have sworn it was longer. It felt like a lovely last bit of peaceful discovery at a park which had given us so much of that already. Just beautiful.
My photo roll has reached the last ride of our first day at California's Great America. Want to see how that last ride looked?
I didn't take pictures during the ride but afterward? That's fair game. Here's the feet of the horse bunnyhugger rode; she was admiring the way the horseshoes were carved.
The upper-level chariot has a dragon menaced by a much smaller snake, a motif we also know from the Crossroads Village carousel. And that delights me too.
Peering out over the midway fountain towards the park entrance.
And a look back at the horses we rode for our last ride of the day.
Had to stop and get a picture of the Apollo astronaut on this mount. For some reason it's on the inside, too, the traditionally less-decorated side. And this on an inner-row horse, too!
All right, all right, I'm getting off the ride, but not before I grab a picture of it in this light.
Trivia: Ireene Wicker, star of The Singing Lady children's radio program (mostly the telling of fairy tales) added the extra 'e' to her first name early in her career, when a numerologist advised that the extra letter would give her fame and fortune. Source: On The Air: The Encyclopedia of Old-Time Radio, John Dunning. Fame and fortune did follow; she was extremely popular for a long time and even overcame the Red-Scare blacklist. Won a Peabody for her children's programming in 1961.
Currently Reading: Crosley: Two Brothers and a Business Empire That Transformed the Nation, Rusty McClure with David Stern and Michael A Banks. Gah, the book mentions the Crosleys buying the patent rights for a particular kind of refrigerator door seal, and mentions that door seals were a particularly hard problem, and then tosses out a mention how the money for that was a waste, but not what was wrong with it or why it couldn't be salvaged and I want to know about this unusable patent for a 1931-era refrigerator door, what kind of reader do they think I even am? (Also turns out the Crosleys made a model fridge that had no motor or moving parts. You heated a sphere with a mixture of water and ammonia on the stove for an hour and set it on a receptacle; its cooling down gave you a day's worth of cooling in the box, which is danged ingenious. Not surprised it was more used overseas where it could be the only practical way to keep medicines cool where there wasn't any kind of power, but I still admire the thinking involved.)
