So I'm jumping ahead to yesterday because of a wondrous thing that we saw. Michigan's Adventure has, for the first time (at least that we know of) opened for the weekends in September and October for a Halloween event. Sunday's was the final day of this and we can barely stand to miss closing day there. And it was gorgeous; between the changing colors of the trees and the Halloween decor the park has never looked better. Even just bundles of hay and pumpkins set up all along the midways makes the place look so much more personable than usual.
Yesterday in the closing hours of the park we noticed people walking off with pumpkins. They've had a little feature, Patch's Pumpkin Train, where you could go off and kids would pick a small decorative gourd from where they were set on planters and baskets and all. Adults, we learned to our sorrow the weekend before, were not allowed. But these weren't the little pumpkins; these were the big ones, the jack-o-lantern-suitable ones, that folks were just walking off with.
As the day --- and the season --- entered its final hours we saw more and more pumpkins being carted off. Also more decorative gourds, including some of the biggest ones. It soon became the largest pumpkin-looting event that ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
bunnyhugger and I had ever seen. All right, yes, by default. But when families were using those canvas wagon carts, the ones meant to haul a couple toddlers and all their gear, to stuff full of pumpkins, gourds, and whatever candy the trick-or-treat stations didn't need anymore, oh, it was quite the event.
Part of us would like to know whether this was a park-sanctioned pumpkin looting. Did they figure we've got to clean the park out, might as well let people take stuff the last day of the season? Or did the families just themselves start figuring, they're giving away smaller pumpkins, they don't need the big ones, why not? And enough people did this that the staff decided they're not going to deal with mobs of parents who feel entitled to free pumpkins? Was this a mass outbreak of pumpkin lawlessness we witnessed? We would so like to know.
Did we get a free pumpkin? No. While we watched this unfolding, we wanted to ride stuff in the last couple hours, and didn't want to be hauling a pumpkin around for that. By the time we were off our final ride, eh, there weren't any good pumpkins around us. (One with a stem broken off, for example.) As we left the park we wondered if the chrysanthemums (in disposable planters, mind) were also free-for-alls. We didn't brave that. But while we were coming back from looking at mums we saw a good-looking pumpkin sitting on a hay bale, right there by the exit. We wondered how we hadn't noticed it before, and how it had gotten there; someone must have changed their mind. No, turns out, someone had just set it down a moment while taking care of something and she didn't mean to abandon it, sorry. No problem. Just a funny close to an already funny incident that topped what was one of our favorite days at the park.
Now, let's enjoy a bit more of the long hike we took in search of letterboxes:
Picnic tables serving that parking lot. The letterbox was supposed to be somewhere in this area, although not by the picnic benches.
The benches make a nice attractive arrangement, though, and I like the way the light and shadow look in this picture.
Now, somewhere out there, past the parking lot, beyond the bathroom, was the putative letterbox site.
These logs were the key. If we counted the location of these right we'd find the box.
We're more or less sure we had the count right, and the box just wasn't there. Too bad.
Back to walking, then, journeying back down the trail. Looks good, doesn't it?
Trivia: The Arab geographer Mas'udi, who journeyed in the middle east from 915 to 943, describes windmills as a conspicuous feature in the Sistan region (in the present day, a region in southeast Iran, southwest Afghanistan, and northwest Pakistan): ``Sistan is known above all as a region of winds and sand. It is famous for the skill which is shown in making the wind turn the mills and raise the water from wells to irrigate the gardens''. Source: A History of Mechanical Inventions, Abbott Payson Usher.
Currently Reading: Kennywood: Behind The Screams, Pocket Edition, Brian Butko.
