After our very short trip to Kings Island that Thursday --- ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
bunnyhugger reminds me she did buy one of the tourist-style posters, of the carousel that was never at Palisades Park --- we had one more C-------ti area thing to do. That was to go to Jungle Jim's.
Jungle Jim's started life as a grocery store and then accumulated stuff in the way you do when your business is an excuse for your Collection, the way Marvin's Marvelous Mechanical Museum is or the way Horrock's on the westside of Lansing is trending. While it has stayed a grocery store, and grown by bringing in more stuff, not all of it specialty foods for overseas communities, it's also accumulated oddities. Animatronics from Chuck E Cheese's. Rides from Coney Island C'ti/Kings Island. And then additional bits of whimsy.
Their main bathrooms, for example, are hidden behind the doors of port-a-potties, with the wall framed so they do look plausibly like they'd be terrible. Through the doors the bathrooms are quite respectable, spacious and well-lit and clean. The plastic doors make going in there this holodeck-like experience where the levels of reality don't seem to match. Outside the bathrooms they have several TV screens running a continuous loop of local stations across the United States mentioning Jungle Jim's receiving a best-bathrooms award.
So you understand why we couldn't miss this, especially as we didn't have the time to visit when we did our 2019 Kings Island trip. Besides the chance to go around taking photographs at the stuff behind people who were just trying to buy their week's groceries --- 60+ year old bumper cars stuffed full of Andes mints and Zero bars? Yeah! --- there's foreign foods. Especially, foreign candies. The pressure to buy all the Star Bars in stock was not present this time, because World Market near us has started to carry them. But there's still plenty of overseas candies that we don't get, or variations that we don't get. bunnyhugger picked up a couple Cherry Ripes, an Australian candy that for some reason can't get imported to the United States otherwise. And not imported cheaply either; Violet Crumble may be a little pricey compared to a MilkyBar, but it's nothing as pricey as a Cherry Ripe is. If you know a way to hook us up with a Michigan-area supplier let us know in the comments please. Or direct message if your connection is sensitive to publicity.
Did I mention that they had pinball? Because they have pinball. We only found two machines, both conveniently near the port-a-potty bathrooms. Niether particularly rare or exciting --- Stern's Jurassic Park and Stern's Kiss --- but we do want to encourage this sort of thing in places. (Our intelligence is they had pinball machines last time we visited, somewhere around 2015, but we hadn't been able to find them then, possibly because we went to the wrong bathrooms.) Had a couple good games and left credits behind, like you want to do.
So that was our last area thing for the day. All that was left was driving home to pick up our pet rabbit. The satellite navigator recommended, since we were driving to bunnyhugger's parents, taking not the Interstate but rather state highways that promised to be more nearly a straight line, so that even at lower speed we'd get there faster. So it probably proved, but it did mean we passed through a whole freaking lot of Ohio. On the other hand, somewhere in the northwestern corner of Ohio in a town we stopped in because we had given up hope of ever leaving Ohio we found a Taco Bell that was really, really good at their job. Like, the vegetables were fresh and tasty enough to make the whole burrito or whatever feel substantial. You get that now and then; we had joked-but-not-quite-joked that the Taco Bell in Dallas was so good because they know how to cook southwestern there. Apparently, the same holds for some small town on Route 49 in northwestern Ohio. Good luck finding it!
Though we got to bunnyhugger's parents later than we hoped --- we were at Kings Island longer than we really had time for, and at Jungle Jim's similarly, and I made a bad turn trying to avoid construction that took us a lot of recovery time --- they were still awake and hadn't given our pet rabbit his evening food yet. So he had something to look forward to when we completed the trip back home, and had our big vacation for the year over, and could look ahead to, in my case, a weekday taken off of work. I'm quite liking this policy of taking time off between vacation and the return to work. WE'll see how it holds up.
I got the photo-plate-pay-by-mail charge from RiverLink, for the crossing into Louisville, a couple weeks later. Didn't even remember there was a toll bridge there, which I guess is why they do it that way.
Our next amusement park was: not last year. But we were right up against Halloween, when bunnyhugger took her Velveteen fursuit out of storage and wore it to the hipster bar where we play pinball. The photographic evidence:
Velveteen trapping the ball on the right flipper of Indiana Jones. From here there's three good shots: into the lock, which if it isn't open will hit the drop targets and bounce into the left outlane; up the ramp, which won't go all the way around and will rebound down the center drain; or to the mode-start scoop, which won't drop in, and will have the ball bounce down to the left kicker and shoot out the right outline.
She seems disheartened by what came next.
``Which fingers do you hit the flipper buttons with?'' ``Yes.''
Always seems like an uphill struggle to get a good pinball game going.
And here Velveteen disapproves of where Paul sent the ball.
Did I mention it was Halloween? So a lot of people at the bar were in costume.
Trivia: When the Victoria Olympic Council reconvened in June 1946 --- its first meeting in seven years --- it had reserves of £6/7/10, or under 13 Australian dollars. It was at this meeting that Ronald Aitken moved to apply for Melbourne to host an Olympic Games, to laughter, but also to unanimous acceptance. Source: Encyclopedia of the Modern Olympic Movement, Editors John E Findling, Kimberly D Pelle. (This would succeed and bring the 1956 Melbourne Games.)
Currently Reading: John Adams, David McCullough.
