There were only the two class sessions in the Saturday afternoon schedule, so what better thing to do then go back to the Student Union and look in the gift shop to see if there were any interesting souvenirs of the school? And then we got distracted by the pile of old yearbooks the bookstore --- now selling almost no books --- had and was offering to good homes. (They had one from as far back as 1928!) The collection was scattershot and they did not have the 1996 yearbook, so we could not look for ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
bunnyhugger's graduation picture.
Ah, but ... if you have heard of Earlham College at all, for reasons not connected to knowing bunnyhugger, it is likely because that was the alma mater of two of the hosts of The Flophouse bad-movies podcast. We knew that Dan McCoy and Stuart Wellington had gone to the school just after bunnyhugger --- they speak of some professors and a few individuals that she knew --- and what do you know but they did have the McCoy-Wellington yearbook. Their yearbook photos look ... fine. They look like normal 22-or-so-year-olds at the turn of the millennium. While we got pictures of their pictures and bunnyhugger shared the news of finding them in The Flophouse's facebonk page, she didn't post them lest they embarrass the hosts somehow. But, again, nothing to be embarrassed by other than that they were younger than they are now.
Also in the Student Union? The old mailboxes, in the basement, and we went downstairs where bunnyhugger could find her old postal box without problem. What she could not remember was the combination, to settle the ancient question of whether they ever changed the combinations. (The dial didn't seem to be working so in this case it might be moot --- some of the boxes had their old letter-based locks changed to numeral-based locks.) But! There happened to be another group of alumnae wandering around looking for their mailboxes and what do you know but one of them had bunnyhugger's same box! This was a great and delightful coincidence and, sad to report, she couldn't remember her old combination either.
Since leaving the reunion bunnyhugger has gotten a sense of what the combination might have been but there's no way of testing it or checking with the other woman who'd had the box. There was word being passed around of people finding their old combinations still working, though, which I would find believable. If I ever think to visit my old Rutgers post office box I will have to try my combination --- C-IJ-DE --- and see if that does anything good.
We did some more exploring of the student union, finding things like the main offices of the student radio --- the outside was covered in record album covers, though how far back those go is unknown to me --- and the theater club and spots where the post office used to be (it's moved into the bookstore/gift shop) or the bank used to be (it's gone so completely she and the other group couldn't figure where the teller window had been), or spots that folks agreed used to be the co-op in the misty past but now was the college e-sports team lounge. That sort of thing.
I enjoyed having bunnyhugger show me all these places important to her life. But it was time we headed out, as there was something big coming up.
Next in the Little Amerricka pictures we start the long ride on the train! I did not take pictures every 75 seconds of this ride, don't worry.
I'd mentioned there was a festival going on, and it included very loud live music. Here's the band. I can still hear this picture ringing in my ears.
``L A'' flower beds near the front of the park and I swear to you it was only on seeing this that I realized the name ``Little Amerricka'' was playing on Chicago's Great America amusement park.
Anyway, we're taking the train ride now. Here's a view of a train outside the train window.
The train leaves the park and goes deep into ... undeveloped space? And a lot of it; the ride goes a good twenty minutes out like this.
It eventually reaches a campground that was new from the last time bunnyhugger visited.
Nobody was waiting here to load --- or to leave --- the train at the campground, which includes a swimming area and a basketball court and a dunking booth.
Trivia: At the end of the 19th century linguists considered French to have about 55 major dialects and hundreds of subdialects, belonging to four distinct language groups: Romanic, Germanic, Celtic, and Euskaric (Basque). Source: The Discovery of France: A Historical Geography, Graham Robb.
Currently Reading: American Scientist, November-December 2026. Editor Fenella Saunders.
