This is my street, and I'm never gonna leave it

[austin_dern]

The past two years have been rough ones for the traditions bunny_hugger and I had when together in New Jersey. Part of the motivation of this particular trip was the saying farewell to one of those traditions, that of going to Seaside Heights and riding the antique carousel at Casino Pier. But especially with my parents moving out of state we were losing others.

For example: we'd always eaten at least once at Jersey Mike's, which has expanded into Ohio and even into Ann Arbor, but not gotten much closer to Lansing. Small thing, naturally, but a missed thing. I did, though, find one that wasn't too far from our hotel, and we could have lunch there on this last full day together. So we had a nice full-size vegetarian sub together, while overhearing state workers talk about the conferences they'd been at. I realize that it may be practical to toss your tie over your shoulder so as not to stain it while eating, but that has always, always looked goofy to me. Just saying. (And when you consider how much I'm willing to do because it's practical even though it looks silly, you know how silly it looks.)

bunny_hugger mentioned how we hadn't had the time to get to the Freehold Raceway Mall and ride the carousel there, either. But we were not too badly positioned for that either. We had meant to get to Casino Pier, but that required going east across the width of the state, and getting to the Freehold Raceway Mall would just mean taking Route 33 east instead of I-195. It wouldn't be much of a diversion.

This didn't mean we had unlimited time to hang around the mall, mind you. We had got up in the late morning, to start, recuperating from the week of doing stuff often late at night, and we would have to get to sleep fairly early because bunny_hugger had a dreadful morning flight ahead. We just went to the carousel (though we passed through the L L Bean, that used to be the Borders, and I wondered if they had swapped the direction of the elevator --- I could swear it used to run the other way, going up as one went eastward, rather than westward, but why would someone renovate that?) and waited a surprisingly long time to get tickets and to get the ride loaded up. There were a fair number of kids floating around, and only one person doing the ticket-selling, ticket-taking, and ride safety checking, but still, well, maybe it was a bad day. We would take two rides, one on the upper level, which offers a better view but a slower turn, and one on the lower level that's got a bit more speed to it.

And then we'd hurry out, because the afternoon was already creeping past us, and we hadn't been to the most important part of the trip.

Trivia: The Philadelphia and Atlantic City Railway, a narrow-gauge railroad founded by renegade directors from the Camden and Atlantic Railway, was constructed in about ninety days in early 1877, and ran its inaugural train on the 7th of July, 1877. Source: Railroads of New Jersey: Fragments of the Past in the Garden State Landscape, Lorett Treese.

Currently Reading: The Complete Fairy Tales Of The Brothers Grimm, Translator Jack Zipes. Wait, ``Little Red Riding Hood'' had an in-tale sequel? The heck? It was weird when it was Grendel's Mother, it's no less weird for a second Big Bad Wolf to show up.

PS: Reading The Comics, September 24, 2014: Explained In Class Edition, some more mathematics-themed comics. There've also been two reblogged items since my last roundup post, so this is the fourth thing since the last roundup.