austin_dern

Nigloland was closed.

Not just for the night. They would not open Monday, the day we had planned to visit. Nor Tuesday, the day we were leaving town. They would not be open again until next weekend, a time when we were scheduled to be out of the country of France altogether.

This threw our night for a loop.

So here are the mistakes we made. The first was forgetting just how late the European amusement park season starts. Even when we were in the Netherlands for our honeymoon, in early July, parks were still closing at 6 pm. This early in the year they haven't even gone to full-week operation. The first week of June they weren't even open outside weekends and holidays.

Holidays. This was the mistake we made. We knew they were open the following Monday, the day after Pentecost, because that's when every park in France was expecting to be slammed with people. This is why we changed our trip plans, moving a park from the Monday after the academic conference to the Monday before. We failed to think to check whether the parks would be open.

We had come close to this mistake before; our big Pennsylvania Parks Tour in 2013 originally saw us going to Waldemeer on a Monday when they were not open, but bunnyhugger caught her error the night or two before we set out and rescheduled the entire trip to avoid this. This time ... well, we didn't imagine anything was up until the night before our visit, and there was no rescheduling things to match. To do anything at all we'd have to rebook our plane flight from the following Monday morning and get a hotel room that we now realized would be much more expensive than we had gotten here.

My joke about the Walley World photo stopped being funny and we won't be doing that again.

It wasn't an easy night of sleep, as nice as the hotel bedroom was. But what was there to do?

Besides breakfast, I mean. We got down, late but not before the end of service and could have a petit dejeuner to ourselves. This would include the softest, runniest brie we've ever seen; it was more of a puddle than a cheese and I would not be disappointed if I ate that nonstop. Also crepes and what sure looked like locally-made jams, and an all-kinds-of-fruit juice (mostly grapefruit) which revealed to me that I really like grapefruit juices. So many pastries. More cheeses, too. Even champagne, though I didn't partake, for not much good reason. We ate a good-sized breakfast like we would every day of a trip that saw us both somehow losing weight.

After that, and with le Wi-Fi Password in hand, we went back to the room and I confirmed the sad news about Nigloland, just in case we had somehow fallen prey to an astounding hoax. I did a little Internet stuff on the balcony a bit, enjoying the air and the sunlight and tranquility and a couple people wandering into the Parc du Chateau garden around the hotel, and bunnyhugger searched to see what could possibly be done locally without a car. We couldn't even put together a picnic and go off to the river or something; there's no grocery stores in town, and only one bus that runs once a day to a town that has anything. Nor would we be able to eat dinner unless it were at that hotel, a place we had feared was too formal for the likes of us.

After an hour or so of that, though, I was hit by sleepiness, and decided to lie down for a nap. This turned into a two-hour nap and then I got up and went back to bed for another hour. And then got up and went to bed for another three hours while thinking, oh, I would have been an absolute zombie if I were walking around Nigloland all day. ... Well, maybe not; being out in the sun and doing things instead of sitting would keep me going, and coming home to fall asleep would be normal enough. But my did that show how we maybe should have planned on some recovery time after all our transit.

bunnyhugger slept too, not as much as me, unusually. It felt good to have done and I guess it left us well-prepared for the rest of our week six hours ahead of our home time.

With the Jackson County Fair sinking slowly into the past what could possibly come up next but ... oh, the Calhoun County Fair which, as you'll see, was quite different:

We got there late in the day so here's the Nuf Edils already in evening glow. Also the slide was in a different spot this year!

Advantage of getting there later is everything already had lights going, and visibly so.

The Nuf Edils makes a natural angle over the Haus.

Getting here a slightly better look at the fun haus because the art is ... not exactly folk, really, but it's got a fun vibe.

Center of the funhouse that's going pretty hard for the Fun Bavarian German vibe. Note the 'Outhaus' sign reading 'Ocupado'.

And finally, off to the left, the Biergarten hause with a bunch of fun-looking animals all over the place.

Trivia: In the early 18th century, shortly after the invention of champagne, the craze for it was such that a bottle might sell for up to 8 livres. At the time, all the wine drunk in a day by a great lord's household --- including 35 to 40 servants, some of whom had allowances of up to three bottles per day --- might cost only 6 livres. Source: The Essence of Style: How the French Invented High Fashion, Fine Food, Chic Cafés, Style, Sophistication, and Glamour, Joan DeJean.

Currently Reading: Mission to Jupiter: A History of the Galileo Project, Michael Meltzer. NASA SP-2007-4231.

It was the end of an extremely long day, one that started with a midafternoon flight, a red-eye to France, and this after missing by inches rear-ending someone on the Interstate. As if stumbling out of Charles de Gaulle airport at 8 am clock time, 2 am body time, weren't enough, we then struggled with figuring out how to get on the metro, and from there to Gare de l'Est, for a nightmarish encounter trying to rent a locker to store our luggage for a couple hours. Then, since we had nearly six hours to go before our next train was ready, we figured out the metro lines and connections to get to a small private museum with wonders we could not have fully anticipated. And after that we had reversed the trip to get back to the train station, there to take several hours' worth of train ride out to the eastern region of France and a train stop that was desolate and all but abandoned. After the frustrating process of finding where there was a list of taxi services, and then figuring out how to use bunnyhugger's phone to call a taxi service --- thanks, phone, for warning that it looks like I'm trying to place a local call while roaming in France, so please press the + key on the numerical keypad that has no + symbol on it followed by the country code for France, whatever the heck that might be --- and try to make my voice, never clear in the best of times, clear enough trying to express what I could piece together from 45-year-old middle-school language classes, to get a taxi that arrived just past bunnyhugger's declaration that there would never be a taxi and we were stranded there. Then on for a ten-minute ride that somehow cost €70 to a boutique hotel, arriving fearsomely near nightfall, after something like thirty hours of our being awake and travelling.

But. We had managed, fatigued but game, to find our way walking from the hotel in the incredibly tiny town of Dolancourt, Aube, to the attraction. Nigloland, one of the most popular amusement parks in France. Patrice and Philippe Gélis, brothers, were inspired by a visit to Walt Disney World in the early 80s and decided to open their own pay-one-price park. And so they created their own, a sort of folk reconstruction of Disneyland as a couple enthusiasts jumping into the deep end of the amusement park business might envision. It's got a half-dozen roller coasters. It's got a galloping horse ride. It's got a walk-through dinosaur park ride. It's got the Rivière des Fées boat ride, and a show about the hedgehogs (mascot of the park, and through the Romani word for hedgehog, namesake as well) of the magical forest. It's got an attached hotel, the Hôtel des Pirates, which we would have stayed at except it wasn't taking bookings for Monday-night-to-Tuesday-morning, and Monday would be the day we hoped to visit. It's got a (modern) salon carousel, a particularly ornate kind of carousel that's all but extinct worldwide.

We had known that we would arrive after the park's closure Sunday. But we made the walk to the gate because we wanted, first, to be sure that our estimates based on looking at maps of the area were correct. And that we could find the entrance to the park. We could indeed; really, it'd be hard to miss, given the town is so small and the park has a 100-meter-tall drop tower you can't possibly miss.

I told bunnyhugger to pose for the Walley World disappointment picture, and took a good-looking one with my new-to-me camera. She got a matching one of me. And we walked the short way back to our hotel to load my first pictures of this park onto my computer, to sleep off so much travel (including a side museum trip), and to savor the day to come. And so that is the teaser. After tomorrow's humor-blog recap post I hope to share with you the full story --- the motives, the pretexts, the development --- of our European vacation.

You get the + symbol on her phone by holding down the 0 long enough.

With that sufficiently teased, now, let's take in some Jackson County Fair pictures from not quite a year ago now:

Some more small pet information. That poster about guinea pig care may seem like it doesn't have a lot of information but it's more than we knew about raising guinea pigs in the 80s.

And now on to the photography exhibits! bunnyhugger had something like a dozen pictures in and I was to see how they looked, whether any won ribbons, and what the competition was like. It was like this.

So here's the Buildings and Architecture, Black-and-White category. bunnyhugger's picture in the upper right took home nothing, even though it's a photo of the same house that won a best-of-class ribbon at Calhoun County's the year before.

A bit more view of the competition here plus some [ Wayne's World voice ] extreme close-ups! (She didn't enter that category.)

She did enter portraits and the picture of me with a Christmas tree, again, didn't place.

Capturing The Moment is another of those categories that seem really hard to explain just what you're looking for. bunnyhugger hadn't entered any of these, I think, but there are some nice moments here.

Trivia: Audubon Society membership rose from 120,000 to 400,000 in the decade after the first Earth Day; Sierra Club membership grew 46 percent in the same ten years. Source: Down To Earth: Nature's Role in American History, Ted Steinberg.

Currently Reading: BBC History Magazine, Vol 24 No 4, Editor Rob Attar.

Yesterday, as Mother's Day, we spent with the nearest available mother, bunnyhugger's. Not to worry, I did call my mother in some spare time and learn that the church she volunteers for and kind of runs has only got temporary pictures of the new Pope up. They hope to have the official pictures soon. Also she's making progress in her bridge ranking and needs only a few more Masters Points and Silver Points to reach the next level, with the twist being that Silver Points are only available at a couple select events, which fortunately are coming up this month.

But to the parents we were with. bunnyhugger's mother insisted on making dinner, grilled cheese, and while I'd rather she didn't go to that work on a day in principle celebrating her, I also like the grilled cheeses she makes. She's good at getting the cheese melted in a way I'm not. And her father, after interrogating me about whether I'd ever read Modesty Blaise --- having forgotten that he gave me two collections of Modesty Blaise books --- disappeared into the other room a minute and then gave me a third.

He also, on hearing again that we have a spring-based kitchen scale that can measure in either grams or ounces, offered a counter-balance scale that he took out and explained he had just found it recently while looking for something else. He also discovered, from looking at pictures of eBay sellers, that the scale was missing a leg, so while we were out walking the dog, he constructed a replacement out of popsicle sticks or something. And then, after that, decided he didn't like that and made a new set. I reflected how we were probably fortunate that he didn't have a 3D printer.

After dinner bunnyhugger got out the new campaign roleplaying game, from the designer of Mice and Mystics. This is Aftermath, animals working on a colony and their own side projects in a world where all humans have mysteriously vanished, within the lifetime of a guinea pig. The catch is that the designer of Mice and Mystics has not the slightest idea how to explain his rules. The always slow parts of playing your first couple rounds were even slower and more confusing than should have been. Not helping matters is that, for example, some of the cards you're dealt have a little shield on them, and the more defensive characters have a symbol on their character card with a little shield on them. So how do you defend against an attack? Is it based on what shields you have and can put together? No, it is not! And there's other little ``do you know how to communicate with people?'' design issues, for example that the symbol for ``range'' for ranged weapons means different things for players and enemies.

After a couple go-rounds and some false starts we were getting the bugs worked out and almost had our first encounter done. But also by that time bunnyhugger's mother was anxious that we get going lest I get to bed too late for work in the morning (I got to bed on time) and her father was anxious lest we not eat overly large slices of key lime pie. So we ended up ditching the session, I'm confident one round of play before beating at least the first page. Hopefully we'll get it together for next time we play.

And that was our Mother's Day.

New event on the photo roll. What's the next thing we did? You'll get a strong hint from the establishing shot here ...

As the picture of bunnyhugger putting on sunscreen tells you, it's an amusement park trip! But what amusement park is there even in frame, much less one that has an escalator at the parking lot?

There it is, well down the valley: Kennywood! Phantom's Revenge is the tall coaster on the left; Steel Curtain, the non-operational roller coaster on the right.

And yes, I tried doing a panorama of the valley from our position in the second level of parking lot.

We didn't remember the escalator to the parking lot. Turns out no, they replaced the ski lift --- which we never saw operating but which was, in principle, a Kennywood ride you didn't need to enter the park to take --- after 2019.

Did I mention it was a Saturday and those are always busy days at amusement parks? Because it was a Saturday and that's always a busy day at amusement parks.

There's the carousel sculpture that's been the signature element of the entrance of Kennywood's chain's amusement parks --- as of when this photo was taken. Since then, the Kennywood chain was bought up by Dollywood's owners, so who knows how things have changed?

Trivia: Jack Pepper (1902 - 1979) was a juvenile comedian who worked vaudeville as a fresh-faced college boy singing a falsetto ``St Louis Blues''. He worked in movies starting in 1929 (Metro Movietone Ruvue #4) and continuing through the 1970s in minor parts. He also had bit roles in seven of the Hope-Crosby-Lamour ``Road'' pictures. Source: The Encyclopedia of Vaudeville, Anthony Slide.

Currently Reading: The Greatest Invention: A History of the World in Nine Mysterious Scripts, Silvia Ferrara.

Lacking the time to write up the con, what with the seventh Tuesday in a row of pinball events, let me instead share what's next on my photo roll: our anniversary trip to Indiana Beach! Which we've now made our anniversary event three times, I think giving it the edge on any place.

Here's the bridge to Indiana Beach, the way we always thought was the back end of the park but is maybe the front? We're not sure. You do get a good view of the place from this angle, though.

Directly ahead is the Cornball Express and the Ferris Wheel and somewhere in there the sky lift ride.

Do Not Enter seems like a bad thing to say at the entrance of your park. They probably just mean for whatever was being built or rebuilt behind the construction fence.

And Lost Coaster of Superstition Mountain was open! JTK had so much trouble getting to it the season before but here we stop in once and it's ready for us.

Frankenstein tipping his hat and his head to the crowd, one of the animatronics attracting people to the walk-through Frankenstein's Castle.

We did go through the Castle. Most of it was too dark for me to even try taking pictures of stuff. But there's a small balcony outside and I got this view from above of the Sea Dragon, itself doing pretty good business.

Looking from the Sea Dragon over toward the Scrambler, built out over Lake Ideal (actually a river), as well as the boat ride that I think wasn't running. You can also see on the edge of the frame the Paratroopers ride that's also on the river.

Looking straight down gives a great Roller Coaster Tycoon-style view of the people enjoying the ride or waiting for the ride or just sitting.

And now I'll just get arty: view of the Sea Dragon reflected in the window of the balcony door. Inside are all sorts of entertaining horrors of Frankenstein's Castle and outside, a Viking head with eyes looking way off to either side.

One of my few pictures from the inside: Shake, Rattle, and Roll is a horror-monster animatronic band playing in a high-vaulted room that you see from two levels.

And finally we emerge and I notice the signs encouraging one to enter. Well, it's worth entering, at least once a season or so.

The last scene of the castle, and the one you see as you exit, a person having a bad day but not for very long at least.

Trivia: As collector of customs for the Port of New York, Chester Alan Arthur reportedly pocketed $56,120, more than the salary of the President of the United States at the time. Arthur would go on to become the 21st President of the United States. Source: Smuggler Nation: How Illicit Trade Made America, Peter Andreas. When President Hayes demanded Arthur's resignation (as well as those of other patronage appointments) he refused to give it.

Currently Reading: One Heartbeat Away: Presidential Disability and Succession, Birch Bayh.

So here's just the sort of thing we needed. After having got back to eating pellets reliably and with good appetite Athena went back off pellets today. She's still eating vegetables well, and hay well as far as we can determine. It's hard to be sure given how disorganized hay always is, at least not without doing an awful lot of cleaning first. But she's eating it. She's also chewing up cardboard like that was candy so ...

We are stumped and annoyed. Being off her food after a gastrointestinal episode makes sense, and even having a relapse sort of seems to make sense. But we've now had her examined a couple times and found she seems to be in fine health; the only physical thing that might have been wrong, her molars growing out, we've dealt with by having them ground down. It's like she just decides sometimes she's not going to eat pellets period.

This would be a mild annoyance except we're hoping to leave Athena with bunnyhugger's parents soon and they will not be happy with a rabbit who's not eating pellets. Or worse who's sometimes eating pellets and sometimes refusing them.

If I didn't know better I'd think she was being stubborn because I set up barricades that kept her out from underneath the sofa last night. But she couldn't be planning a revenge that complicated, right? ... Right?

Thursday we had to drive home. But, disappointed that we hadn't ridden Bat or Backlot Stunt Coaster, or Banshee but understanding it would probably still be closed for excellent reasons, and thinking we hadn't really got anything from the gift shop, we stopped in for what we swore would be just a few hours and, to our surprise, was. Pictures so you know it happened:

We got a good parking spot, fairly near the big sign! I don't know what the trouble somene was having that got the cops on them.

But you can see from where we were down to the Eiffel Tower and, to the left of it, Orion. Note you can see we're packed for home since my dirty laundry is in the trunk.

The stately Kings Island Theater, which we never did get around to seeing anything in. I like the 70s typeface (Friz Quadrata) used for the lettering on the building.

Sol Spin, seen here spinning. It's the same kind of ride Kennywood has, although with different colors.

Here's Banshee, still closed for the investigation and possibly cleanup of the death the night before.

Station and lift hill for Banshee. It has that nice trick of doing a loop around the lift hill.

Trivia: In 1661 England's King Charles II ordered Massachusetts to hang no more Quakers merely for their religious dissent. Source: Rhode Island: A History, William G McLoughlin. (Four had been hung since 1658, when the colony ordered the death penalty for Quakers who entered the colony a third time. More were given lesser punishments.)

Currently Reading: Seriously Curious: The Facts and Figures That Turn Our World Upside-Down, Editor Tom Standage.

PS: What's Going On In The Phantom (Sundays)? Who's writing The Phantom now? December 2024 - March 2025 is my comics recap for this week.

A couple years ago my parents gave bunnyhugger a Christmas present that both she and I could use: a jigsaw puzzle, but one of space exploration. This puzzle is a pretty good one-poster guide to the things that have taken people into space: all the booster rockets and planes, all the capsules (including the X-15, which got high enough to bring people into space, and is why the B-52 Stratofortress which launched the craft is included), all the space stations, and all the spacesuits worn both inside craft and for spacewalks/moonwalks. White Knight/SpaceShipOne also get an appearance.

After politely thanking my parents for this we then pretty much forgot about it because bunnyhugger is much more the jigsaw puzzle fan while I'm the one who has any chance of telling Salyut 7 apart from Almaz 3. But, with a bit of down-time between puzzles and noticing this puzzle was a mere 500 pieces --- she's more into your thousand-piece one --- she figured, why not give this a try?

This ended up being a collaborative effort. She found and placed in (almost all) the border pieces, and then, after some encouragement, I went and tackled what seemed like the hardest thing. This would be the many not-quite-repetitive pieces of the International Space Station and its solar panels. The scale they used made the pieces not quite align with the jigsaw cuts, so if you looked at them you could work out which piece went in which column of solar array, but bunnyhugger was not looking forward to that mass. Meanwhile, I kind of was.

Over the past week I had more time to work on it, as well as a couple of tedious work problems that made it nice to step over and do something simple, and with a clear direct reward: a tiny bit of Soyuz 7K-T came together! So that was fun. And the poster had a lot of shapes easily recognizable to me, so I kept putting pieces in. bunnyhugger felt bad she wasn't doing enough of the puzzle, as though recreation had minimums.

So yesterday it came to an end, with bunnyhugger dropping in the last two dozen pieces, saving for me the very final piece. In a day or two we'll probably break it up, and it's too soon to guess what the next puzzle will be. Or if bunnyhugger will invite me to drop in pieces if I'm going to take that much at a time.

Today in photos we leave the neighborhood of Dollywood; can you remember at all what came next? You might be surprised by the pictures of it ...

A couple more pictures from the sun room of the Super 8. Tis is looking straight out across the road. There was a helicopter tours attraction there that bunnyhugger didn't notice, and was glad, because the thought is terrifying and ridiculous.

Oh, and this was across the street and we never stopped giggling about the STUF. Anyway, our next thing ...

... was a stop at Buc-ees, actually, but I somehow didn't take pictures of that including of their beaver statue outside. But we drove up to C-town and made an evening visit to Kings Island. So, surprise! No pictures of the next thing we did, but we're right into the thing after.

It was a Tuesday evening but we got a pretty decent spot, not far from the front gate. So, with fresh sunscreen applied we were ready to see what it was like inside.

This is a boring picture, yes, but understand: we visited Kings Island just days before the merger between Cedar Fair and Six Flags that would create the new ... Six Flags Entertainment Company ... and I didn't know how fast they'd replace the company credit underneath the park name.

And here's the entrance, with Kings Island's reflecting pool and their Eiffel Tower somehow photographed so it looks like it's in the wrong proportions. I don't know how that happened.

Trivia: From the 1890s through 1920s modern-living advocates pushed for houses with more readily accessible nature, so that the weather could be appreciated: sleeping porches, sun parlors, large windows, courtyards, and stucco exteriors for American bungalows. Even the term ``bungalow'', taken from India, suggested tropical enjoyment rather than year-round uniform medians. Source: Cool Comfort: America's Romance with Air Conditioning, Marsha E Ackermann.

Currently Reading: Lost Popeye Zine, Volume 54: Napple or Yapple, Tom Sims, Bela Zaboly, Editor Stephanie Noelle. Sims and Zaboly overestimating how whimsical it is that the residents of Napple Island call apples 'Napples' while the residents of neighboring Yapple Island call them 'Yapples'. Also how good a story it is for Popeye's Mom to insist her Yapple Pies are better than Roughhouse's Napple Pies.

We set up the trophies, the plaque, the rule sheet, the page explaining how game selection works, and the scorecards on the only somewhat tolerably free table near the center of the tournament-play area. Also bunnyhugger's laptop, as that would do the real work of keeping the progress through the match straight.

Problems we didn't see at the start of the day, but that hit us: first, the table was nowhere near any of the available power supplies. Her laptop didn't start running short on power until pretty late in the tournament, but I did have to grab it and hustle off to a dark corner to one of the handful of available power plugs. For a short while I had the computer sitting on top of an unused pinball game, where people would have a chance of seeing me, but one of the arcade owners asked me to move it lest it scratch the glass. So I ended up setting it on a chair for the twenty minutes or whatever it needed to recharge enough to last through the end of the tournament. (Also we should have closed some power-consuming programs, which alone might have made the difference in lasting the whole tournament.)

Also an unforeseen problem: while we were 25 or 30 feet from the door, that isn't all that far when it's single-digit Fahrenheit temperatures out, and there's a straight line from the doors to our location. We kept getting blasts of arctic air through the day. At least moving deeper into the building resolved that problem.

One of the great little side things of the day was from KT, one of the Grand Rapids posse. She's a baker --- I think professionally, even --- and loves to bring stuff to these tournaments. She brought so much food that wasn't exactly nutritious but, hey, who's going to turn down vanilla cakes with white or chocolate frosting, or cinnamon rolls, or blondies? Between that, and some hummus and chips we'd brought for an easy lunch, and the hot pretzels at the snack bar we didn't go hungry, although we did stop at Taco Bell for a lot of sauce-covered beans after all this.

bunnyhugger, being on not-her-first-rodeo, prepared a sheet with notes about what to say to people as instructions. One of the important parts was a reassurance to people that even if they're knocked out first round, this doesn't mean they're bad players; it just means they lost a round this time. Good thing to keep in mind in any competition. But most of it was about things like how came selection works --- you have to pick one modern game, one vintage game, and one middle-era game each round, and your opponent also picks three --- that people immediately needed refreshers on when the first round started. (A note for next year: we need to print out more copies of both the game-selection instructions and the game list.) She also included the thing I thought worth saying, what to do in the unlikely event of getting an extra ball. Extra balls are supposed to be turned off, and it would seem impossible that if a game setting were overlooked and the extra balls left on for some game that they'd not have been caught the day before when open tournament put the games through extreme testing. But, just in case ... (the official rule is to play any extra balls you earn, if you should earn them. I believe then a person with the key, like bunnyhugger had, would turn off the extra balls for future rounds).

And yet for all that preparation we forgot one thing. That is that before the start of any game, both players are entitled to up to 30 seconds of practice time. (People often use this to test out skill shots, kickouts from anything that might hold a ball, and how generous the tilt is.) Just as people had dispersed to their games we had to call them back to explain that they didn't have to just walk up to and start playing a game. Another thing to remember for next time.

With that, good luck everyone, and on to the match.

But first, photographs. What followed visiting Camden Park? Nearly a full day of driving. But at the end of that day of driving was another --- the second --- of our aspirational parks, places we wanted so much to visit.

And here we are, having found the Walkway to Dollywood! ... which we would not actually take because we decided we could probably get a closer parking space since it looked like people were clearing out; there were only four or five hours left in the day when we arrived.

Plus, you know, Dollywood is somewhere way down at the far end of that. It's all downhill but why walk even that much farther than you actually need?

This is better. We got a parking spot at the nearest part of, I want to say, C, and had a tolerably short walk down past this nice little creek and bunches of ducks.

The butterfly is pretty much the icon of Dollywood besides Dolly Parton.

And here we are! At least, we're at the security screener. Remember this spot, we'll come back to it.

And here's the entrance, tickets (which we'd already bought online) and turnstiles to get in. Note that the park still has real maps and programs and stuff like that.

Trivia: In late April 1945 Heinrich Himmler, thinking he might somehow present himself as a person to make a separate peace with the western Allies and to have humans to use as bargaining chips, ordered the concentration camps shut and the survivors evacuated. Source: The Last Million: Europe's Displaced Persons From World War to Cold War, David Nasaw. Weirdly, the Nazi plan was totally unhinged and unrelated to reality and so far as it accomplished anything it was to get a bunch of people killed for no good reason.

Currently Reading: Lost Popeye Zine, Volume 14: 1952, Tom Sims, Bela Zaboly. Editor Stephanie Noelle.

Happy new year, dear bunnyhugger. Thank you for seeing the old one out with me.

Christmas Day started, as traditional, later than we meant. Also pushed a little later by miscommunications amongst us kids about who was showering and when. I ended up feeling surprisingly good about my sleep, which had been in a sleeping bag on the (padded) floor rather than on the air mattress in the second guest room. That was because bunnyhugger's had some trouble getting and staying asleep lately, and my extremely active sleep habits will catapult her off the bed and into the wall. So I volunteered to use the sleeping bag, for my first sleeping-bag experience in decades. I wasn't sure I remembered how to get into and out of one but did manage without losing much dignity. Also without doing my back any harm, to my surprise.

bunnyhugger's father made waffles for breakfast, something he was eager to do, though not so eager as to bring the waffle iron down from the second guest room before the night before, for some reason. This turned out well, though he refused to believe bunnyhugger's claim she likes pancakes better. You know how he is. He also disbelieves bunnyhugger's claim that she never sleeps well on the air mattress, because it's supposedly the highest-qualify air mattress on the market. She still has to refill it before every use.

bunnyhugger's father held off on his promise to start a fire until after the gift exchange. And the gift exchange was, once again, and against our protests, a very us-directed thing. It's very easy to find gifts to give bunnyhugger and especially to me (just buy me any book with a title like [NOUN]: The [CATEGORY] That Changed the World) and bunnyhugger is pretty good at putting out a wish list. Also, her family is altogether too generous. I tend to get two, maybe three things for everyone and bunnyhugger's brother alone will always say there's three more things coming but late. (They also tend to buy at the last minute, meaning, for example, that they were able to give bunnyhugger the new vinyl release of Jethro Tull's Christmas album, which only was released the week before Christmas.)

bunnyhugger's brother had an excellent idea to simplify Christmas this year and make more time: instead of baking something from scratch he'd spruce up a couple of store-bought lasagna pans. He did make some side dishes --- baked potatoes, green bean casserole --- but nothing that should have left us without time to interact and yet, somehow, we didn't have anywhere near the time we figured we might. While the fire finally roared in the fireplace, we ate to the point we were all asking: if we keep on eating, are we going to have room for pie? Or ice cream? (We kept time and volume for pie, but ice cream would not be eaten this day.)

We also lost our chance to watch any DVDs --- not Scrooge (the 1951 Christmas Carol), not the Muppet Christmas Carol (a gift from me to bunnyhugger), not A Charlie Brown Christmas or anything else. Instead, and facing the planed ``head home at 11:00'' we started a game of Parks, playing with bunnyhugger's mother, brother, and his partner so for the first time ever we could use the five-person rule set. (It's not very different from the two- and three-person rule set we normally use.) This despite bunnyhugger's repeated worry about how late I would have to stay up to finish the game, working as I did (from home) Thursday morning. We failed to finish by 11:00, or even near 11:00 --- it was more like 12:30 before we were done --- but at least everyone who insisted that I was running away with the game was proved wrong, when I came in second to bunnhy_hugger. I did a better job collecting visits to parks, the main goal of the game, but she made up points in the side quests of taking photos and her personal objective, so all my engine-building might, and all the times I snagged a piece of gear she was figuring on, went for nothing. The game is really fun with five people, by the way; the big crowded trail makes everything more strategic and also meant I could take the time to figure out my move while other people were going, rather than do my overly-clever-thinking while people were waiting for me specifically.

So it was that altogether too near 1 am we were finally packed up and ready to leave and hugging everyone and regretting that we didn't have more time for, you know, everything. Next year I've got to take Boxing Day off too.

New year, new park! We're on the second of our amusement parks from this summer's tour, in the very western edge of West Virginia, and a location you might know from its representation in the Fallout line of games.

bunnyhugger getting everything organized to go into the park. Huh, wonder what that sheet of paper she's got in her right hand is about.

Camden Park's welcome sign, a great neon-y thing that unfortunately we weren't there late enough to see lit up, if it still lights. The clown is an actively used icon for the park, and the sign is available in replicas and as magnets and T-shirt designs and such.

bunnyhugger getting a snap of the sign from the other side, the side we actually approached the park from.

And here's the unassuming entry gate to the park. I trust that the park was a free-admission park until pretty late in its existence and the conversion to the pay-one-price model meant stuff like the entrance was made out of whatever space they had that wasn't awful for it.

Which is why rather than a grand midway you enter the park to facilities buildings on the left. It turns into a food stand, though.

And here's a park map, one that we'd discover is a little out of date. It still shows a RoundUp ride, for example, that's been replaced by a small roller coaster not working when we were there.

Trivia: One of the Sanskrit words for 'Sunday' was 'Rivivara', and did honor the Sun. Source: Mapping Time: The Calendar and its History, EG Richards.

Currently Reading: American Scientist, November - December 2004, Editor Fenella Saunders.

PS: What's Going On In The Phantom (Sundays)? Why is the Phantom in the 16th Century? October - December 2024 as we look to 1591 for a story of a story.

Let me see if I can say anything about Halloweekends.

So, Thursday. The park only opened at 5 pm or so, and only select rides would be open. The opening day of a Halloweekends weekend is like that, and it's usually good riding for what is open. But counterbalancing this: it was a beautiful, warm day, the kind of warm, sunny day that feels great for early-to-mid September. Six weeks late. It's fine to have the occasional stretch of unseasonably pleasant weather, but we haven't had any seasonal weather yet.

This has been great for the amusement parks; Cedar Point has been packed every weekend as you might expect. It also implied that it might be packed this weekend, as coming the closest to Halloween while the weather was still great. And yeah, the park was fairly busy right when things started up. (Well, when they opened for the general public. We got in at early admission, a Platinum Pass perk, and were able to get three rides in on Wild Mouse. Two of them were on the cheese-themed car which, this day, was not more spinny than the mouse-themed cars.) Aided by many roller coasters being down, either for the day (like Corkscrew and Gemini, as scheduled, but they are ones that reliably entertain a lot of people) or for the weekend (Iron Dragon was undergoing maintenance, though that likely would have been closed anyway), or were Top Thrill 2.

So that didn't start out well. But we made the best of it, getting the daily exercise walk in, and getting to whatever huge restaurant they built to take the place of the Antique Cars ride near the Town Hall Museum. Turns out that while the place gets lines out the door and down to Town Hall, it serves people pretty quick --- there's a straightforward menu and they can just send people right on through --- and there is also the vegetarian option of getting three sides instead of an entree and a side. Also they have some good potato and brussels sprouts stuff that's better food than you expect at an amusement park. Good chance we'll go back to that in future visits, if we aren't intimidated by the lines.

We also used the chance to take farewell photographs of Snake River Falls, the Shoot-the-Chutes ride that Cedar Point put in and that never really got popular, even on the hot days. It was already closed for good --- the last ride was around Labor Day weekend and was apparently a bit of a scrum as there was some reward promised to the last riders and this lead to queuing incidents --- and we don't know that it'll be removed next year, but why would they close it if they didn't have plans for the space it takes up? So we got pictures of that and of other areas we thought likely to be renovated out of existence.

After all this farewell-tourism and eating and exercise and all, though, and the arrival of sunset? The park did clear out (or the population drained into the haunted houses/walkthroughs that we don't visit) and suddenly the riding became great. We endured something like a half-hour wait for Raptor, a ride which never has a wait, but after that it was five- and ten-minute waits for most everything. By the end of the night, we estimated, we'd ridden the majority of the park's roller coasters, as well as two of the carousels (we missed the Kiddy Kingdom Carousel), the Cadillac Cars, and some other flat rides. I believe that's the night we closed out on Steel Vengeance, taking advantage of a fifteen-minute wait for a ride that still gets three-hour queues, and if we had gone in a little bit sooner we might have been able to snag a second ride. No matter; it was well after midnight before we got off the ride and we were exhausted, after the drive and seven hours of park-visiting. We'd had a really good day at the park.

The next thing on my photo roll: Pinball At The Zoo. I spent a couple hours there Friday night and all of Saturday, not getting anywhere near competitive range. But other people? ... Read on.

Saturday morning. bunnyhugger enters, to shore up her standing in the women's tournament and maybe, what the heck, take a shot at main.

The main floor, outside the tournament, is about people showing off (and buying/selling/outfitting) their tables. I got fascinated with this mid-60s Williams Eager Beaver, for the outsider-furry art and the shout-out to the University of Wisconsin For Some Reason. Note the squirrel sign-painter at the bottom of the glass there.

Playfield art. At least two squirrels are aware of what the beavers working on the tree means for home.

Lower playfield of Eager Beaver, with a couple ... uh ... I guess they're beavers, to either side of the flipper? Or maybe on the left is that bear who seemed to be the timekeeper in the backglass art?

Upper playfield, with more beavers and a chipmunk and rabbit watching the action.

Someone had the Weird Al's pinball machine, an oddity from a boutique manufacturer that has all sorts of dubiously wise design choices to it. You'll see.

Trivia: German General Hans Krebs, sent the early hours of the 1st of May, 1945, to seek a truce with Soviet negotiators, told Colonel Vasili Ivanovich Chuikov ``I want you to know that you are the first foreigner to learn that on 30 April Hitler committed suicide.'' Chuikov answered, ``We know that.'' Krebs was dumbfounded. Chuikov was bluffing. Source: 1945: The War That Never Ended, Gregor Dallas.

Last weekend would have been an outstanding time to visit Cedar Point, as the ``bonus weekend'' between the Labor Day end-of-daily-park-operations and the start of Halloweekends usually sees a crowd measured in the dozens. So it was a week ago, we're told, but work deadlines wouldn't let bunnyhugger take the time for it and I wouldn't go by myself like that. This past weekend would be second-best, and we took the chance on Sunday to go and see how lucky we could get.

A stroke of bad luck going into things: we would have to leave early, before the park's close at 8 pm. This because not just I had to get up for work, but bunnyhugger had to get up an hour earlier than usual. She had jury duty, and had to report at 8 am downtown, and while I can get under six hours' sleep and be functional, she can't. It turns out we drove out of the park at 7:50 pm, which is still early for us especially since that counts the time taken to walk out of the park and go to the bathroom and get in the car and take out contact lenses and all. And we made great time getting home, getting in the door by about 11:30.

The weather was great, clear cloudless skies and mid-to-upper 80s. The crowd size was around normal, based on where we parked, but the crowd just ... wasn't in line for stuff, at least not the stuff we were interested in. We were able to ride Millennium Force, one of the marquee roller coasters, with a maybe 20 minute wait, not much more than the 15 minutes promised for line-cutting Fast Lane riders. Steel Vengeance, the always-in-heavy-demand ride, claimed a wait of fifteen minutes and it was not even that long. That was the most incredible thing of the day; there's always a huge line and this ... this was Mean Streak-type waits, just nothing. We did not ride Maverick, which had a sign promising a 50-minute wait --- five minutes for Fast Lane --- but now I wonder if we should have looked at the actual physical line instead of the (electronic) queue estimate.

At the trading-pins stand, where we've only ever bought pins, I got a couple that I liked, from the 'Escaped Mouse' series. These have a couple of the mouse mascots of the Wild Mouse coaster seen in front of other rides from the area. Simple but they have good poses. I also picked up the pin that claims 'I Rode Top Thrill 2', the rebuilt Top Thrill Dragster that ran for about three weeks this season before being closed and, surely, sued about. I claimed this as an ultra-rare pin. (It's not; it's one of the common pins, but actual Top Thrill 2 riders are rare.)

Though the Halloweekends things were all in place and even some of the haunted houses opened we weren't looking for them particularly. We were looking for good spots to look at Snake River Falls, the Shoot-the-Chutes ride that closed for good on Labor Day. Nobody knows what the park is planning to put in its place, although apparently the park's teasing something to do with sirens. As in the lure-men-to-their-doom kind, not the warning that there's a tornado kind. We got our photographs at least, as well as pictures of the Town Hall Museum and its attached buildings. If they're renovating Snake River Falls there's an excellent chance that those are going to be demolished or renovated to make room.

I suggested, on our way out, stopping in one of the gift shops up front and see if there were, as bunnyhugger hoped, any good new Iron Dragon merchandise. Way back at the start of the season she had been talking with a manager-y type of a gift shop and got the tease that there might be something good coming but not until later in the season. She found it in the gift shop underneath the sky chair ride: an Iron Dragon travel mug. Steel interior, and with an actual artistically designed pattern outside, not just the ride logo slapped on a black background. Its only real drawback was being hand-wash.

Also --- on the shelves of Squishmallow plush she had already looked at and disregarded as having nothing new --- I noticed the grey body of Aaron D Ragon. Yes, they'd created an Iron Dragon-based Squishmallow plush after all, with a goofy but fun name and also a biography on his nametag that recommends people go to the Dragon's Inn and try the chicken tenders. Cedar Point replaced the Dragon's Inn this year, turning it into a cocktail bar, one of suspiciously many. You can still get chicken tenders anywhere in the park, though, including ice cream stands, the Tilt-a-Whirl people don't realize is there, and the parking brake on the GateKeeper roller coaster.

Now, the high point of the day would be our stopping in the 'historic' farm/petting-zoo on the Frontier Trail. The animals were out and active and engaged enough and, particularly, there were two chickens outside the fenced-off areas just strolling around. And then, from behind the barn that serves as night quarters, came two turkeys strolling in, to the theme from West Side Story, as bunnyhugger was whistling. Though the approach looked like there would be a rumble the birds did not actually fight, both parties being lucky that their chick was here.

And then as we were walking out and past one of the just-opened haunted houses she cried out ``Bunny!'' I couldn't see anything. I was a little too tall for this. There's a part of the petting zoo that's itself inside another fenced area, and in that was a square pen with a couple rabbits inside. One had settled into a form in the dead center of the pen, where it couldn't be touched until someone picked up their kid and held them out past the fence. Another was sitting under a shelf in the corner of the pen, and put up with several rounds of being petted before going off to join the other rabbit, where they asked for grooming from the always-centered rabbit and got some attention. All very adorable and it only hurt a little that the center rabbit, a white bunny, reminded us of Roger. (This one wasn't albino, though; they had tan spots.) And the corner rabbit had a color and build much like Sunshine's, but a touch smaller.

Still. This was a really good day at the park and when we mentioned how we could go next week, it didn't feel absurd. Probably that'll be busier; Halloween season is when amusement parks make their money for the year. But, you never know, do you?

There were a couple people at the park in costume, mostly kids, but a few teenagers or older people. I saw someone wearing what was either a dog or a bear costume walking ahead of us as we entered the Frontier Trail, but never saw him again. That's such a distinctive outfit to not see again that I wonder if he wasn't on his way to be part of a haunted house's attraction, possible as a The Shining reference. No knowing. I guess if we go back and see him again, we'll know.

The Midway Carousel was back to playing Halloween and spooky-themed music on its band organ. Pieces we heard included Johann Strauss's ``The Blue Danube'' for some reason, ``Spooky, Scary Skeletons'', and the theme to Scooby-Doo, Where Are You, a show that famously had zero ghosts, witches, spirits, or supernatural forces at work. We didn't stick around long enough to hear their version of The Exorcist theme yet.

bunnyhugger was selected for a jury, for a case they expect to need just a day to present.

Back to photographs now, and to Crossroads Village, last seen hanging around the antique carousel. And what follows being around an antique carousel?

bunnyhugger getting on a horse for a ride at six rotations per minute on the C W Parker carousel.

Here's the ride ready to start. You can see the band organ on the right.

And looking back outside again. Here's the wooden sidewalk, glistening from past rain, looking out to the main body of the village.

bunnyhugger gets a picture of the decorative arch and, in the distance, that big white ornament light fixture, which you'll be seeing soon enough, don't worry.

Road leading north from the rides section of the village.

The roads have names, although only some of them have street signs. I liked this arrangement. Feels very album cover to me.

Trivia: After his election to the United States Senate in 1930 Louisiana Governor Huey P Long's lieutenant governor, Paul Narcise Cyr --- an enemy --- took the governor's oath before a notary public, on the theory that Long's election to the Senate vacated the governor's office. Long, holding on to the governor's office and not leaving the state, maintained that since Cyr had taken the governor's oath he had vacated the office of lieutenant governor, and therefore State Senate President pro tem A O King, member of Long's organization, had automatically become lieutenant governor. Source: The Year We Had No President, Richard Hansen. The Louisiana Supreme Court ruled in favor of King, on the grounds that Huey Long, you know?

Currently Reading: Nose Dive: A Field Guide to the World's Smells, Harold McGee. bunnyhugger asked if I got this book because of the coati thing and no, that's just coincidence, I happened across it in the bookstore and read a couple pages and they were interesting and it was on the discount shelves so that's why I have it. But yeah, it would happen like that, right?