austin_dern

bunnyhugger pointed out I overlooked a leg of our travels and a pretty big one. We did not go from Rennes to Paris to a commuter line to the Belgian coast. We went tp Paris, yes, and from there caught the Eurostar to Brussels. Here's why that's worth some mention.

When ten years ago we went to Rennes, and Paris, we followed this by taking the Eurostar through the Chunnel to London. The noteworthy thing there is getting from the Metro to the Eurostar was a literal nightmare, following a string of signs that all ended at blocked gates, and an elevator that promised to bring us closer to the Eurostar terminal but actually lead to a small patio with nothing passenger-accessible, and we only got through this problem --- somehow --- thanks to the lucky assistance of a Canadian who somehow knew something but she wasn't sure what. And now we needed to do that again. We would have something like an hour to make the transition if that were possible at all.

And this time it was absolutely no trouble whatsoever. We knew what platform we were supposed to go to, and saw signs for various platform numbers and followed those. We never passed any gates of any kind, never got to places where signs pointed us to blank walls, and if we saw Canadians we didn't recognize them as such. Either they completely reconfigured the metro station and the railroad station in the last decade or somehow we had gotten lost last time and ended up in a nightmare for no good reason. There were places we felt signs could have been improved along our journey, especially that nightmare with the storage locker, but this was exactly the easy connection we hoped. (This is also where we were approached by that guy hoping to find out where to get his platform information).

It was at the Brussels train station that we caught the commuter train. The Paris train stations we were at were all very light, spacious things, evocative of ... I guess by original intention the Crystal Palace of the Great Exhibition of 1851, although it's become more of a shopping mall vibe. Brussels, though, that feels like a New York City train station. More like Penn Station than Grand Central. Very busy, relatively cramped, and at least where we were not a whole lot of sunlight filtering in. Not that there wasn't, just, compared to the Paris stations we felt more underground.

We were thirsty, mostly, by this point and ended up buying a couple Coke Zeroes from a vending machine in a process that seemed more complicated and ambiguous than really seems like should have been for a vending machine. But we had the soda at least, so, I guess that's all okay. And we got where we wanted just fine, as you learned the other day. Just filling in a mistake I'd made here. Now over to pictures from some confusingly other event!

So you naturally wonder what the next thing on my photo reel is: county fair? Pinball tournament? Amusement park trip? Nope, it's the Fairy Ball that we went to with FAE, friend from pinball. It was an afternoon-to-evening event in a great and interesting setting.

The dance stage, part of the Moon Grove, at the western end of the Fairy Ball setting; the wedding reception would end up focusing here and it would be a performance area the whole night.

Here's the registration line, going back into the woods trail.

There were many people in costume; here bunnyhugger takes I believe a film photograph of one.

And another picture early on in the brightest light we'd enjoy.

Here's the jackalope outfit that bunnyhugger put together.

We, being signed in, went on to explore the grounds while check-in continued.

Trivia: One of the Sanskrit words for 'Saturday' was 'Sanivara', honoring Saturn and meaning 'slow moving'. Source: Mapping Time: The Calendar and its History, EG Richards.

Currently Reading: Lost Popeye Zine, Sundays Supplement Volume 16: 1954, Tom Sims, Bela Zaboly. Editor Stephanie Noelle.

Our hotel was in Rennes, basically, northwestern France. Our next spot was De Panne, a Belgian shore town, not quite due north of it. As you might imagine, the best way for us to get from Rennes to De Panne was going through Paris. The trains run that way, or at least the trains run more frequently that way. So this was another travel day but, we had reason to hope, our last travel day until the flight home Monday.

The train to Paris was fast and routine as we were accustomed to, even despite the incident going out to Rennes the other day. And then it was yet another trip on the Metro to get from Gare du Nord to Gare de ... I forget which. Not l'Est this time. But we also had to get more money put on our Metro cards because we had thought to get only single trips the last time around. Anyway, a lot of going up and down stairs and walking along long hallways, some of them starting to get nice and familiar.

The trick with the train to Belgium is that it's more a commuter line than a passenger rail like we'd been taking to this point. As in, you buy a ticket, but it's just for any train that day and you aren't guaranteed a seat or anything. Just, good luck. Turns out we had perfectly fine luck, getting on the train without issue and finding a seat with enough free space even for my new suitcase.

When we got to De Panne --- the end of the line, so it was easy not to miss --- bunnyhugger knew our hotel was just off the train line. We just had to start walking on this particular numbered street and eventually make a right turn. And from the train station we could see Plopsaland De Panne, what would turn out to be the only amusement park we'd get to visit this trip. The place where, had things gone right with Nigloland, would have seen my 300th roller coaster.

So, the hotel. It turned out not to be just next to the train station. It was, however, just a block or two off the tram station, the tram in this case being a 130-year-old interurban that we'd had vague plans of riding the whole length of Sunday, after we'd been to the park. The bright side is that walking rather than taking the tram let us get a feel for De Panne, and also for bunnyhugger to take her daily walk without particular fuss.

The hotel was a lovely one, with a nice modern style, by which I mean we couldn't figure how to get the elevator to work. There was just a flat metal panel with a 0 on it and we knew the lobby floor in hotels were storey 0. Turns out we needed to not touch the center of the 0 --- our best guess --- but rather touch the 0 ring, like, going across the whole loop. So we guessed, at least, after seeing the desk clerk have no trouble, and learning that every floor had a flat metal plate with a '0' on it for summoning the elevator.

Our last question for the day was where to get dinner. bunnyhugger found on google maps an Automat and absolutely, yes, we wanted that. We'd loved the handful of experiences with Automat-style food service when we were in the Netherlands in 2012. And it was only a couple blocks away, and on the shore, so everything we could hope for. Except that, first, we had a terrible time finding the place. And then when we did find it we found that Automat didn't just mean 'wall of coin-operated doors with ready-to-eat foot items inside'. It also meant 'vending machines'. And in this case, nothing with, like, a sandwich or other full meal inside, although we could get some cold cuts? I guess that'd be something. At least one of the vending machines was out of order; possibly that would have had viable meals.

So we needed some secondary plan, and we found that by walking around until we found a kebab place open. We ordered some falafel meals --- me, a pita, bunnyhugger a box --- and waited what felt like forever to get served. (Also they were cash only, so took us down to almost no folding European money through this.) I think a combination of a bunch of people going to the place that was open with one of the workers being on break caused the slowdown; when other guy got back into action everyone got served fast enough.

We took it all back to our hotel room, the largest we'd had yet and in many ways (having a mini-fridge, for instance) the nicest yet. Saturday was looking to be a great day.

What's not a roundabout way to get somewhere? ... Uh. Wait, this is a bunch of pictures of Calhoun County Fair carnival rides, most of which are about going in a circle. Sorry. Enjoy.

The carnival doesn't have a Scrambler they bring, but they do have a very similar ride and that's on display here in motion, catching the LED flickers so make the movement look more complicated.

That's what it looks like from the ground; it's almost supernatural in its shape.

And another picture with the shutter held open a little longer. I'm amazed you can make out one of the cars this clearly.

Here's a shot of the merry-go-round in action, only looking like it's going 300 rpm.

And the drop tower, looking like it's driven the passengers twenty feet under ground.

From this perspective the swings and the Ferris wheel look like they're going quite speedily.

Trivia: The Greenwich Observatory's chronometer was in 1850 observed to have a daily gain or loss of 0.149 seconds, based on the average gain or loss per month. Source: A History of Mechanical Invention, Abbott Payson Usher.

Currently Reading: Lost Popeye Zine, Sundays Supplement Volume 16: 1954, Tom Sims, Bela Zaboly. Editor Stephanie Noelle.

My friend with the search for Parisian pinball arcades did get me to look at Pinball Map, just in case there were any in Rennes. It turned out there was a venue, Le Grand Huit, with a half-dozen pinball games and just on the other side of the train station from us! And in what they listed as a barcade. As far as I could tell from the web site it was a bunch of converted warehouses or something with a variety of amusement and arcade attractions put around. They even had a couple vintage fairground rides, although the hours when they were operating were vague. Pinball map suggested the pinballs here were new, or at least were first noticed just a couple weeks before we were in town. This would be a great place to spend the long evening after the conference ended Thursday! Except that the venue was closed for a special event Thursday. We had to go Wednesday evening, when we'd only have a couple hours, or else not go at all.

So and with rather too few coins in our pocket we set out and I led us confidently through roads that seemed a lot closer together in online maps. I was just getting worried we'd gotten lost, thanks to some construction on the south side of the Gare, when we reached a new corner and saw the big sign pointing to the new entrance! Perfect!

The collection of stuff at Le Grand Huit feels a little like What If Marvin's Marvelous Mechanical Museum ran a barcade? It's not so crowded as a Marvin's thing would be, but it's also got more space than Marvin's old holdout-of-the-mall-food-court space would have allowed. They had some stuff that it sure looked, in the photographs, that adults might get to ride, including a swings and maybe a carousel that looks like a solid mutt of different mounts put together, but we were there by like 9 pm and they had long since stopped running rides for the day. The place has a couple salon carousel gondolas as dining booths, and has one carousel elevated, rotating eternally, passenger-less, fifteen feet above the dining floor. It's a pity to have a carousel be unusable for riding but it is also a heck of a thing to see it from that angle, without the platform always underneath. They also have a robot bartender, a coin-operated mechanical arm that the web site claims once did industrial manufacture stuff and that now will make a drink for you, but only on the weekends, which we were as far away from as it was possible to get.

And then, yes, pinball, two tables put next to each other beside the robot bartender, almost a normal arrangement, and four tables put way off (but near the actual bartender), radial spokes around a center pole beneath a canopy. It's an unusual but attractive arrangement. And the choice of games was ... wow. Weird. They were all old games, and not as some venues might have representing pinball's diversity of eras (electromechanical, early solid state, late solid state, dot matrix, LCD screens). No, they were all games from about 1989 to 1992, a range so tiny it seems like it must have been an aesthetic choice, but what was the aesthetic? It kind of smells of ``someone was given €15,000 and told to make it weird''.

The most normal games they had were Lethal Weapon 3 --- a slightly annoying game but one you can still find in tournaments --- and The Party Zone --- I've never seen this in tournament play, but it's a fun one. Also Riverboat Gambler, which you never see places. Gilligan's Island, which has some of the best integration of the theme into a game ever but that doesn't have much depth of gameplay, and has a little pranking move where you can give all your opponents points that makes it a courageous choice for tournament play. Surf N Safari, a water-park-themed 90s Gottlieb game so it's kind of fun but also not well-balanced a table. And ... Class of 1812.

Class of 1812 is another early-90s Gottlieb game so it's a little ramshackle in its design and rules. Its theme is that you're at the graveyard, digging up a comical-horror family, each of the major areas corresponding to one of the family you're recovering. Yes, there is a rapping granny. The most delightful piece, though, is that when you start multiball, which the game gives you eight billion chances to do, it starts playing The 1812 Overture. And after one round of the famous theme it goes back and starts over, only this time with chickens clucking the tune out. This is why people love the game, even though like nobody has it (The Pinball Arcade has it in simulation, though, and it's worth it). We had to play that.

So we did. I had an okay game; bunnyhugger nearly broke ten million, a great score. We played again and while I did better, she did better yet. She got a replay score at least once; I got a match, and we got to play another round. For only about three games each we were doing very well. For a time on our last game I started thinking one of us might reach the high score table but it turns out it started somewhere north of 35 million points, well beyond us. But for only a handful of games in a completely new venue? We had little to complain about.

But we had less change, our euros now exhausted. We thought a bit about getting a drink from the bar, and more change, and playing on ... but ... it was also getting closer to a time when we should be responsible and get to bed. So, regretting that the venue was closed for a private event Thursday when that would have been perfect for our needs, we made the sad way back to our cozy hotel.

Had enough rabbits yet? Of course not, but we will run out of Calhoun County Fair rabbits soon. In fact ...

Another Californian loaf looking suspiciously at me.

Rabbit conference threatening to get out of hand when one rabbit has the insight: you can just step on the others!

Rabbit wondering if anyone else knows about this ``just step on them'' move because it will change everything!

Here's a chicken stunned by the stepping-on action.

This kid was proud of his chicken and wanted us to take pictures of him with them and did not care that neither of us knew the other and we'd never get pictures to him. So, here, in case you have a google face alert going. I think it's a pretty good picture at that.

Here's one of those rare chickens that can lay an egg through their own bars, which is what gets you best-of-class.

Trivia: New York City radio station WEAF (later WNBC, now WFAN) aired its first paid advertisement in August 1922; by late 1923, the National Carbon Company sponsored the Eveready Hour, promoting its batteries. Source: Wih Amusement For All: A History of American Popular Culture since 1830, LeRoy Ashby.

Currently Reading: Lost Popeye Zine, Volume 64: Olive Oyl's Dilemma!!, Ralph Stein, Bela Zaboly. Editor Stephanie Noelle.

Now to Wednesday of our trip, the midpoint, and the start of the conference. We needed a moment to re-acquire our bearings, but it's pretty easy to get from our hotel to the University of Rennes 2 campus --- it's right on one of the metro lines --- and from there, while I set off in a wrong direction, bunny_hugger figured out where to go, and we acquired a companion who was also going to the same conference, which was in the same building it'd been in a decade ago.

I meanwhile had to buy my admission since I'd failed to do that ahead of time, and they would only take cash, so I'd had my first experience with European ATMs for the trip getting some folding money. This meant I went to the conference without a badge like everyone else had, and I held on to my receipt just in case I was challenged, which I never was. And bunny_hugger didn't even get to keep her badge, which ordinarily becomes one of those conference souvenirs, just like a furry con would do but with even worse art. In this case, no art at all. Nor any hint of academic affiliation, which on the one hand goes to the ideal of all being equal citizens of the Republic of Letters, but on the other hand means you might miss that, say, this person you're talking to is that person, the one with the paper you keep assigning your students.

Peter Singer, of course, gave the keynote address, and he took the historical approach of how the idea of animal rights moved from a fussy thing that Margaret Dumont-esque dowagers fretting over other people's dogs to a thing where everyone agrees we should have chickens that at some point in their lives get to see the sun, though not necessarily to live more than six weeks. So, you know, some cheerful news, some depressing.

Then it was on to the sessions, with two or three tracks most of the time, with each session room giving all their talks either in French or in English. bunny_hugger had the good fortune to be the first speaker in the first session in the first room listed on the schedule, although that does not mean Peter Singer stopped in to review her work.

Her presentation really engaged people, though; she got a healthy number of questions and all from people who were excited to learn about something they'd never considered before. She's the person to describe it in summary, but here's my attempt, and understand that she's got your obvious objection addressed, or will by publication time. It grows out of the question of what, specifically, does someone lose by dying? Yeah, ha-ha, the answer is ``days of life'', but, what is the point of those days of life? If it's just getting up to eat, poop, and sleep again, what's having more of that doing for you? (Not talking here about days of rest; talking here about an unending series of days just like that.)

In the 1920s by Moritz Schlick proposed that the purpose of life was play, by which he means things you do to accomplish them, rather than to carry on existing another day. This covers a wide range of things, including work you enjoy doing even if it supports your eating habit. But at heart, like, why read a book? Because you enjoy reading a book. Why join a softball league? Because you enjoy softball. Why run on a wheel? Because it's fun to run on a wheel.

And here's the insight. Animals play. More, we've been discovering, all kinds of animals play, not just the classically smart ones like apes and crows and dolphins. Bees play, something bunny_hugger had found in the scientific literature and that really fired imaginations. And so, if play gives human life meaning, what does play give animal lives?

The other paper in that session had the charming title ``What Would Miffy Do?'', Miffy here being that cute bunny from Dutch picture books that gets confused for a Hello Kitty character. This was about the challenge of how to justify making decisions on behalf of animals who, after all, can't express their preferences, even if they could understand decisions being made about them. We have models for that which work, more or less, for humans lacking full capacity for judgement. So extending that to animals seems like a reasonable stretch.

Back now to the Calhoun County Fair, which we visited on the last day of that fair.

Yes, these aren't just bales of hay, they're bales of hay so good as to get extra-special complicated ribbons and in one case a plaque. I'm glad I don't have to judge what makes a best-of-show-worthy sheaf of alfalfa.

Which is not to say that I'd have any idea how to judge the prizes for, like, ``old hardware store calendar''. Note the old Polaroid in the middle that apparently didn't get anything.

And here's some arts, including the raccoon watercolor that gets a first place.

Now on to the rabbits! Here's one of the many Californians that look rather like Penelope.

And here a nice old white rabbit invites us into their schemes.

The guinea pigs, meanwhile, don't see why they should have been brought in on any of this.

Trivia: In a meeting on the 4th of March, 1953, about plans to overthrow the government of Iran, US President Dwight Eisenhower wondered why it was impossible ``to get some of the people in these downtrodden countries to like us instead of hating us''. Secretary of State John Foster Dulles conceded that Iranian Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh was no communist, but, ``if he were to be assassinated or removed from power, a politcal vacuum might occur in Iran and the communists might easily take over'', with dire consequences for world oil production and the world's strategic balance. Source: Overthrow: America's Century of Regime Change from Hawai'i to Iraq, Stephen Kinzer. Raising the question: has anyone ever tried going back in time to divert the Dulles boys to, like, painting landscapes or something instead of screwing up the world completely? Maybe let's give that a try one we get the Hitler thing resolved?

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

When I finally roused myself enough to get up, on the day that should have been our Nigloland visit, it was already like 6 pm. bunnyhugger was getting consoling texts from the friends she'd dared tell. (We wouldn't tell our parents until we got back home.) About all there would be left to do is take a walk --- bunnyhugger was not going to abandon her daily task even for this --- and find dinner. For the walk we wondered if we were allowed into the Parc du Chateau, past the gate behind the hotel. I said I'd seen people going in earlier in the day and as I watched again some more folks went in, so we would follow.

This let us have some time exploring the grounds of the hotel which, as mentioned, used to be a working windmill, on a small river. There were a couple buildings that looked like they were probably once the mill owner's home and maybe a guest house. There was also a fence blocking off fields and other houses, we assume from land being sold to other owners. But the parc itself was this pleasant garden, a chance for us to walk around in mostly shaded paths on a none-too-hot evening, looking at the water and this little boat dock(?) underneath a shelter so you went into a tunnel to get down to the water surface, like some fantasy novel. Also a couple large decorative pools with the water turned off, unfortunately, as they looked great. Some statues, classical stuff like cherubs and Venus and the like. We also could see people dining outside, overlooking the water wheel (fixed in place, as far as we could tell) and the river (changing).

For dinner we had two choices, hunger or the hotel. There wasn't even a convenience store in town. So I put on one of the shirts I wear to work, and figured to wear to the conference, while bunnyhugger put on the blazer she figured to present in and got extremely nervous about dropping food on herself. It turns out the restaurant, though offering two- and three-course meals that looked like what you expect from a fancy French restaurant was much more generally chill than that. We saw people there in if not jeans and a t-shirt and least not much more dressed than that. (Those were outliers, though, and most people were at least dressed up a little bit.) We didn't need to worry, possibly because anyone in town who didn't want to drive to eat out was coming here.

The one serious drawback to the meal was it wasn't vegetarian. There were individual vegetarian pieces --- including the Avocado Toast appetizer --- but for the main course it was something an animal had to die for, and we accepted that, resolving not to tell anyone at the conference this. (Not that anyone asked or would be likely to.) I had my first meat-based sausage in years and in a sauce so creamy that I'm still tasting it three weeks on. And then dessert was more wonderful yet. bunnyhugger got an ice cream, but served within some sort of bread shell that soaked it up spongelike without overwhelming the taste or feel of the melting ice cream. Me, I went for the more basic plate of local cheeses, and I wouldn't be sad to have a plate of cheeses for every dessert. Or main course. Really you could pretty well sum up me by just putting up a sign, ``Bit more cheese''.

After a good while including after-dinner coffee they ... didn't seem to be bringing us a bill, which, sure, is the non-American-restaurant way. I had noticed several other people leaving simply by departing the table so figured that was the thing to do; there wasn't tipping and they knew what room to charge it to, so there. So after some assurances that we weren't dining-and-dashing we got up and walked slowly back to our room and then had some worries that we had done the wrong thing.

Well, on the hotel bill there was a charge for about what we estimated the dinner would cost, although it wasn't billed anything obvious like ``dinner'' or ``meals'' or ``restaurant''. It instead had a name of something like ``floor charge'', and google translations managed to make the purpose of that charge even more vague and ill-defined. It's been a couple weeks now, though, and we haven't heard any trouble, and they certainly have our e-mail and credit card information so we probably got away with it all right.

After dinner ... you know, strange as it may sound, I wasn't quite ready to go to bed. I got my camera out. I wanted to walk some, and alone, and I ended up taking by night the walk we'd hoped to do that morning down to Nigloland, to look at the gate and just ... be alone with my thoughts about this accident.

I would not stay alone. While walking along the long fence of the park someone stopped his car to ask if I needed anything. I told him no, I was fine, we just had come for the amusement park and found it closed and I needed to be sad. This he understand, but he did tell me the park would be open Saturday, which, yes, but I'd be gone by Saturday. I thanked him and he left. (We spoke in English, after the first sentence or two. I had actually thought out ahead of time what I might say if someone stopped by me, and I think I had the basics of it ready, except that in my mind I was saying dimanche [ Sunday ] instead of samedi [ Saturday ].)

The second time this happened I had basically the same conversation, and I guess it says something about the population of Dolancourt that a person taking a walk at like 10 pm on a Monday [ lundi ] might draw two cars stopping to ask if I needed a lift.

And that's how the day that should have seen us at Nigloland ended.

Now in photos let's look again at the Calhoun County Fair, as the day was ending but there was still plenty of Fair left ... we thought.

Here's the Wiggle Worm, which I believe was a junior caterpillar ride. Also there should be grown-up caterpillar rides again.

First picture of the carousel, and you can see bunnyhugger getting snaps for her 2025 calendar.

Somehow this angle makes the canopy lights look like there's more than there are, and arranged more randomly than their actually strongly-symmetric arrangement were.

Hey, Sea Ray was a fun pinball game, I didn't know they turned it into a swinging ship ride!

Turning around again to face the carousel and at least a couple horses with the distressed/wide-open mouths meant to suggest they're straining for their speed (which at like five rpm is respectable).

Some of the landscaping the rides operator puts up to give the place the impression of a more permanent park. Which suggests they pick up this mulch after the week is over and bring it to the next fair.

Trivia: Mexico City has more than five hundred streets named after Emiliano Zapata. Source: The Address Book: What Street Addresses Reveal about Identity, Race, Wealth, and Power, Dierdre Mask.

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

After that wondrous set of carousels and fairground art and all --- including, as bunnyhugger noted, a Bayol carousel rabbit, larger than hers, which revealed that we'd been saying Bayol's name wrong or at least different from how Marianne(?) said it --- what was there to do but get back to the Gare de l'Est so we could wait for our train? Also to sit down a little after we'd been going for so very long. Also to get something to eat. There is no way to guess how much we had eaten in our journeys since the last time we had been in a bed but that's all right; this would be our last food for the day and we didn't go to bed hungry.

You know what Gare de l'Est could really use, though? Chairs. Or benches. Or a lot of seating because for all the people that were there there weren't enough places to sit. Just a bit of advice for French railway authorities there.

The train we got on was one of those high-speed things; we got to see cars on the highway hurtling backwards at highway speed, relative to us. I finally realized where on the screens they showed the speed and could see, we got up to like 150 miles per hour on the ride over, and we would again a couple other rail trips. It hardly felt that fast. We also were not positive we were sitting in the right coach because we went to the coach numbered 9 (or whatever) and while seat numbers larger than and smaller than ours were on it, our actual numbers weren't, so I kept walking in a direction until I found our numbers. We got away with it, at least.

We got off the train in the small town of Bar-sur-Aube, at something like 7 pm on a Sunday, when the place was even more quiet and asleep than you might imagine for a tiny French village late on a Sunday. Question: how to get to Dolancourt and our hotel? I had insisted, it's a train station, there will be a taxi stand. So there might be, but the station was closed up and deserted. Fortunately, they had posted signs with taxi services so I borrowed bunnyhugger's phone and after wrestling with it to allow me to make the local calls that she had got European service for, had a halting conversation with a taxi dispatcher who was running everything through Google Translate. None of this reassured bunnyhugger, but the taxi arriving in about the promised half-hour did. The driver asked if either of us wanted to ride in front and I gave the seat to bunnyhugger, giving her the chance to see the countryside --- beautiful as you'd hope --- and get the first glimpse of Nigloland park. It's got a huge drop tower, it's easy to spot.

Our hotel, the former water mill, was a lovely spot and gave us Chambre number 1, just past a small stairwell up and then another right back down. We turned down the dinner reservation offered us; between fatigue and a great number of small snacks over the day we weren't hungry. And then for all that ... well, bunnyhugger hadn't yet taken her daily half-hour walk. What better thing to do than pace out our journey tomorrow, to get to the amusement park?

We set off in the wrong direction at first, retracing the taxi's steps because we had seen a sign for Nigloland and the Hotel des Pirates from the road. Realizing we were getting only farther from the tower, I started walking along a gravel road past grapevines that possibly was private property? But finding an arrow sign pointing to Nigloland reassured us that if we were trespassing, it was a generally forgiven trespass. We stumbled our way through, trying to take whatever path led us closer to the tower, until we found a side street facing a big park sign, one of the landmarks we'd seen on google Street View. From there --- and now, suddenly, I somehow knew exactly where to get here from our hotel and how to get back efficiently --- we walked to what we took to be the gate of the park and then back to our temporary home.

Reentering I asked the desk clerk for the Wi-Fi password and he told us that was impossible. We have no idea what that meant. The next morning I would ask a different person at the desk --- I remembered enough French to say, ``je voudrais le ... [ fumbling, sheepish expression ] Wi-Fi password?'' --- and she wrote the password down for me, and did not explain that it was written on the back of our room's key card as we would have known had we ever turned that over. The first clerk doesn't seem to have taken a dislike to us or anything either; he was the host when we went to dinner the next day and was as pleasant as possible, and was the same at breakfast the day after that. Maybe I expressed myself poorly.

But for that night, we were on our own without Wi-Fi. Fortunately bunnyhugger had her cell phone and could use it to look up the most important thing: when would Nigloland be open tomorrow, so we knew just when to get up, and how long we'd have to kick around after the park closed. 1 pm to 6? Noon to 5? 11 am? 10?

The answer was nothing we had anticipated.

So with the Jackson County Fair done you know what that leaves me ... that's right: looking around the fairgrounds as they clean up, when I went down to pick up bunnyhugger's pictures! And ribbons! So here's the same spots you were just looking at but with even fewer people somehow!

Here's my car, parked where all the food vendors and picnic tables had been just like fifteen hours before.

The canopy to the right is where, I think, the magician had been set up. I don't think it was that Aaron guy bunnyhugger's been following.

Inside the exhibition hall, with the now-empty booths and false storefronts.

It wasn't just vegetables that got the card instructing people to throw them out. Baked goods got one too. In the window you can see a couple miniature sets not yet picked up.

And here's the vegetables waiting for their owners to come, take the ribbons, and throw them out.

This is not where they're to be thrown, but it is a depression that caught my eye.

Trivia: While fleeing New York, after the duel that murdered Alexander Hamilton, Aaron Burr stopped in Philadelphia at the home of old friend Charles Biddle. Present was also Charles's son, Nicholas Biddle, who would be the head of the Bank of the United States who warred with, and lost to, Andrew Jackson. (Nicholas was home from college and waiting to leave for Paris.) Source: The Money Men: Capitalism, Democracy, and the Hundred Years' War Over the American Dollar, H W Brands.

Currently Reading: The Invention Of Air: A Story of Science, Faith, Revolution, and the Birth of America, Steven Johnson.

Among the museums in Paris is the Musés des Arts Forains, a private museum that gives guided tours. It's a Jean-Paul Favand, former actor and antique dealer, who gathered items from funfairs --- that is, carnivals, amusement parks, that sort of thing. It wasn't far from the Metro. A tour was to take something like 90 minutes and even allowing generous allotments of time for getting there by subway we should be able to get there, take the tour, and get back before our next train left the Gare de l'Est. And the Gare de l'Est even has storage lockers where you can leave luggage for hours, days, even weeks if need be. This would be perfect! If we could just get from the airport to the Gare.

The answer is of course the Metro but getting there demanded a ticket and we were not at all clear just what we should buy. Turns out there's a €15 special ticket that will give you, for two hours from purchase, unlimited travel on the Paris Metro so we just had to buy one of those each and get going. OK. The cards we got also said this was rechargeable, which we'd learn in two hours plus was not true, although the cards we got after that, on heavier plastic stock, were.

We got to Gare de l'Est and found a tremendous line outside one of the storage locker places. If there were others, we didn't find it. While in line a couple panhandlers came up asking me for money and were not deterred by my protesting, truly, I was American and had no euros on me. Yes, I ended up giving one a couple US dollars and that didn't even get me in the clear.

The storage locker room was behind a small anteroom with a security guard(?) looking disinterestedly out through the plexiglass windows. And an X-ray(?) screener with too short a conveyor belt for the number of people going through. Then a one-way door into the locker room, where we found row after row of closed lockers. And lockers with no obvious way to open them; like, did they open by pressing the door in and pulling it open again? Experimenting this way brought me to one locker that I could finally pry open, and stow our suitcases inside, and went to the nearest terminal to try and enter a locker combination the way the signs indicated I should. And they would not give me the option, nor would they take my credit card, nor would they open the locker again. And this may sound confusing but trust me: it was more confusing than that, and took more steps.

I walked around inside the locker room looking for an attendant, someone who could do something? Maybe even for an American who speaks extremely rusty middle-school French? And found nobody, although in the back of the room there were a good number of people and also lockers that were sitting there swung well open, unlike the defective locker I had picked.

So what could I do? I hung by the one-way-door until someone came in, snuck back into the anteroom, and knocked on the window until I could tell the security guard there was a problem. He said things I didn't understand and pointed inside, so, I went back in and waited for him to come out. Which he did not. I knocked on the security-guard door and nothing happened; then again and he knocked back at me. After long enough waiting I snuck back into the anteroom and knocked again and he told me something about the person in there. What person in there? So he gave up on waiting for me to figure out whatever the vague direction was, came out of the room and angrily walked along among the lockers until he found a small crowd around someone who, turns out, was an attendant and was helping other people with their issues.

Fine, then. I was lucky to get the attendant's attention next and we could get to where bunnyhugger stood, beside the locker, having this complete nightmare on her own since I was off being angry at the whole locker system. We were able to explain the locker having gotten stuck or something, not giving us the chance to enter a code or a receipt or anything. She asked what was in the locker, which struck me instantly as of course sensible; how well we could describe the contents would give some hint whether we were just stealing someone else's belongings. But perhaps I misunderstood things, as she would later ask if we had any backpacks, things with loose belts that (we inferred) might be jamming the axle. While our messenger bags had straps they were nowhere near the axle.

She was not able to open the locker, not until she went and got some small prybar, and then --- rather than let us go to one of the normal working non-broken lockers --- she set everything in and ran us through the pick-a-security-number thing and card-payment. So at least we had a receipt, and the dread that it was going to be impossible to get the locker open when we returned from the Musée.

I won't spoil things. When we got back, yes, the locker did fail to open and I had to find the attendant. This is when she asked if we'd had anything with loose straps that might be gumming up the works, and she had to go get the prybar again to let our things out. Mercifully. When we had everything back we closed the locker ourselves so that, hopefully, nobody else would have to go through this mess until they could fix the locker.

Please remember that we went through this thousand-word nightmare after the drive that included a near-crash, and flying the redeye so we were on almost no substantial rest, and our day wasn't near done yet.

I know we haven't got to the fireworks factory musée yet but it's been a thousand words, so please enjoy the near-end of my stop at the Jackson County Fair and, you know, it's kind of weird that Flying Elephants ride. You'll see what I mean.

Some more of the merry-go-round horses. I could swear I've seen the blue one in My Little Pony fan art.

And here's your classic white horses on the outside and middle, and Dalmatian horse on the inside. Plus, chariot.

Here's a horse that's been partially chroma-keyed out.

Other, non-carousel rides, most of which are pretty kid-focused. You can see a Nuf Edils in the background.

The flying elephants ride of course has that mouse character.

The crows meanwhile get redone in purple.

Trivia: Aviation pioneer Alberto Santos-Dumont was the youngest son of one of Brazil's richest coffee growers; the mechanization of the plantation gave him experience working with machinery. Source: To Conquer The Air: The Wright Brothers and the Great Race for Flight, James Tobin.

Currently Reading: The Invention Of Air: A Story of Science, Faith, Revolution, and the Birth of America, Steven Johnson.

The run-up to our trip went roughly like you'd expect. I got time off very early and easily, and it happens, it came at a time we were dealing with a really nasty, probably configuration-related problem at work that caused a particular system to work when we ran it locally but not on the Development or the QA servers. I hoped that being away for seven working days would let someone else find and fix the problem, and was wrong. But, I do think I've figured out what the problem is, it's just a very annoying thing to deal with.

Meanwhile bunnyhugger's annoyances were more about schedule pressure. Getting the presentation she'd need ready meant getting a paper written which meant getting a certain amount of writing done every day and if it was past midnight and the writing wasn't near done? She was stuck staying up until it was done, producing a nasty cycle of very late nights leading to waking very late in the day leading to not having time to write at a reasonable hour and there we go.

And if that weren't enough somehow our May had gotten overbooked. Some of it was stuff we knew would come, like the Finals for pinball league and the Zen Tournament which would be the Tuesday before we left. Some was stuff we vaguely knew about but that didn't register as obligations until they came up, like the Celebration of Life for ERR. There was the pizza party gettogether at PCL's place. bunnyhugger had two retirement parties for workmates to attend. Also she had to get spring plants bought and planted; she got fewer than usual, and had just enough daylight to get them all in. Happily they seem not to have been eaten by squirrels. For Mother's Day I just supposed we would be visiting bunnyhugger's mother and that knocked that day out. And then there were things like the kitchen light repair to throw even the normal days off.

About a week before we left there was a massive windstorm rolling through, with tornadoes that touched down in the county. We counted ourselves lucky to have avoided any serious damage from this, only to discover a couple days before we left that a huge tree branch from a tree between our back fence and the opposite neighbor's back fence --- so good luck guessing who might own that --- had fallen down and broken part of our fence. bunnyhugger found someone willing to cut the very long branch down, and even cut it up into fireplace-ready log segments, and while that means a potential problem was dealt with that was even more time eaten up by things.

And meanwhile, hey, I did some stuff too. Particularly, while going to Staples to get a power adaptor, I found they had a sale on suitcases. My old suitcase, from Singapore, broke one too many pieces a couple trips ago and I've been making do on bunnyhugger's or just loading up on duffel bags. But here, mm, some good-size ones at like fifty bucks off. After a fair bit of dithering I picked up a hard-shell one that was somehow lighter and rolled better than my old Singapore-purchased suitcase. The material on it said it was enough space for 7-14 days, and since we were figuring to be out about eight days that seemed good.

Turns out I ended up half-filling the suitcase, so, I guess the 7-14 days promise is accurate. I would end up using this space to stuff my duffel bag carry-on in-between flights, reducing the encumbrance of walking from place to place or the fuss of getting stuff on trains. bunnyhugger was determined to pack just enough that she could do the whole thing with carry-on luggage and she did succeed at that, so, maybe I could have bought a smaller suitcase. But I feel good about this one.

Important thing is we were ready, and bunnyhugger even discovered an unexpected bonus that we would make part of our first, very long, day. As the kids say, everything was coming up Milhouse.

Going now to look more at stuff besides the photo exhibits at the Jackson County Fair's exhibition hall. You coming with?

That 'creek' through the building is nicely flower-lined. I don't know how many of these are there only for the week of the fair and removed afterward.

Besides having a few 'storefronts' the exhibition hall has 'street names' for walkways. Facing us is Waterloo.

Getting down to look at the creek and the flowers here.

And then here's a cherub planted near the south end of the hall.

This collection of Fourth and Fifth Place ribbons from past Jackson County Fairs won a Third Place.

I hope somebody kept track of which of these ribbons where exhibits and which were the awards.

Trivia: Theodore Newton Vail --- general manager for Bell Telephone Company from 1878 to 1887, and founding president of AT&T from 1885, and probably the businessman most important to that company's domination of American telephony --- had as first-cousin-once-removed Alfred Vail, the telegraphy pioneer to whom Samuel Morse sent his ``What Hath God Wrought' message in 1844. Source: Telephone: The First Hundred Years, John Brooks.

Currently Reading: American Scientist, May - June 2024, Editor Fenella Saunders.

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.