From the Horse's Mouth

Next morning we got up a bit earlier; we'd have to catch a train. Still we had the breakfast nook to ourselves (when we avoided some uncleared tables) and bunny_hugger observed about the TV news crawl that there was a delightful lack of people talking about Trump and his insanities. This was the week that Elon Musk had his messy breakup with Trump, mind, so I had seen some of the funny bits of that on social media, but we didn't have the oppression of this being all the news and that was surprisingly refreshing. Also, such soft, melty brie. So much brie.

This time around we asked the hotel staff to arrange a taxi for us and they were able to get one with the same company we'd gotten on Sunday, but for less than half the price. We also reflected that we should have asked the hotel ahead of time if they would arrange for taxi service, which they probably would have been able to do and would have been able to get cheaper for us.

The train back to Paris and Gare de l'Est was on time and fast and then all we had to do was go up and down four hundred different stairwells on an underground path running from Ile de France to the Norman coast and back to get to Gare du Nord, the train station that's the next one on the metro line. This because our connection to Rennes left from there. Gare du Nord also lacks adequate seating space for people just hanging around waiting for a train, although at least one block of what looked like seats was closed off for construction so maybe they're a little less at fault.

While we were getting a snack and finding our next train a guy, an American by accent, came up to ask if we could help him understand where his own train might be. We were and are novices at this but we'd more or less figured out where on the overhead boards they showed the several different train number identifications, and which of the kinds of icon it showed when they had assigned a track number. In his case, they hadn't yet assigned one, but it should be coming within minutes. We hope we were right or that he asked someone better-informed.

Now up to this point every train we'd been on had been not just speedy but on time, like, to the minute. And we had even commented on this, maybe foolishly, since now there was some kind of problem and the train stopped for what ended up being about a half hour total, and moved at mere American train speeds for a while after that. bunny_hugger saw guards standing at road crossings halting traffic so it looks like there was some important signalling problem hitting our line. Well, even Jove nods, I guess.

When we got to Rennes bunny_hugger said she'd get walking directions from her phone, if we needed them because I might well remember how to get to our hotel, the same one we stayed in ten years ago, all right. I think that overstates my memory for how to find places I've been once before but oh, yes, it did get to be pretty familiar pretty fast. And yes, it was the same hotel we stayed at before, with things stunningly similar to what we had known. With one difference: last time, the breakfast nook had a small bowl with a poor lone goldfish in not remotely enough water. bunny_hugger checked, from trip review photographs, that they no longer kept a goldfish in such terrible conditions before rebooking this hotel. (They now put some miniature bottles of jam in the space.)

We were set up nicely in the hotel and more or less ready for the conference the next day, although bunny_hugger was irritated her shirt had got a crease in it despite everything and there was no method at all for flattening a shirt; no iron, no pressing board, not even a hangar that could be used to let it absorb moisture from a hot shower and then settle out.

But we also had the question of what to eat and when we found there was a grocery store a couple blocks away, sure, we went for that. We had notions of getting some nice little sandwiches (all that we could find that was vegetarian was fake bacon, tomato, lettuce, and vegan mayo, billed as Le British for some reason) and exotic flavors of potato chips and something called ``Monster Munch'' (original flavor, though they had variations) and a couple small bottles of Coke Zero. They had some more exotic, more interesting-looking flavors but all at room temperature and without a fridge or ice we weren't confident we would get a fair taste of it.

So this would be our quiet, personal meal back in the hotel room. While bunny_hugger got ready for bed, a friend on Telegram started looking up where you could find pinball in Paris, their helpful nature failing to register my explanation that we were not in Paris except as a transit point. But it did make me wonder: was there somewhere in Rennes, or in our Belgian destination of De Panne, where we might find a game? That seemed worth checking ...

And now to check in on the Calhoun County Fair, which had no photographs from bunny_hugger --- we had expected us both to be out of town when they were to be dropped off, so she didn't sign up --- but had other things to look at. For example ...

Nice little water fountain statue set up to make the fairground rides look more permanently decorated.

I'm sure I said this before but that rhino looks like they're taking stuff for medical purposes only.

Big Top Circus is one of the kiddie funhouses (really they're all kiddie funhouses) but it has got app splash screen energy.

Over to the crafts barn where we once again failed to convince bunny_hugger's mother to enter anything. Still, here's some nice patterns of fat rabbits and small birds.

More crafts, including a bunch of needlepoint and other felt fixtures and some really great castle playset that's got stuff in every room.

More of the embroidery and needlepoint and stuff. Note the knives with movie killers on them.

Trivia: The United States's 1960 Census was the first to ask about air conditioner ownership. It found about 12.4 percent of all households had air conditioning, ranging from less than five percent in New England to more than 27 percent in the West South Central division (Texas, Oklahoma, Louisiana, and Arkansas), with nonwhites having air conditioning at under a third the national rate. Source: Cool Comfort: America's Romance With Air-Conditioning, Marsha E Ackermann.

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

PS: It's a bonus story strip recap as I look at What’s Going on in Flash Gordon? Are We in Some Time Travel Story Now? Enjoy!

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.

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.