Keith Palmer's Multi-Purpose Journal

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.

So. Despite mild confusion about which station to transfer at, and which direction to take out of the Metro, we got to the Musée des Arts Forains just about on time for our 1 pm tour. There were maybe twenty people in the group with us, apparently about half the size of a normal tour group, which meant that some things would go quicker. The museum is at Les Pavillions de Bercy, a set of buildings that originally warehoused wine (the location was, back then, outside the limits of the City of Paris and so immune to the wine taxes) and that naturally grew open-air cafés and other little amusements. So this is why the buildings are a couple of huge, high-ceilinged spots, with plenty of space for everything inside, and separated by enough space for a modest-sized group to hang out in plenty of space.

We expected a tour something like we might get at the Merry-Go-Round Museum in Sandusky, with polite docents explaining the most interesting pieces. This is not the docent we got. The one we had, a young woman with a name that was ... I don't remember anymore, something archetypically French like ``Marianne'' maybe ... a performer. I'm not sure if she said she was actually a cabaret performer but she had the energy and drive of one, talking with it seemed everyone, encouraging people to call out answers to questions both serious and silly. (The tour was mainly in French, but she broke into English for the handful of people like us who benefitted from that. Also bunnyhugger had been given a laminated booklet, most of which she photographed, explaining the exhibit in English. There were also German and other language versions available.) You might get some of the tone of the place by descriptions of some of the busts of famous figures decorating the outside of one of the buildings. They had, for example, Charles de Gaulle and François Mitterand. Also Jimmy Carter and Mick Jagger. Why? Well, let's move on inside, shall we?

The museum has a number of pieces of amusement and fairground art --- signs, backdrops, figures from rides, that sort of thing. A lot of things that are illuminated. Some that go back a great way, like bagatelle tables that I teased bunnyhugger with by saying at last, we had found pinball! Some go back only to ... within my lifetime, such as the horse-racing midway game they had. This was one of those roll-the-balls-to-make-the-horses-move games, and everybody got a turn, in a couple rounds of trying. The mechanism they had, in lovely shape and well-painted and with all the horses working, dates to the ancient days of the 1970s. bunnyhugger came within a whisker of winning the race, her turn.

Ah, but the real centerpiece here was not the horse-racing game, or the many figures with bootleg Mickey Mouse or Popeye or such. No, the centerpiece was carousels. Three of them, just like Cedar Point. Once was your classic sort of travelling carousel, three horses across, though with some interesting twists, like, one of the non-horse rides was a rowboat that rocks side to side. I'm sorry to say we weren't able to get a ride in that, but kids leapt into the spot and you can't fault them that.

What we expected would be the most interesting was the salon carousel. This is a near-extinct breed of carousel, with mounts resting on the platform instead of suspended by poles from the canopy, and going for ornateness in the design. This despite being a travelling ride, most of the time, itself! In the classic installation the ride would have a facade built around it to look like a salon, the sort of place where you might discuss Impressionism or the Communards or Boulanger. The platform's made to look like marble, and the seats are tastefully overdone, as opposed to the American carousel style of ``stick some more glass jewels on it''. The carousel moves slowly, even by modern standards, but it's a stately sort of slowness, the sort of thing to make you feel like your'e drowsing in luxury, an attitude supported by the music that's got some classical, lullaby feel.

The penultimate attraction and something I'm sure draws private parties all the time was a band organ, one of the huge ones that dominates a room instead of being set out by a carousel to call people to the midway. It was the sort of thing I'd seen at the Speelklok Museum in Utrecht that bunnyhugger has since been sorry she didn't get to see herself. It played a waltz, and at Marianne(?)'s encouragement many people get into the dancing. bunnyhugger asked if I knew how to waltz and I could say what I did know: you and your partner go around in a circle, which itself goes around in a bigger circle. This is true enough, although people who actually know how to waltz also know how to move as a graceful epicycle among the main circle. Well, for only really knowing the waltz from cartoons and this one podcast I didn't embarrass myself. Only bunnyhugger.

The last big exhibit and the one we did not even imagine was there was ...

So, come the late 19th century. You know what's new and stylish and exciting? Bicycles. Not like those boring old horses and donkeys that everyone rides and is bored by. So what would be a great carnival ride? Something you could really take money for? Something where you ride a bicycle. And so this is the result of that thinking: a carousel that's a ring of one- and two-seater bicycles, set in a fixed ring around the center pole. Its power source? The pedalling of the riders.

bunnyhugger had heard of these, even seen a picture of one, ages ago, in one of her books about European amusements. She did not know any still existed. Neither of us imagined we'd ever be at one, or get to ride one.

There were conditions, of course. First, these were fixed-gear single-speed 'bicycles' so if your feet slipped off the pedals you were not to try getting them back on. Just put your feet up on the frame and wait for the ride to end. Also kids, don't try pedalling. Just sit in the passenger seats behind the pedalers. Also, Marianne(?) warned, it would not be comfortable. The seats were, fin-de-siècle style, hard lumps with no give, and the pedals were shiny brass(?) rods with very little footing, closer to what you get if you take the top off a stirrup than anything you'd actually use to bicycle.

It is also loud, sounding much more like thunder when you get it going, which takes less strain than you might expect when everybody's pedalling. And it gets going really fast, even with some people losing their footing and bowing out of the pedalling; the only thing to really slow people down is their exhaustion and their fear of how fast they have got the thing moving. It felt to us like it was going as fast as the Crossroads Village or the Cedar Downs carousels, although maybe that's an illusion created by how much of a hand we have in it. You don't get many amusement park rides that are rider-powered (the museum had a couple Venetian swings, out of service, though, one of the other kinds of rides you can just go on until you or the ride operator lose patience).

I'm sorry only that we were in too small a group for there to be two cycles on the velocipede carousel; I'd have loved to get a movie of the whole process. But surely other tourists have taken videos and put them wherever you get videos online. It is something else.

After this the tour was over. I hung back to get some last pictures of the Popeye and Mickey Mouse bootleg stuff. bunnyhugger (and many of the other people) used the chance to go to the bathroom, a thing I totally missed and would slightly regret, as the Gare de l'Est had pay toilets and we had no coins and weren't going to use credit cards to pee. Sorry to end on such a mundane note but there's only so much interesting to say about thanking Marianne(?) and agreeing it was a fantastic tour.

And now at last, another end, this one of the Jackson County Fair pictures! Or is it?

I have no explanation for this elephant.

The pink elephant, that I can explain.

Green I don't remember from Dumbo.

This time I noticed there's several models of Timothy Q Mouse and they rotate around semi-freely. You can see two of them in this shot.

Elephant making sure everybody sees how Timothy hasn't got pants.

And one of the crows asking, basically, Mmmmmmmmyes?

Trivia: Coleco paid Cinematronics two million dollars for the home rights to the Dragon's Lair video game. Source: The Ultimate History of Video Games, Steven L Kent.

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

PS: Don't you want to know What’s Going On In The Phantom (Sundays)? What’s this B-17 crash doing? March – June 2025 gets explained to you in fewer words than it took to read this here.