Just in case someone thought they had missed it

After checking out the crafts and the other photographs we'd go to the rides area. Not to ride; we wanted to wait for night to do that. Just to see what was there. It looked different and we needed a bit to work out what was changed. The ride-through haunted house wasn't there this year! And all the other attractions shifted around a bit. The ride-through haunted house wasn't much --- I don't think there were even any (working?) internal attractions, just shuffling back and forth in the dark, the one time we rode, but it's still a loss. But the carousel and Ferris wheel had new locations. And the Simson band organ was missing, we hope only temporarily.

With that scouted out and a couple daytime photos taken we went back to the animals. There were a couple of ducks in the pond, and more turkeys and chickens, causing us to ask wasn't there a bird flu going around? Or maybe they've just decided that, as with Covid-19, they'd rather everyone get it than try to stop it. bunny_hugger loved seeing the turkeys and to a lesser degree the chickens, and made many valiant attempts to take a photograph of one before it jerked its head out of the way. She would later curse herself for using up all her camera's battery on blurred turkey heads, but the photographs that came in clear were really great.

In the rodents-and-rabbits pen they had a couple guinea pigs, up from the usual ``at most one'', but they all went into hiding as we approached. The rabbits were well-represented, though, both in actual animals and in posters about the animals. And there was something extraordinary: a juvenile Eastern cottontail rabbit, a wild rabbit, having their belly taped up by ... if not the on-site veterinarian at least someone who knew how to bandage a wild animal. The guy who brought the rabbit in --- it was about the size of his hand --- explained loosely how it had been in a fight(?) and he was hoping to give the animal time to heal. It was amazing to see how patiently the rabbit put up with being held, by humans, and having its middle wrapped up with a gauze that by definition was constraining its motion.

We would go through all the pens of the animals, although the larger ones like hogs and donkeys and horses drew less interest from us. One that was delightful was seeing the horses being led out of a barn, for exercise or something. One got to the threshold and decided that was it, and a sequence of horse people came on pulling at the reins trying to coax the horse into moving. Finally they found someone who had the knack of patting the horse in the right spots and pulling the right way to get things moving again. Was a delight to watch.

When night finally came we scouted out the rides again to figure what to ride. We came up with a meager list; they don't have (adult) roller coasters and when you rule out kiddie rides what's left has a bunch of things that are not to one or the other's of our tastes. Like, zippers look great but I think I only want to ride one once in my life unless it turns out very different from what I suppose. The drop tower, similarly, not something bunny_hugger feels like getting on. What we certainly wanted to ride were the merry-go-round --- their carousel runs at a healthy five rotations per minute, second-best in the state, even if it is a bit clunky a ride --- and the Ferris wheel. We also wanted to ride this small Himalaya-type ride that took up the spot the Gravitron used to occupy. (The Gravitron was now over close to where the haunted house had been.) This was a ride well-worth it. Good speed and a good healthy reverse cycle too, just like we'd hope for. Very glad to have caught that.

Speaking of catching. When we were waiting for the Ferris wheel someone on the ride dropped their water bottle onto the midway below. I noticed that because I had just been looking over the ride safety sign which includes the warning that you shall not throw things off the ride. While I was stunned by this and supposed it was an accident, someone from the midway picked up the bottle and tossed it back to the riders. bunny_hugger, who'd missed the drop, asked me if I, who'd missed the toss back, saw that. So you can imagine how we had a confused talk about what the heck happened there.

We didn't think we needed to stick around to the end of the fair's operating day and yet we came pretty close nevertheless. For a last treat we went to get elephant ears for bunny_hugger's mother. Her father, who'd had emergency dental work, we had thought couldn't eat something as solid as that but he would make the effort anyway. I also went to get a hot, soft pretzel and the operator there happily gave me the remainder of their stock, an extra five pretzels for the one I bought. We gave one to bunny_hugger's parents, after coaxing them a couple times; her father liked them too. And it turns out soft pretzels reheat really well. Wet them down and let them warm at 300 degrees Fahrenheit for five or ten minutes and you wouldn't know they were frozen in-between. We are going to have to hit up the pretzel places right before the close of the day next year.

Sunday, after the fair had closed, we drove back to the empty grounds and picked up bunny_hugger's photographs. Also her ribbons: one third-place, two second-place, and one first-place ribbon. We spent the rest of the day with her parents where, among other things, we finally beat the Mice and Mystics bonus chapter that was an escort mission we all had come to loathe. We're not perfectly sure we were reading an ambiguous condition correctly but on the other hand we don't care because we don't want to deal with that escort mission again.

bunny_hugger has looked at other fairs, including the Michigan State Fair, for their photograph submission rules. We'll see what develops.

Vortex height requirement sign has the old logo for Canada's Wonderland's Vortex, which is identical to the Kings Island Vortex's logo even though they were different kinds of roller coaster.

Wood carving of a lounging raccoon that's part of the decor for a ride near Vortex. Love that lounge.

And here's the lift hill for Vortex, which goes up and over Wonder Mountain. the support pillars for Vortex on top of the mountain caused the park to close off what had been an observation deck.

Lumberjack is a double pendulum ride, much like the Aero 360 at Kennywood, but the pendulums are made to look ike lumberjack axes.

And here's Yukon Striker by afternoon light.

Some of the queue decoration in Yukon Striker's very long and not-fast-moving-enough queue.

Trivia: The word ``since'' can be traced to Middle English ``sins'', a contraction of the earlier ``sithens'' --- the genitive form of ``siththan'', which was itself a condensing of the phrase ``sith tham'', ``since that''. Source: Webster's Dictionary of Word Origins, Editor Frederick C Mish. (The ``ce'' ending reflects the same genitive form at the end of words including ``once'', ``twice'', ``thrice'', ``towards'', ``always'', and ``backwards''.)

Currently Reading: High-Speed Dreams: NASA and the Technopolotics of Supersonic Transportation, 1945 - 1999, Erik M Conway. Opens with a (reasonable) complaint that he wasn't adequately informed how many of his source materials for the 90s project were proprietary corporate information and how he had to rewrite and redo research to replace his sources and how this is an increasing problem with that thing where the public pays for research that a company gets to claim for itself.