Category: Miscellaneous

Ten Things I Saw At The Fair

August 21, 2016

I went to the Altamont Fair the other day. I’ve been many times, but may have skipped it last year. I went alone, but had a lot of fun!

The rides were incredible. They seem to have contracted with a new amusement company and there were more, better and newer rides than I have seen before.

I wanted to go on all of them, but chickened out since I knew it would give me motion sickness. I spent some time watching them though, and did ride the Ferris wheel and two ghost houses:

They were silly and not scary, but gave me a chuckle 🙂

Those are two of the winning scarecrows in the scarecrow contest. The theme was ‘music’. Can you guess who they are?

Admission to the fair included the circus, which was entertaining and surprisingly long (over an hour). I saw trapeze artistes, a globe of death, many jugglers, performing horses, and this guy ‘The Master Of Balance’. That’s a tower of about ten chairs he had made, and from my great seat he looked to be quite nervous.

It was a very hot day and inside the circus tent was almost 100F! I imagine my body temperature rose to life-threatening levels as I watched the extremely cute hula hoop girl 😉

I’m sure you already recognized him, but this remarkably lifelike statue is of Phineas Barnum and stands in the circus museum. I spent quite some time reading the historical material on display.

Cute birds! The chick in the yellow dress was only a week old! I felt bad for the livestock since even the abundant fans did little to alleviate the heat.

Speaking of livestock the goat dress-up contest was very amusing. My favourite was this pair (‘the twins’). Note the little goat shoes!

Topical art, in the ‘under 8’ category. This is Slimer from Ghostbusters, and is indeed a terrifying portrayal!

Last but not least I watched a fascinating sheep-shearing demonstration.

The guy doing the cutting used hand shears and hand-cranked as you can see above. He went into near academic detail about the process and I learned so much I now believe it’s fair to call me a sheep-shearing expert myself. If you have any questions, leave them in the comments 😉

Brexit

August 12, 2016

Today we did a bunch of shopping, finishing the souvenir buying. We’ve got some tacky stuff; look forward to it 🙂

I spent a decent time writing postcards today since I had many stamps left (and postcards to write). Incredibly I seem to have sent 55 in total this trip, costing (including postage) over US$100! That’s a little crazy, but I hope you like them.

Tomorrow we’ll head home. I’ll probably take a week or so off the blog, but the next post may again be about this trip, or rather about an unusual thing that happened to us in Brighton last week…

Margate

August 11, 2016

Many, many years ago I read a horror novel set in Margate. I don’t remember what it was called, but I never forgot the town. Today, on a very comfy high speed train, we visited this fading seaside resort.

When we arrived a light rain had ended and it was still and cold. The beach was massive and flat and the tide was out.

It was quite remarkable how much land was revealed with the tide out. During our stay it only came in a little bit, so we never saw (for instance) these moored boats actually floating!

We had a few sights we wanted to see in Margate, but one in particular stood above all the others. About ten minutes walk from the shore we came upon this unassuming place:

We walked in, paid £4 apiece, and walked down some dark stairs into the earth to find ourselves here:

It’s called The Shell Grotto, and is an unusual underground grotto with 4.6 million shells plastered into the walls and ceilings.

It’s a mysterious place which was accidentally discovered in 1835 during an excavation. There are no records of the place before it was discovered and it is unknown who made it or when.

The grotto has been on public exhibit for 170 years, and visitors are free to form their own opinions. Is it a religious place? Artistic? Just a whimsy? Analysis of the plaster and carbon dating of the shells has been inconsistent.

Whatever it is (a temple to Dagon!) it was a remarkable place to visit and alone made the trip to Margate worthwhile.

That’s a single gherkin, which KLS ordered at a fish’n’chip restaurant. It cost £0.50 and despite being much bigger tastes the same as those in Oz. Delicious!

The boardwalk at Margate has a bunch of arcades, most of which have those coin-pusher machines. This one used 2p coins, paid out bootleg Pokemon mini-figures and tickets that I redeemed for a bootleg R2-D2 toy. It only cost £7 but was a lot of fun 🙂

There’s also an amusement park (Dreamland) with a bunch of good rides. Sadly the (only) roller coaster was closed, else we would have ridden it.

Margate was great. The train trip was fun, the weather great, and the sights worth seeing. It’s best years may be behind it, and we’ll never return, but we’re glad we went.

Robot Claw