We went to Santa-Caligon days Sunday, walked our fool heads off.
For the uninitiated, this is the class of the fair/carnival circuit for the KC metro. As huge and insane as the launch of the largest voluntary migration in human history. If you think there's too many Mexicans in the Southwest, imagine how the Mexicans living there felt when thousands of white folks were showing up without permission.
Gardner is where the Santa Fe trail branches off from the California & Oregon. It seems so close for that, like surely they could get more than across town first.
Riding in a wagon on pavement, not sure how that translates. I guess the wagon runs were worn fairly smooth, but the thing hardly seems capable of off-roading it.
But then, it took six months in a mule-drawn wagon to get all the way to California, so I guess Gardner makes as much sense as anything. What, a day's travel? Two?
But, of course, we had good reason to kill all those Indians: hunter-gatherer culture is incompatible with thrill rides that can be towed from town to town.
Em wants you to know she took the shots of me and Mo on the Spin Out, a truly frightening ride that spins you a couple ways while turning you completely upside down.
Compared to Frontier Days or the county fair, the rides were reasonably priced, and there was a ton of them. I was able to spend a little more freely than I could at Frontier Days, put a few overtime dollars into spinning my kids around.
Still, I set a dollar limit before I walk out the door. As a matter of fact, I don't take more cash to this kind of affair than I can spend, there's too many temptations. I tried to explain this to Em, that if I take $20, I spend $20. If I took $120, I'd spend $120. It's like a casino, it will take every cent you want to take in, or even more.
Still, I didn't spend that much more, $36 instead of $20, and we got to ride more than twice as many rides. If you count three-story slides that is.
I wanted to do a ferris wheel, but the cheaper one had a line and the more expensive one would have meant dipping into the food money.
And they said my honyocks were too tall for the moon walk. Like hell!
So we ended up using the last remaining tickets to spin around in the belly of a giant bear.
Em said she wanted to try new foods, and I was all too happy to oblige. Mo had a skewer of shrimp, Em wanted a root beer float but also partook of my gator stick.
She even liked it, much to her surprise. No, it does not taste like chicken, it tastes like alligator.
I wanted a deep fried candy bar, just because I can't believe there is such a thing, but I didn't have enough cash to find out what a breaded and fried Snickers bar is like. Sounds gross, which means it's probably delicious.
3 comments:
My husband is a teacher. He enjoys it, even though he feels he is underpaid and even though sometimes, other people's kids bother him. He's very patient. Unlike me. I could never be a teacher because the first kid who didn't turn in their homework would get a lecture called, "You'll go nowhere in life if you can't even turn in a page of spelling words on time. Do you want to grow up to be on welfare? well, do you?"
I suppose everyone does feel underpaid sometimes. But generally, people who enjoy their jobs don't seem to worry so much about the money. Some very happy people make peanuts. Some very miserable ones get paid six figures.
I don't for a minute want to devalue teachers. My Dad included, they are important. And some of the shit my Dad had to take on the job, he shouldn't have had to. Still, they didn't fire him for sleeping at his desk...
My husband works at a charter school. They lack in resources.
He is the art teacher, music teacher, P.E. teacher and the vision/hearing screener as well as he is k-8 certified and so he subs a lot.
He likes it. He wouldn't do anything else, but the politics of the school bother him. Then again, so do national politics, so...life always sucks on one level or another.
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