FAIR RIDES... GOOD ONES!

Howdy again, Blogging Buddies! Welcome back! You just had to check out more of the Beauregard Parish Fair Fun, didn't you?!?!? :)

Alrighty then. Let's visit the carnival! The Midway is always the most exciting with the lights, the barkers, the screams from riders who weren't expecting what is being delivered, the scents, the cotton candy... heck... you all should know what I'm talking about. If you do not, GET THEE TO A CARNIVAL!!!

Let's ride!!

So many choices!!

I admit I have never been through the Monkey Maze... but I would go if I could find someone to go with me!! Any takers?

Ahhhhh! The Tilt-A-Whirl!!! A favorite! The fun of bumping up and down over the wooden flooring (it was when I rode the thing!), hanging onto the hand thingie in the middle, and the amazing shifting from left to right in unison with your riding buddy to get the darned thing to hit a peak at the exact point to make the car absolutely whirl like a whirling dervish!! There was an art to riding this thing, Blogging Pals. Truly. I probably learned more about physics riding this than I ever learned in a classroom!

Why did the Ferris Wheel seem SOOOOO much higher when I was seven? Hmmmmm. At that age, you had a reluctant parent join you for the ride. No swinging of the car. They were grown-ups and had MUCH better sense! It was about 9 years later when your riding partner was busy trying to impress you with his (or her!) bravery and waiting until you were stopped at the very top before beginning to rock that sucker until you thought you would fall straight through the infrastructure to the ground below. SPLAT! Never happened. Just thought it might.

When I was riding this, it was called the Scrambler! Apparently that didn't have enough appeal so it is now called the Sizzler. Either way, there are a few hints I will impart to you here. First of all, GET ON THIS THING FIRST when you are riding with others!! That will place you toward the interior of the ride. You do NOT want to be at the exterior point. Trust me. This thing is like a four-legged octopus. Each leg has four cars attached. The four cars whirl around and around the center point of the leg while the four legs are being whirled around and around the center point of the whole ride!! Can you say "Centrifugal Force?" Uh-huh. If you were dumb enough (as we all were the first time) to get on last and found yourself at the farthest edge of that Force, you found yourself being compressed into the metal side of the car with the combined weight of ALL of your riding buddies who, even if they wanted to, could not pull themselves off of you. The big fun here is similar to the Tilt-A-Whirl. When you exit, you are usually so dizzy you find yourself walking into the exit gate rather than through it!

Okay. Just viewing this sucker was enough to make my breathing more difficult! This was likely the most "killer" ride I rode and was probably the biggest draw at the time. This, my friends, is the infamous Zipper. Yes, you'll recall I mentioned it when I told you the Fair was coming. It has that kind of hold over you once you have been on it. And you HAVE to ride it. If you don't, there will be long lines of your pals waiting to call you sissy-type names for the rest of your life. Even knowing that, it is a difficult decision to make. After the first ride, this beast sucked you in. You wanted to ride it again and again. Part of the reason was so you could listen to Tommy Roe singing "Dizzy" over and over again... at a decibel level that caused the moon and stars to shake!! Go ahead. You know you want to hear it again. Click on the link. :) I'll wait.

Hope you enjoyed "Dizzy" and sang along! I know I did!! You should all recognize these little guys. Yep. The Bumper Cars. You rode them with those same indulging and reluctant parents until you were FINALLY tall enough to drive one yourself! Oh... the FREEDOM!! I'm going to venture to guess that I likely pushed a hole through the bottom of one of these every year while trying to get the darned thing to go faster! First, I was after my brother's car. In later years, I was probably chasing down some guy who wasn't paying enough attention to me. :)


Finally, the ubiquitous favorite. The Merry-Go-Round. I don't know if I liked it at first because it sounded like my name was in it but I can tell you that I loved it from my very first ride. I never cared that it was in the "kiddy" section of the Midway. I always found time to make it over to the Merry-Go-Round for that wonderful, prissing, prancing pony ride. Age has no bearing on a Merry-Go-Round ride.

I certainly hope you recognized many of these rides and perhaps had a brief memory drop in for a visit (a good one, of course!). It's just so much fun to revisit some things and the Fair (or Carnival or whatever you visited as a child) is just one of those things. Every single sight, noise, and scent brings back a specific memory. It was just such great fun for me and I truly hope you can enjoy it, too!!!

More of the Fair in the next couple of days!

Until then...