The Writing Desk of Jakebe Rabbit

Finally let's resume talking Plopsaland De Panne.

The Ride to Happiness is the roller coaster that has a reputation, to the point it might be something an American roller coaster enthusiast might have heard of. That reputation is of an unbelievably intense ride, something unlike what you might have experienced otherwise. The station, and the ride, has this steampunk vibe, all gears and clockwork mechanisms and, like, a forge's furnace in part of the queue building. You also might get some of the vibe of the place by the sign put out front, delivered in three languages --- English as the first and largest text, the only place in the park where that happens, and French and Dutch translations beneath that:

Dear people of Tomorrow, welcome to The Ride To Happiness.

After many wonderful years of writing history, Tomorrowland has been searching to expand its horizons. This spectacular ride has found its course, created to stimulate all senses in a way that hasn't been done before --- as a true symbol of uniting the People of Tomorrow community around the world.

The 4 elements of nature work together to power this extraordinary machine. Kicking off with the first element Air --- known to blow harshly at the Belgian coast --- of which the force is collected for the next element Fire. The scorching fires are then controlled in the oven to be used in the next element Earth. The incredible temperatures can shape Earth's surface any way it desires, ensuring its path to flow perfectly for the last element Water. Finally, the 4 elements unite to fully power The Ride To Happiness.

Prepare for an unforgettable journey of a lifetime.

Tomorrowland, by the way --- designers or something of the ride --- is a big electronic dance music festival in Belgium, scheduled for a couple weekends later this month in Boom, Belgium. So despite all that text, and the huge monitor of a cybernetic woman introducing you to the ride when you get to the station, it's not some prog rock thing. Actually the music is more ... I'm not sure how to describe it. Softer, though, and enveloping and seeming out of line with a thrill ride. But the cybernetic woman congratulates you on being guided through the energy maze to this place and that you will have nature embrace your inner being so live today, love tomorrow, unite forever. The ride is full up to the brim with vibes, is what I'm saying.

And what is the ride itself? ... Well, the roller coaster is a short one --- all the Plopsaland roller coasters are --- but it's a pretty intense, curving, topsy sort of ride. And what elevates it further is that the cars all spin, and are released to spin almost right away. The experience is much like if you put spinning wild mouse cars on an Arrow megalooper of the 1980s. In fact, the ride is pretty close in length and speed and inversion count to Kings Island's Vortex, though it's not so tall as that one had been. I'd call this more intense than Vortex, although just how intense varies, depending on your luck in the spinning. We got several rides on this over the day, and avoided doing a real session on it because it would be just too much for that. Also you start the ride with a low-speed inversion, the track doing a heartline roll before you get to the launch. These are always unsettling.

It is a really good ride. And the theme and presentation is so very different from any American roller coasters. It's amazing.

And now, getting into the photo reel, since we're done with the Fairy Ball what comes next? ... Go on, guess.

Establishing shot. Exterior, my car, outside the Mad Mouse ride. Labor Day. So, looking like maybe not too heavy a day at the park? We'll see.

Here's the park's tree, and Ferris wheel, against the cloudiest sky we ever thought we'd see at Michigan's Adventure.

Maker's plate for the Scrambler, a ride we don't get to nearly enough considering it's pretty hard to have a bad ride on one.

bunnyhugger here was snagging a picture of the charming cartoony figure of the safety warning figures, cartoon stick figures who are smiling when they're letting the restraint bar keep them safe during the ride and unhappy when they unlatch it and stand up. Note the Big Eli logo on back of the cars.

There's Thunder Bolt, the Himalaya ride, which for 2024 lost its roof. Now it's protected from the elements only by the elements themselves.

Trees outside the Scrambler and Thunder Bolt already starting to change colors for fall.

Trivia: The British Naval Intelligence Office cracked German naval ciphers at the start of World War I, thanks in great part to the accidental capture of three German cipher books, one from a merchant ship in Australia, one from the light cruiser Magdeburg wrecked on the Russian coast, and the third from a torpedo boat salvaged from the English Channel. Source: To Rule The Waves: How the British Navy Shaped the Modern World, Arthur Herman.

Currently Reading: Empire of the Sum: The Rise and Reign of the Pocket Calculator, Keith Houston.

I must once more beg off writing up the European Vacation in order to tend other matters of great importance. Please enjoy more pictures from the Fairy Ball, though.

We poked back around the woodland trail in full darkness.

Here's the sort of path we were following by night.

And here we emerged onto the Court of the Fae, illuminated only by the overhead lights.

The Moon Grove looks even more remote in portrait mode.

They had something or other going nearly all the time, with the drawback being you couldn't avoid missing a lot of stuff.

Fairy lights in the darkness doing a very good job of being the trail.

Moon Grove as the wedding dancing was going on and, you can see, they were bringing out the light sabers!

Meanwhile here's a woman demonstrating fire dancing moves.

That's an exciting event!

Swinging the flames around some.

Yes, there's fire-swallowing.

And some dancing with the fire.

Trivia: Two of the final projects of Terry Toons were Saturday morning cartoon pilots: The Ruby Eye of the Monkey God, a jungle-adventure cartoon, and Sally Sargent, about a 16-year-old secret agent girl. Source: Terry Toons: The Story of Paul Terry and his Classic Cartoon Factory, W Gerald Hamonic.

Currently Reading: Empire of the Sum: The Rise and Reign of the Pocket Calculator, Keith Houston.

My humor blog has been another week of Robert Benchley and some very slight other stuff. Also a joke based on a thing bunnyhugger has been facing. Want to read all about it? Here we go.

• MiSTed: The 72 Hours Saga, Part 46
• Robert Benchley: Isn’t It Remarkable?
• Statistics Saturday: MacBook Computer Case Colors
• Robert Benchley: Do Dreams Go By Opposites?
• Robert Benchley: My White Suit
• What’s Going On In Gil Thorp? What’s the problem with Clambake? April – June 2025
• Robert Benchley: Wear-Out-A-Shoe Week
• MiSTed: The 72 Hours Saga, Part 47

And now let me share a normal amount of pictures from the Fairy Ball last year.

Swordfighting at the Moon Grove! I don't know if this was merely a demonstration or if it was actually for some prize.

Much like a small convention they set up things like palm-reading booths and some vendor stations.

Some of the many signs made and not yet put up even as the event was under way.

This was a small circle very useful for navigating. The bike stand is on the right, with the Moon Grove below.

bunnyhugger examines the entry arch. Note the Christmas lights --- the fairy lights --- to line the path inside.

bunnyhugger composing an ode to the entryway.

Drum circle that was going on as we went to walk the path through the woods.

There's the drummers on the right; I can't tell what's going on in the background. Hidden behind the trees was a crepes truck, though.

And here's the walkway. Those probably aren't actual ghosts draped up in the woods.

This seems like an unproductive bridge until you remember it's probably a lot of fun to ride a bike over.

Following the fairy lights through the woods here.

And we came out the path near the Moon Grove where, it happens, the wedding ceremony was going on, with the exit right behind, like, everybody. So, we stayed back rather than intrude, and maybe appeared as blurry visions in the background of other people's pictures.

Trivia: Greenland ice core studies indicate that between atmospheric lead levels rose from 0.5 parts per trillion to 2 parts per trillion in the first century AD, reflecting Rome conquering Britain and mining the island's lead. Source: Molecules at an Exhibition: The Science of Everyday Life, John Emsley.

Currently Reading: Empire of the Sum: The Rise and Reign of the Pocket Calculator, Keith Houston.

bunnyhugger pointed out I overlooked a leg of our travels and a pretty big one. We did not go from Rennes to Paris to a commuter line to the Belgian coast. We went tp Paris, yes, and from there caught the Eurostar to Brussels. Here's why that's worth some mention.

When ten years ago we went to Rennes, and Paris, we followed this by taking the Eurostar through the Chunnel to London. The noteworthy thing there is getting from the Metro to the Eurostar was a literal nightmare, following a string of signs that all ended at blocked gates, and an elevator that promised to bring us closer to the Eurostar terminal but actually lead to a small patio with nothing passenger-accessible, and we only got through this problem --- somehow --- thanks to the lucky assistance of a Canadian who somehow knew something but she wasn't sure what. And now we needed to do that again. We would have something like an hour to make the transition if that were possible at all.

And this time it was absolutely no trouble whatsoever. We knew what platform we were supposed to go to, and saw signs for various platform numbers and followed those. We never passed any gates of any kind, never got to places where signs pointed us to blank walls, and if we saw Canadians we didn't recognize them as such. Either they completely reconfigured the metro station and the railroad station in the last decade or somehow we had gotten lost last time and ended up in a nightmare for no good reason. There were places we felt signs could have been improved along our journey, especially that nightmare with the storage locker, but this was exactly the easy connection we hoped. (This is also where we were approached by that guy hoping to find out where to get his platform information).

It was at the Brussels train station that we caught the commuter train. The Paris train stations we were at were all very light, spacious things, evocative of ... I guess by original intention the Crystal Palace of the Great Exhibition of 1851, although it's become more of a shopping mall vibe. Brussels, though, that feels like a New York City train station. More like Penn Station than Grand Central. Very busy, relatively cramped, and at least where we were not a whole lot of sunlight filtering in. Not that there wasn't, just, compared to the Paris stations we felt more underground.

We were thirsty, mostly, by this point and ended up buying a couple Coke Zeroes from a vending machine in a process that seemed more complicated and ambiguous than really seems like should have been for a vending machine. But we had the soda at least, so, I guess that's all okay. And we got where we wanted just fine, as you learned the other day. Just filling in a mistake I'd made here. Now over to pictures from some confusingly other event!

So you naturally wonder what the next thing on my photo reel is: county fair? Pinball tournament? Amusement park trip? Nope, it's the Fairy Ball that we went to with FAE, friend from pinball. It was an afternoon-to-evening event in a great and interesting setting.

The dance stage, part of the Moon Grove, at the western end of the Fairy Ball setting; the wedding reception would end up focusing here and it would be a performance area the whole night.

Here's the registration line, going back into the woods trail.

There were many people in costume; here bunnyhugger takes I believe a film photograph of one.

And another picture early on in the brightest light we'd enjoy.

Here's the jackalope outfit that bunnyhugger put together.

We, being signed in, went on to explore the grounds while check-in continued.

Trivia: One of the Sanskrit words for 'Saturday' was 'Sanivara', honoring Saturn and meaning 'slow moving'. Source: Mapping Time: The Calendar and its History, EG Richards.

Currently Reading: Lost Popeye Zine, Sundays Supplement Volume 16: 1954, Tom Sims, Bela Zaboly. Editor Stephanie Noelle.

Happy anniversary, dear bunnyhugger.

Plopsaland De Panne opened originally something close to a century ago, as a park named Miel. Or it opened around 1951 with that name. Our best understanding based on looking at the signs is that it was a Knotts Berry Farm-like situation where they had a working farm, or bee gleanery anyway, that started putting in amusements until the amusements took over. And then in 2000 Plopsa took over. They're a media company, making a bunch of children's entertainment, so that the park became something like a Nickelodeon Studios park except we know even less about the intellectual property the rides deploy. Well, we know about Heidi, the basis for Heidi: The Ride, which had Nigloland not been closed was the roller coaster I hoped to be my 300th.

Anyway our Saturday opened, after filling up with a lot of continental breakfast, trying to figure out how to get the tram back to the park. We could certainly have walked to the park --- we'd done it yesterday --- but we figured it would be quicker and save energy to let the interurban do the hard work. The catch is there wasn't a ticket vending machine at the tram stop by the hotel, something that seemed to catch the desk clerk by surprise. He suggested an alternate stop that did have tickets, and that we'd been by the previous night looking for the Automat. We bought, I think it was, ten rides, figuring we'd use some that day and then some riding up and down the coast Sunday.

Then we waited for a tram that didn't come. It slowly dawned on us, after a tram going the other way crossed over the tracks and went past without stopping, that this station was out of service, something we could only have guessed if we thought about the implications of the track under construction just beside the station and why there were signs posted all over the next-train time monitors. Or if we had read those signs, which we finally did.

So! Back to the hotel and then a right angle to walk to the hotel's tram stop, meaning that overall we maybe didn't actually save time or energy over just walking to the park in the first place. Also maybe we should have walked along the tram line instead of going to the hotel and back as a way point but I haven't looked up what the track is like so who can say.

The park charmed us with the statues outside of various characters in I imagine character-appropriate poses, and the huge banner celebrating the 25th anniversary of the park's becoming Plopsaland, and we could see the tunnel on Heidi The Ride from out there. As we went to buy tickets from the automated booth a woman came up and, we believe, was offering to sell us spare tickets she had for €20. Which is a pretty good saving from the gate price of €50, if the tickets were legitimate, which we had no reason to think they were, so we feigned not knowing what she was talking about and she went on to someone else. It did remind us both, though, of the time we went to Chessington World of Adventure (London) and someone gave us a couple of tickets surplus from some newspaper promotion. But those were given to us free so there was no way we could have been cheated there; this, we just weren't sure about.

Between starting late and the trouble with the tram we were getting into the park about an hour after its opening, but we didn't think we would need to do an open-to-close day, most likely. And, all going well, you'll learn how that forecast came out over the coming days. (Just fine, pretty much.)

You know what I have to share with you now? If you said pictures of 2024's Calhoun County Fair you would be right, but also, this is the last day you would be right to say that! Unless for some reason I go back and re-share a bunch of pictures or maybe ones I omitted this time around, which I swear to you I did do. But the plan is this is the last batch of them, and they should share the surprise twist of how our night there ended.

Hope the riders have their seat belts on though this.

And here's the Ferris wheel at some speed.

See, we like this ride when it's doing warp five.

And then came rain! A sudden cloudburst came out and down very heavy.

It shut the fair down about a half-hour before it otherwise would have.

And it created ponds and rivers all over the park as we tried to find our way back to the car.

Trivia: Including the price of development, each of the approximately 56 miles driven by rovers on the lunar surface during Apollo 15, 16, and 17 cost something like US$680,000 (in early 70s money). Source: Across the Airless Wilds: The Lunar Rover and the Triumph of the Final Moon Landings, Earl Swift.

Currently Reading: Lost Popeye Zine, Sundays Supplement Volume 16: 1954, Tom Sims, Bela Zaboly. Editor Stephanie Noelle.

Our hotel was in Rennes, basically, northwestern France. Our next spot was De Panne, a Belgian shore town, not quite due north of it. As you might imagine, the best way for us to get from Rennes to De Panne was going through Paris. The trains run that way, or at least the trains run more frequently that way. So this was another travel day but, we had reason to hope, our last travel day until the flight home Monday.

The train to Paris was fast and routine as we were accustomed to, even despite the incident going out to Rennes the other day. And then it was yet another trip on the Metro to get from Gare du Nord to Gare de ... I forget which. Not l'Est this time. But we also had to get more money put on our Metro cards because we had thought to get only single trips the last time around. Anyway, a lot of going up and down stairs and walking along long hallways, some of them starting to get nice and familiar.

The trick with the train to Belgium is that it's more a commuter line than a passenger rail like we'd been taking to this point. As in, you buy a ticket, but it's just for any train that day and you aren't guaranteed a seat or anything. Just, good luck. Turns out we had perfectly fine luck, getting on the train without issue and finding a seat with enough free space even for my new suitcase.

When we got to De Panne --- the end of the line, so it was easy not to miss --- bunnyhugger knew our hotel was just off the train line. We just had to start walking on this particular numbered street and eventually make a right turn. And from the train station we could see Plopsaland De Panne, what would turn out to be the only amusement park we'd get to visit this trip. The place where, had things gone right with Nigloland, would have seen my 300th roller coaster.

So, the hotel. It turned out not to be just next to the train station. It was, however, just a block or two off the tram station, the tram in this case being a 130-year-old interurban that we'd had vague plans of riding the whole length of Sunday, after we'd been to the park. The bright side is that walking rather than taking the tram let us get a feel for De Panne, and also for bunnyhugger to take her daily walk without particular fuss.

The hotel was a lovely one, with a nice modern style, by which I mean we couldn't figure how to get the elevator to work. There was just a flat metal panel with a 0 on it and we knew the lobby floor in hotels were storey 0. Turns out we needed to not touch the center of the 0 --- our best guess --- but rather touch the 0 ring, like, going across the whole loop. So we guessed, at least, after seeing the desk clerk have no trouble, and learning that every floor had a flat metal plate with a '0' on it for summoning the elevator.

Our last question for the day was where to get dinner. bunnyhugger found on google maps an Automat and absolutely, yes, we wanted that. We'd loved the handful of experiences with Automat-style food service when we were in the Netherlands in 2012. And it was only a couple blocks away, and on the shore, so everything we could hope for. Except that, first, we had a terrible time finding the place. And then when we did find it we found that Automat didn't just mean 'wall of coin-operated doors with ready-to-eat foot items inside'. It also meant 'vending machines'. And in this case, nothing with, like, a sandwich or other full meal inside, although we could get some cold cuts? I guess that'd be something. At least one of the vending machines was out of order; possibly that would have had viable meals.

So we needed some secondary plan, and we found that by walking around until we found a kebab place open. We ordered some falafel meals --- me, a pita, bunnyhugger a box --- and waited what felt like forever to get served. (Also they were cash only, so took us down to almost no folding European money through this.) I think a combination of a bunch of people going to the place that was open with one of the workers being on break caused the slowdown; when other guy got back into action everyone got served fast enough.

We took it all back to our hotel room, the largest we'd had yet and in many ways (having a mini-fridge, for instance) the nicest yet. Saturday was looking to be a great day.

What's not a roundabout way to get somewhere? ... Uh. Wait, this is a bunch of pictures of Calhoun County Fair carnival rides, most of which are about going in a circle. Sorry. Enjoy.

The carnival doesn't have a Scrambler they bring, but they do have a very similar ride and that's on display here in motion, catching the LED flickers so make the movement look more complicated.

That's what it looks like from the ground; it's almost supernatural in its shape.

And another picture with the shutter held open a little longer. I'm amazed you can make out one of the cars this clearly.

Here's a shot of the merry-go-round in action, only looking like it's going 300 rpm.

And the drop tower, looking like it's driven the passengers twenty feet under ground.

From this perspective the swings and the Ferris wheel look like they're going quite speedily.

Trivia: The Greenwich Observatory's chronometer was in 1850 observed to have a daily gain or loss of 0.149 seconds, based on the average gain or loss per month. Source: A History of Mechanical Invention, Abbott Payson Usher.

Currently Reading: Lost Popeye Zine, Sundays Supplement Volume 16: 1954, Tom Sims, Bela Zaboly. Editor Stephanie Noelle.

Thursday was the second and last day of the conference, and the course of events was pretty much what I described already. The most noteworthy thing besides the meals being set up better was a neat address about how the animal rights movement had changed in the past fifty years, conveniently broken into two phases, roughly 1975-2000 and 2000-present. The first half was dominated by the idea being introduced to public debate and, it seemed to me noteworthily, a focus on the importance of stopping animal suffering. The second half has seen a shift in focus to topics like how animals can experience joy and we should value that. bunnyhugger's presentation got a mention here, although just as an example of the sort of work done on this line of thinking.)

The finale of the conference was supposed to come a little past 4 pm, and we hurried thinking we might be late, only to sit through the last ten minutes or so of a presentation --- in French --- that was itself running long. At least we had good seats for when the closing remarks, including a good bit of hope that Peter Singer would be able to visit Rennes 2 for the 60 Years On conference, came on. (He must have heard that from everybody.) And then there was a little more hanging around, some desserts, the conference staff collecting all the name badges for some reason. Peter Singer walking around with his orange backpack like he was just another student taking a gap year. We didn't stick around to the very end of the gathering, but we were probably on the latter side of things.

Annoyingly we had more time Thursday night but less to do, since Le Grand Huit was doing exclusively some private event. We also were not quite hungry exactly but also not quite not. bunnyhugger found we were close to a franchise of a Belgian fast-food place named Quick and I thought I might get cheese fries or something like that, maybe a pop.

We were indeed close to it, although I managed to make the walk a needlessly longer one by going way too far north to start and getting us closer to Minimarche than we needed to be. Attempting to compensate by going over a block or two and then back down a road that wasn't precisely parallel succeeded, though, as well as letting us see a couple of nice bookstores and gaming shops and all that were closed but looked like fun places to hang out.

The policy of having giant touch-screen ordering menus has reached Rennes, France, and in this case it was actually not that bad since it meant we could look over the menu at ease, and use the [EN] button to read it and order in English. The only mistake made was that I touched the button to 'pay at register' --- I swear I thought I was going to pay at the screen --- and so I had some fumbling with the cashier, including not being completely sure they were even going to start making our food until we paid. Anyway, decent enough cheese fries. We saw they had some stuff that looked good, mozzarella sticks and something else (maybe a vegetarian burger?) that were unavailable, with the menu screens covering the pictures of the items with 'Victim Of Their Own Success', I guess indicating they were sold out.

So we had a slow night, a chance to get to bed a little early, make sure we were ready for tomorrow and the trip back to Paris and then on to Belgium. We'd could do that.

And now, some more Calhoun County Fair pictures for you.

Just checking that it's not a carved wooden horse. (I kid, although she might have been checking what kind of plastic or fiberglass it was made from.)

And just like that we have a dark sky and rides by night!

Here's much of the midway, including the drop tower and the Ferris wheel.

And here's that junior caterpillar ride.

Caterpillar looks a bit horrified at being ridden. Hope they get over that.

The balloons ride looks nice here.

Trivia: UPA cartoon studios' first television productions were a series of eight 60-second commercials for Ford Motors with Doctor Seuss. Source: Of Mice and Magic: A History of American Animated Cartoons, Leonard Maltin.

Currently Reading: Lost Popeye Zine, Volume 64: Olive Oyl's Dilemma!!, Ralph Stein, Bela Zaboly. Editor Stephanie Noelle.