Friday, June 03, 2011

MWNews 99





Some catchup work, or maybe just a long winded entry about the Easter Show.  You might notice it is well after Easter but I am going to pretend I typed this in a long time ago and you are just now getting around to reading it.

We went to the Easter Show.  That's it.  So long.  See you later.

Not sure how much I have already typed about this and I have sent emails with some information in email, so if I repeat myself, I guess it is just your problem for remembering too much.

To get the Easter Show, which, by the way, is held in the old Olympic Park location, (where they had the Olympics in 2000 for those that only know about things they have in the USA) we have to take the train.  They make it easy as the entry tickets allow you to travel anywhere on the trains on the day you use it, so there is no extra cost for the train ride.  Unless you count the two hours it takes to get from where we are to the Olympic park location.  Not that I am complaining as when we have always made this trip in the past, it is usually crowded and there are no places to sit so you have to stand the entire time.  Thrilling at first, annoying after about an hour, totally painful after two hours.  But, since we went in the middle of the week, I took the day off, it was not as crowded as it normally is for the show.  That being said, I still have to ride standing up the entire time as we have always taken either the pram or a wheelchair or something that requires me to stand watch over it in the area between the train cars so no one removes it from the train when we stop at all the stops.

In this case, we had two wheelchairs.  Have I mentioned we took Beverly and Karen (mother in law and sister in law, respectively).  They were here, and I know I have mentioned that in the past, for the Easter holidays.  Fortunately, since Beverly's wheelchair is a full size one, unlike Maeghan's and the pram we usually take, I had a seat in the wheelchair so it was not that bad.  There was one incident on the way back where I was sitting in the chair and had apparently not put the break on fully and was woken up by my legs slamming into the wall when we went around one turn.  But other than that, it was not that bad a trip.

We always plan on getting there early but I didn't hold out much hope of that happening since we would have had to get everyone up by 6 am to get to the train station by 8 to get to the show by 10.  We did actually end up getting there by about 10:30 as we caught an express train that only had one stop before we had to switch trains and we caught the next train immediately and then made the next train right on time also.  In case you were counting, that was three trains we have to catch to get to the showgrounds.  In some cases, you can make it in two trains, but they are not express trains, so it would have actually taken longer to get there on those.

The issue with getting there at 10:30 complicated by the fact that we had to stop for the toilet before we could go in and that was a long wait from all the people getting off the train at the same time.  Also, although we had purchased tickets ahead of time, the in laws had not.  So we had to wait another 30 minutes for that.  In the end, we did not make it onto the grounds until about 11:30, right at lunch time.  Since Bev and Juanita have low blood sugar issues, finding something to eat as soon as possible was imperative.   Of course, the most expensive and most generic food is right at the front of the show, or sort of at the front.  You have to walk about 200 yards to get to the actual start of the show.  Lots of last minute shops along the way for people leaving the show to spend the last bit of their money on cheap souvenirs, but mostly nothing of real interest.  We had to stop anyway.

The people in charge of the show are very clever.  The first real part of the show you come to is the kids ride area, right next to the not so cheap eats mentioned before.  So you cannot really get into the show area until you traverse the kids rides and spend some money on fairly obnoxious food.  We did both.  Ate the expensive food, $9 for a hamburger, and rode some rides.  We already had tickets we had purchased online for the rides, but what you did was print out a coupon to turn in at the ticket booths for the actual tickets.  Only a 15 minute wait, but then we had 120 tickets to keep track of the rest of the day.  Not a big problem, unless you consider the tickets are worth $1 each, so making sure I did not drop any or lose any was something I had to keep track of all day.

At this point in this entry, I have begun to notice that if I give every detail of the trip, this entry will be about 80 pages long.  So I am deciding on how to best split it into two or three entries or shorten the details.  As it will probably be days before I get back to this, shortening the details seems to be the better option.

I, of course, being the responsible parent and remembering how awful it was to be forced to see all the animals before you could go on any rides, immediately made everyone go see all the animals.  Not only did the kids complain, but the adults did as well.  So we had a ride first, then some animals, then a rest, then some lunch, then some more animals.

Most of the animals were not very interesting.  The pigs and goats smelled, the chickens were just birds in cages, and the cows were nonexistent.  There was one area, the petting area, that had hundreds of goats of all sizes running around.  The kids were allowed to get handfuls of hay and feed it to the animals.  Speaking of which, why have I not used some of the pictures from the show.  I have lots but for some reason, I failed to put one at the beginning.  I will see if I can go back and put one in.  Of course, you will never know what happened as the picture will be there at the beginning before you started reading.  Turns out, I put three pictures there, although I had to make them smaller than normal to allow them to fit and then I went back and made them normal so I am not sure what they will look like in the end.

The kids loved feeding the animals.  They had it set up in a really big area and I assumed they expected or had more people on the weekends as there were gates and waiting lines setup to not allow too many people in at once.  We went right through and it was crowded while we were there, so I cannot imagine what it would be like if it was full.

After that, we went to see the horses and have some ice cream and coffee.  Again, expensive but what can you expect from these types of shows.  The horses turned out to be boring so we went to see the cats and dogs.  On the way, we found a huge slide that William wanted to go down.  There was no way Maeghan was going to be able to climb to the top and I would have had to pay to take her up there, so I William went by himself.  He didn't mind but was unsure of what to do once he was at the top.  Some man helped him get on the slide and he came down really fast.  Faster than he expected, I think, so he did not want to go again.  At $4 a slide, I thought this was a good idea.  I did time it.  $4 for four seconds, but William said he enjoyed it.

This is going to have to be a two part entry.  I told the kids we would go to the shop as soon as mommy got home and she is home now, so they are bugging me to go.  Not a lot more to tell, but I am sure I can make it interesting.  Or as interesting as this has been so far.  I am sure most of you dropped out a long time ago, but for those who made it to the end and are strangely attracted to seeing the next entry, I say good on ya.  (That's and Australian expression).  I will probably get back to it today, but then again, do I ever get back to it when I say I am going to.  Probably not.  It means I will actually have to re-read this entry to find out what I have and have not already said, but maybe there is some chance I will actually do that so I don't repeat my self endlessly.

So, until next time

Talk to you later

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