Saturday, May 26, 2007

Viva Vienna 2007


I thought today was never going to end. And that was with me sleeping in until after 10 this morning. Ginger bought a new little outdoor blow up pool for the kids so we had to blow that up, but our air compressor was busted, so I had to go get a new one. Ginger and Catherine with to Michaels to check out their sale and Quinn and I went to Sears to get an air compressor. I've never seen as many floor salesman in Sears as were in there today. Guess they have it packed for the holiday. And they guy was really anxious to help me find an air compressor, to the point of pushing away other sales people, that is until he found out I wasn't looking for a $700 work area air compressor and just wanted a small one to blow up inflatables. Then he couldn't get away from me fast enough. Anyway, I got a compressor, but once I got home I discovered it only had a plug for a car lighter and not a standard wall jack. Since I got the only small version they had (they had a larger $90 one that seemed a bit much for what I wanted), I returned it and went to Target and got one. Only to get home and discover that one only had a car plug also (yea, I was just brain dead on that one).


So after one more trip I finally got one that can plug into the wall. Once I got home we blew up the mini pool. I'm not a fan of this new pool thing myself. Since we have a real pool in the neighborhood, and it just opened this weekend (that's right, the return of the weekend pool posts is just around the corner). Because of that I'm not seeing much of a need for this one. But it has a little water slide that you can put on it, and I think the slide portion is why Ginger got it.


After playing in the pool most of the day was gone, but Viva Vienna is back in town, and the kids had so much fun at that last year that we really wanted them to go again. Wow, I had to look at that post to find the link to it, looking at that post from last year I can see how when I was blogging then I put a lot of time into carefully arranging smaller pictures within the text. Man, I'm just phoning it in these days.


We had decided to not go to the fair during the day since it was in the high 90s here and the thought of the kids running around on rides in that heat just didn't sound like a good idea. So that's one of the reasons why we ended up going later in the day. The downside of that decision is that at night it's almost impossible to get any good pictures of the kids on the ride. I got a couple though, so I'm happy with that, but I feel like during the day I could have gotten a lot more. Speaking of taking photos, one guy at the fair kept putting his kid in front of me to take a picture. I had to actually ask him, "Do you want me to take a picture of your kid or something?" and then he explained that he had assumed that I worked for a magazine or newspaper based on my camera bag and size of my camera (I get the impression that the SLR is slowly going the way of the dodo).


The cost of the rides has increased. Last year tickets were fifty cents apiece, and it was four ticket per ride. This year the ticket price went up to one dollar per ticket, and most rides were now three tickets. So it's still a money sinkhole, but we had more or less planned to limit the amount of time we were there, and by going late there really wasn't an option of staying much longer.




The 'roller coaster' was once again a favorite of both kids being the only ride deemed worthy of a repeat. After the second roller coaster we informed they kids they had two rides left before going home, and then Quinn proceeded to scare me half to death on one of his last rides. It was this silly ride were the kids sit in a SUV / Jeep type vehicle on an elevated platform (maybe two feet off the ground) that just goes around and around. I believe there's a working horn in the cars also, but that's really not relevant other than to give some info on why any kid would want to get on this ride (I still really don't know, but I've given up trying to understand it). Anyway, Quinn couldn't pick which car he wanted (and since it was later in the evening, the rides weren't packed so there were a couple of empty cars). So he switched cars a couple of times. Then the ride started while he was standing on the platform running around to get to another car. Now the rides going around and Quinn's there running around the edge. I tried yelling to the guy in charge of the ride, but by the time I got his attention Quinn had made it to the next car and dove into it. I had just had these visions of him falling off the platform while it was moving and cracking his head open, so I'm glad that didn't happen. After it all this went down the guy next to me said "Can you believe that kid? He must have switched cars like three times before the ride started." Obviously he didn't know Quinn was with me, and I didn't bother telling him at that point and just replied with "Kids will be kids I guess."


And what kind of post would this be unless I included some shots I just took for fun.


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