T.I.TDMF. Part Three: On Carnival Swindlers and Letting the Magic Live On

6PM, July 1st, Del Mar, California. The cloud cover was just beginning to break, an hour or two before the sun was due to set. The fair was still in full swing, people arriving as steadily as they had been at one that afternoon. My boyfriend and I were in the Funzone, the area of the park where all of the games and more adult rides were located.

Not the Funzone. You can’t tell, but the entrance of the park is REALLY FAR AWAY.

As I stood next to a carnival basketball game, watching my boyfriend fritter away $20 in a sweet (but ultimately futile) attempt to win me one of these glorious creatures

I realized two things:

--Firstly, those hoops were fucking rigged.
--Secondly, the Del Mar fair is best if consumed no more than once a year.

For all those “but WHYYYYYY?” naysayers out there, hear me out.

I love the Del Mar Fair. It’s a part of my childhood. I’ve been to it more times than I could say, beginning since I was too young to really remember going. As kids my brother and I won prizes for (in retrospect, somewhat skimpy) vegetables we had grown in our garden and arranged, spiffy-like, in wooden baskets. I’ve gone with my family, my friends, and my significant other. I’ve made the transition from Kiddieland to the more adult-centered areas. And I’ve loved every minute of it.

But do it too often and it becomes commonplace. The beauty of the fair is that you wait all year for it, and then when it comes to town, and you finally manage to get off work or out of school to go, you have an absolute blast. You spend the day navigating through the throngs of fairgoers, eating marvelously shitty fair food, and being dazzled by the rides. You let yourself be overwhelmed by the colors, and the sounds, and the smells and tastes, and then later that day, or that night, you go back to your everyday life with pictures and memories and cheap little prizes to show for it. And, until next year, or the year after, or whenever you finally manage to go again, that’s enough to hold you over. If you frequent the fair day after day, you risk weakening the effect. You risk the well running dry.

So if you can, go to the fair, and have that absolute blast. And don’t worry if you’re only there for a day. It’ll be back next year, same place, same time.

Note: all of the pictures in the This. Is. THE DEL MAR FAIR. series are mine, with the exception of the last ferris wheel one, which is courtesy of rockoutkaraoke.

T.I.TDMF. Part Two: Food

Ah, fair food. No other culinary subcategory can claim to be so populated by items both wholly disgusting and impossible to stop eating. The food I eat at the fair would likely cause me to die of something like shame, were I to consume it in my daily life. Shame, and the inevitable heart attack. But mostly shame.

Tasty, Australian shame.

During the Del Mar fair, San Diego becomes the world capital of both fried foods and foods that have been inappropriately shoved onto sticks. In fact, it’s widely believed that the earthquakes experienced by San Diegans are not in fact due to tectonic shifts, but to Mother Nature’s residual displeasure at the general culinary goings-on at the fair. Seriously, most anything you could want (and many, many things you would never want) batter-dipped and tossed into oil and/or shoved onto a stick can be located there. See for yourself: http://www.sdfair.com/fair/pdf/10food_type_map.pdf.

“Eh,” you might shrug. “Most of that’s old news. I already saw it all on that one show on Travel Channel about deep-frying.” If so, you are cynical. Also, I have you beat. Allow me to call your attention to a glorious nugget of information from that menu:

Don’t see it? No problem. Let me blow that up for you.

You know you’re dealing with a true culinary horror when
chocolate-covered bacon doesn’t even warrant a mention.

DRINK IT IN (OR, YOU KNOW, NOT). DEEP FRIED BUTTER, PEOPLE. DO YOU KNOW WHAT THIS MEANS? THEY TOOK BUTTER, DIPPED IT IN BATTER, AND THEN FRIED IT.

And lest you think some wayward soul responsible for developing the Del Mar Fair menu decided to insert such a monstrosity as a whim, take a look:

Mmmmm. Fat-fried fat.

Now, there is a chance that they put that up there purely as a promotional stunt, but why would they do that if they weren’t prepared for someone to order it? And I’m certain someone must have, just out of pure curiosity. Hopefully just out of curiosity. I wasn’t one of those people, just because I do have to draw the line at something, and this appeared to be that something.

Honestly, though, I would happily hork down* most anything at the fair, abovementioned atrocity aside, so much so that I ended up having to mentally pit certain food choices against each other, World Cup style, as too much food causes my stomach to lash out via the dreaded food coma.

Strawberry Shortcake à la Mode won the dessert round, natch.

So, am I completely indiscriminate, food-wise, or taken by the fabulousness that is Del Mar Fair food? YOU DECIDE. Except, you know, I’m pretty sure it’s the second one. Though if you feel the need to head out and see for yourselves, I happen to STRONGLY encourage that.




*According to Urban Dictionary, this means both “to eat quickly” and “to vomit up”. I most definitely used it with the former definition in mind, though I like how it’s essentially the “shalom” or “aloha” of food--it means hello and goodbye.

T.I.TDMF. Part One: Rides

The first rule of carnival rides: do not take your cell phone with you onto the ride. For real. This advice should be bronzed and/or mounted on a plaque. Why, you might ask?

STORYTIME.

When I was a kid I went to our local fall festival every year. Equal parts carnival and new-age witch-y craft fair, it was the best thing about fall, next to Halloween (which, for a kid, is a pretty big deal). It was shut down sometime while I was in middle school when the owner fell ill, and to this day I still miss it.

I have plenty of fond memories there, but some of the best involve the moment I became old enough to tackle the “grown-up” rides, all of which were both mildly terrifying and fairly thrilling at the time, and many of which had truly hilarious, budget sci-fi names (I’m looking at you, Gravitron). I would eventually ride most of them, multiple times—but one never got a repeat ride. Likely because, as my late elementary school/early middle school-age self put it, it was a “screaming metal deathtrap” and “like being in a car crash”.

That ride? The Zipper.

When the fall festival shut down, I didn’t think I’d see the Zipper again. But lo and behold, awaiting me at the fair was a little piece of my past.

WE MEET AGAIN, MY TACKILY-PAINTED NEMESIS.

Since then, I’d matured quite a bit and developed more of a taste for thrill rides. So, upon arriving at the Funzone, I convinced my boyfriend to forgo the free-fall ride he’d been eyeing and go on the Zipper with me first. I suppose I was feeling nostalgic.

“You should put your phone in my bag,” my boyfriend suggested as we stepped into the cage, helpfully holding up his backpack and gesturing with it, ostensibly so as to demonstrate the space still available between his illicit chocolate-chip cookie stash and the tube of SPF 50 he’d packed for me.

“Nah, I’m good. I have tight pockets, so it’s not going anywhere,” I said, ignoring his raised eyebrow. He shrugged, and as the ride attendant secured us and slammed the door (lid?) I attempted to quell the anxiety beginning to bubble up in my stomach.

Look at this shit. Those are twirling PEOPLE-CAGES. How can you not be anxious?

It turned out to be 100% the car crash I had remembered. As we hurtled through the air to the tune of screeching metal, wind whistling past us, and the combination of my boyfriend’s exhilarated laughter and my unexpected and admittedly somewhat pathetic screaming, I was forced to stop squealing in terror and look on in—well, still terror—as the force produced by the roundabout motion of the ride tugged my phone out of my pocket and sent it ricocheting around the cage.

“Oh, shit,” I blurted out, dizzily watching my phone shoot around the cage like an ungainly maroon bullet. Briefly it occurred to me that the holes in the mesh door were too small for my phone to fly through, but the moment of absurd relief at knowing my phone wouldn’t get sent flying across the park vanished when I realized that if it hit me or my boyfriend at the speed it was going, it could deal some serious damage. In my periphery I could see my boyfriend’s eyes widen as he realized what was happening.

“Shit!” He yelled. “Catch it!”

All of a sudden the ride flipped again, and my phone, which had been momentarily rattling around the bottom of the cage, shot up, directly towards my face. Reflexively I brought my hands up in front of me and clapped them together. The feeling of the phone between my palms made me sigh in relief, and for the duration of the ride I kept it in a deathgrip.

Eventually the ride slowed, with our cage still at the top. I shoved my phone into my boyfriend’s slightly-unzipped bag in case we started moving again, but it soon became clear that the ride was over. As we waited for the rest of the passengers to be unloaded and for our cage to clank down to ground-level, I couldn’t help but start laughing. My boyfriend tried to hold out and look sufficiently stern, but ultimately failed, and broke out into an exasperated grin.

“Next time it’s going into the bag,” he declared. “No arguments.” Needless to say, it went into the bag from there on out.

/STORYTIME.

So, yeah. I really can’t think of a better argument for slipping your phone somewhere a little less hazardous on carnival rides than the threat of an extremely ignoble injury (and/or death) by flying cell phone. Especially since the abovementioned incident occurred within a span of roughly ten seconds, which, in SoCal terms, is, like, hecka fast.

But despite our harrowing experience on the Zipper, my boyfriend and I continued on our ridefest*. We went on the Zipper, the Mega Drop, the Evolution, the Magnum, the Sky Flyer, and several others that I can’t remember, either because they were so ludicrously and/or generically named that I can’t match the name with the ride, or because the trauma caused me to repress the memories of them.

After a while we took a break to head over to the Ferris wheel to recover and fortify ourselves, which turned out to be a great idea. See, camera + high vantage point + gorgeous locale apparently = some cool photos. Also, I had forgotten that we were like this close to the ocean for a minute, and the view reminded me.

And this isn’t even a good picture of what we could see. Best city in the world? I think so.

I also got some pretty good shots of the whole Funzone.

That hellacious circle-y thing to the center-left is the Evolution. The doom-tower at the upper-right corner is the Mega Drop. Yeeeeeah.

I personally believe that there’s an inverse relationship between how colorful a game booth is and how likely you are to win a prize. Most of these booths are equally bright; you may draw your own conclusions.

The entrance to the park is WAYYYYYY down there. And yes, those are people dangling from that upper-left corner brontosaurus-looking ride. I politely declined to ride it, as I believe human bodies are not meant to be continuously catapulted headfirst for several minutes straight.

To conclude: I love the rides at the Del Mar Fair, dearly, and in my own prone-to-screaming way. And it’s way cheaper to go to the Fair than to go to any of the more popular SoCal amusement parks. Seriously: adult admission is $13—or free (!), if some awesome stranger gives you a ticket because he/she has an extra, which is what happened with me—and $30 will bag you an all-you-can-ride wristband. So go! Have fun! Spend your tourist dollars in lovely San Diego! And go read the next two installments of the Del Mar Fair trilogy!

*An interesting component of this was the ongoing attempt by the ride creators to name their rides in a manner designed to make us

a) Underestimate the intensity of their rides

and/or

b) Associate fairly innocuous household names and terms with unrelenting terror.