bobquasit | A Day At The Races

This is a long and somewhat experimental post. So against all sanity, I'm putting it all behind an LJ cut.

Oh, what a day.

If only I could wrap it up in cellophane and keep it on a shelf to be taken out and cherished in years to come. Since I can't, this will have to do.

Sebastian woke up at our normal weekday time, 5:50 AM. But he was being very good; he asked to play on the computer, but was willing to play quietly in his room for a while. After about twenty minutes he told me he needed to go to the bathroom, so I opened the gate at the top of the stairs; I expected him to ask me to go with him to the bathroom, but he went by himself without a word.

When he came back he asked for the computer again, so I turned it on and set him up on the PBS Sprouts website. That's one of his favorites. While he played, I got another half hour of sleep or so; after that, I accompanied him downstairs.

Now, I hate hate hate hate HATE television, and I fear what it may do to him. But he begged me for TV, and I'm not always good at saying no. I think I'm better at it than Teri is, but still, there are times that I give in. I forget what he wanted to watch, but luckily I remembered that we'd bought a new DVD (for the first time in months) the night before: The Iron Giant. So I put it in and watched it with him.

That's a great movie, in my book. I bought it as much for myself as for him. And, as always, I got choked up like crazy at two points in the end: when the giant says "Superman", and the closing shot. I had to fight back the tears.

Sebastian absolutely loved the movie.

Teri woke up and saw the last half, and then we drove her to the animal shelter. After that, we headed for Seekonk Grand Prix, a go-kart track I'd recently remembered passing.

A long time ago my parents took us to a go-kart track up near Bar Harbor, Maine; we hadn't planned to stop there, but it was about an eight-hour drive and when my brother and I saw the track through the car window we begged to stop and ride. We had a hell of a lot of fun - obviously I've never forgotten it - and I won one or two races at least.

Naturally I was pretty excited to find a track so close to us.

But when I'd talked to Sebastian about it during the previous two weeks, he'd actually been frightened by the idea of go-karts. In fact, he'd begged me to take him to the zoo instead, the week before (so I did). This time, though, he seemed totally fine when I brought up the idea of going to the track. So we dropped Teri off and headed for the races.

	Coffee & Cream fountain On the way, we saw that the Coffee & Cream drive-in fountain was actually on, which happens very rarely. I asked Sebastian if he wanted to stop and take a picture, and of course he did. We pulled into the parking lot of the gas station parking that was next to it and snapped a few shots; this was the best one. I feel bad that we didn't buy anything, but we were in a rush. Incidentally, I noticed that the language on the giant coffee cup and sign was the same as that used inside the sit-down Coffee & Cream restaurant a few miles away on 146A (next to the Beef Barn), so that answers a longstanding question: the two are almost certainly owned by the same people.
	Sebastian looks up We got to Seekonk Grand Prix before 11 AM; I more than half expected them to be closed, but they were open. The place was pretty empty, though. In fact, when we went out through the back of the game room and onto the tracks, we were the only ones there apart from the two guys running things. The Kids Track, Slick Track, Bumper Boats, and mini-golf were closed; the only things left were the family track and the bumper cars. Here's Sebastian looking up at the sign for the tracks.
	The Family Track I'd bought six tickets for $20, so we went to the family track. Here it is. It was actually pretty long, with a loop that passed under itself and another that went under an artificial stone mountain. The echoes of the engine as we went under were tremendous. Incidentally, although the signs said that the engines were electric (and I heard one of the operators telling some slightly rowdy kids later on that he could kill any engine by remote control, if need be), the engines sounded a lot like lawnmowers to me.
	At the track We only needed one ticket for the two of us to ride in a kart (together, of course). For each ticket we got to make three or four circuits. I kept the accelerator floors almost continually; I don't know what the top speed was, perhaps 20 mph, but it felt fast and the wind was cold. There was a bump at one point on the track that gave us a good solid jolt every time we went over it. Sebastian loved it, so I made sure to hit it every time. He spent the entire ride laughing, pretending to steer, and singing odd songs. After using up a couple of tickets, we got off the track; a heavy-set little boy and his father got on, and we watched them from the bleachers. After a ride or two the father begged off, saying that he needed to go inside and let his face unfreeze. I was amused, since he was younger than me and had a full head of hair - but I could sympathize, too. It was starting to warm up, but it was still only in the mid 50s at best.
	The mini-golf is closed After that we went for a ride on the bumper cars, at Sebastian's insistence. I pointed out that it's kind of pointless to ride in a bumper car if you're the only ones doing it, but Sebastian still insisted on riding and insisted on sharing a bumper car with me. Fortunately the young guy running the ride (he'd also been running the family track) got into a bumper car himself, and so we bumped back and forth with him. Sebastian loved it and laughed himself silly. After that Sebastian really wanted to see the miniature golf area, even though it was closed; nobody was around, and the place wasn't roped off or anything, so we went and spent a good bit of time walking on it (and you can see it in the picture at the left). At one point a rather large rabbit jumped out of the bushes near us and dashed away; we both got a good look at it, but there was no time for a photo. Sebastian particularly liked a cannon there (the whole thing had a nautical theme), and I promised him that we'd come back in the spring when the course was open. After that we went back and used up our remaining three tickets on the family track. Again, we were the only riders on the track at the time. When we finally stopped, though, there were ten or twelve people waiting to use the track. They seemed to be a big bunch of friends ranging from 13-16, although it's sometimes hard to tell. It was noon now. I had promised to pick up Teri at 1:50, and we were both hungry, so I herded Sebastian to the game room and the exit despite his pleas for me to buy some more tickets. I told him that we had to hurry; I hated to disappoint him, though, so I bought a dollar's worth of tokens to play in the game room. I hoped to run through the tokens quickly. We played a bowling game. Sebastian tried to bowl a few times, but simply couldn't get the ball up the ramp and into a hole, so I did all the bowling. But I hadn't realized that you won tickets for playing; we won four tickets, which turned out to be enough for only the very tiniest prizes. Sebastian set his heart on a blue clear plastic dolphin prize as soon as he saw it, but that took 35 tickets; at the rate we were going, it would take hours to win that many. I turned a couple more dollars into tokens, and did some more bowling; did better, but still ended up with only 18 tickets. However, we went over to another game - a "sink the Titanic" game which was ridiculously simple - and did well enough on that to get a total of 50 tickets. We blew our remaining tickets on an air hockey game. Sebastian did surprisingly well at that. Once we'd finished, we got the dolphin and a couple of other cheesy little prizes, and took off.
	Accident on 195 It was 1 PM, and I was worried. It had only taken us about 20 minutes to get to the track from animal shelter, but on the way down I'd noticed that the traffic on 195 in the opposite direction was absolutely horrible. There was construction going on, with four lanes being squeezed down to two. But the traffic turned out to be even worse than I'd expected, because not only was there construction, there was an accident. I was going slow enough to snap a one-handed picture. If you look carefully, you can see a girl on a stretcher being taken to an ambulance. I got a decent look at her (better than in this photo), and she looked okay; she was sitting up and smiling a bit.
	Wall being demolished on 195, Providence Further on we passed that construction. They were tearing a wall down at the side of the road.
	Sebastian sleeping in the car Sebastian was starving, and let me know that in no uncertain terms; unfortunately the time we'd spent getting that blue dolphin had killed our chance to have lunch before picking Teri up. Fortunately Sebastian eventually fell asleep.

We picked Teri up (with Sebastian still sleeping), and drove to Wright's Chicken Farm for a late lunch. Once there, we woke Sebastian up; he wasn't too crabby, but immediately burst out with a mighty "I'm HUNGRY!".

We had a great lunch, then went home and at Sebastian's request watched The Iron Giant again. Then I gave him a shower which went better than usual (actually, very well indeed), took him up to his room, tucked him into bed, and read him Tim To The Rescue until he fell asleep.

I talked with Teri until she fell asleep, then had a late dinner and wrote all this. And now I'm going to bed. Tomorrow's my morning to sleep in, so I'll spend a few extra hours lounging in bed and dreaming.

Life is good.