I used to write long, detailed trip reports of all my roller coaster trips for my Livejournal, including long past the time most people still had a Livejournal. (Fun fact: Joseph still updates his LJ every single day.) I fell out of the habit because it started to feel like a chore. The last one I did was my first big coaster trip with Joseph in 2013, which we refer to as Pennsylvania Parks Tour; I got partway into writing about the day at Conneaut Lake Park and I was so intent on expressing what an otherworldly experience that was, that I never felt satisfied with what I wrote and never finished it.

These days, all that work instead goes into editing my trip photos and posting them to Flickr. The captions serve as my record of the trip. But, as you've perhaps noticed, I am usually about six months behind on processing my photo rolls (though right now I've gotten it down to about four months!). By the time anyone can have a look at what I've been doing, it's very old news. So, I'm going to try out just grabbing a handful of favorite photos, mostly unedited, and writing just a few notes about each park instead of a novel, on the principle that a trip report that isn't up to my excessive standards is better than no trip report at all.

That's my prelude to telling you about my European trip from early June. It wasn't actually a roller coaster trip, though roller coasters happened in it. It was actually a trip to attend an academic conference. I have tried to get to an international animal ethics or animal studies conference around every three years, starting with Minding Animals I in 2009, which was in Australia. In 2015 I attended a conference at the University of Rennes 2, in Rennes, Brittany, France. (There is also a University of Rennes 1. At one point in its history the University split into two.) The conference was titled "Animal Liberation: Forty Years On" and was open to presentations in both French and English. The "Animal Liberation" of the title is the seminal animal ethics book by Peter Singer, who is not just a superstar of the animal ethics subfield but is probably one of the most influential and best-known living academic philosophers. Singer was at that conference and I ended up being seated next to him at both a dinner and a luncheon, so I got a rather insane amount of face-time with him. (There's also a story about how an actual recurring academic nightmare I have came true and I had to admit to him I can't really read German... but that's another tale for another rambling discourse.) When, last winter, I received a call for abstracts for an upcoming Rennes 2 conference "Animal Liberation: Fifty Years and Beyond," I said to Joseph, "I got an email from Rennes... they're getting the band back together." So, I tossed a rather impulsively chosen topic their way and then had the terror of having it accepted and having to actually write the thing before the conference in early June.

I set worrying about that aside until grades were in, figuring I'd just use May to write the presentation. I actually set up my end of term last semester so that I had the least ever final grading to do, and as a result I finished the earliest I ever have in my history of teaching. I didn't even know about the conference at the time, but was inspired by one of my colleagues telling me (with a touch of shame) that the reason he was able to get all his grading for winter term done so early is that he gave all multiple choice finals. I thought, yeah, what the hell, I've been working too hard too many years, and I did the same. I gave my usual part-essay midterms, but assigned all-Scantron finals except in my smallest seminar course.

So the last two-thirds of May was spent laboring in the word mines every night, writing a quota of text before bed (nearly a third of which ultimately ended up being cut to make my test readings fit in the time limit), no matter if "bed" didn't come until 5 or 6 am as a result. Meanwhile, I planned a trip that would, of course, hit amusement parks. When I go somewhere for work, I figure out one or two amusement parks I can do in the vicinity, so that I can get partly compensated for my travel costs from my department (I have a limit that I easily exceed, so it's really just a partial defraying) while also getting roller coasters I'd never see otherwise. Originally I had a trip planned that included Disneyland Paris and Parc Asterix, the two largest parks in France, after the conference. Then I started noticing that both parks had suspiciously longer than usual hours scheduled that weekend. I knew some holiday must be going on and checked into it. The weekend after my trip would be Pentecost, which is apparently a very popular holiday for going to amusement parks in France, approximately equivalent to Memorial Day in terms of being a start-of-summer holiday. Crowd calendars estimated the parks to be absolutely slammed that weekend. It would also be a very expensive trip, and I began thinking I wasn't willing to pay the kind of money it would take to do those parks (especially Disney) while going on an exceptionally crowded day.

So, I went looking for other parks in France and perhaps nearby countries that would be interesting and unique. I figured I may as well go somewhere smaller where even a big crowd wouldn't be as ruinous as a big crowd at a major park. I hit upon something that looked like an absolute gem, Nigloland, in the Grand Est region of France. "Niglo" is a hedgehog mascot whose name apparently derives from a Romani word for hedgehog. And the park is full of basically the Niglo version of Disney rides, including a sort of Country Bear Jamboree called the Niglo Show, their version of Space Mountain, their version of the Jungle Cruise, etc. I love that kind of home-grown weirdness so I started getting very excited about seeing Nigloland. The only thing that worried me is that I could not figure out a good way to get there. Supposedly there is a shuttle that one can take from Troyes (the capital city of that region) directly to the park during peak season, but the park's Web site just said that information on it was "coming soon" which I took to mean it wasn't operating yet and wouldn't be for our visit. I figured out how to take the train to the closest train station, but from there it would still be necessary to find a car to the vicinity of the park. The train station really looked like it might be in the middle of nowhere and I was concerned. Joseph assured me not to worry, there would surely be taxis at the train station. I tried to find coaster enthusiast trip reports to Nigloland and the only one I could find referenced taking a taxi from the train station so I figured that is what we would have to do. (Uber isn't a thing in most of France.) I pride myself in having every aspect of a trip hammered out before I go, including exactly how I will get from point A to point B at every stage of the trip, and I have a very good track record of well-planned international trips, as Joseph can attest. (At one point he told me in another life I could have been a travel agent.) So this part kept worrying at me, but I was going to have to roll with it.

For a second park, I looked instead to neighboring countries and decided to do Plopsaland, which is just over the border in Belgium, on the coast. It's rather notorious among coaster enthusiasts due to having an especially intense and strangely-themed coaster called The Ride to Happiness.

Normally I prefer to do all my touring after a conference so that it isn't hanging over me, but this time I wanted to try to do one of the parks at a time other than Pentecost, so I slated us to go to Nigloland just before my conference, and Plopsaland during the holiday weekend, since it seemed as though Pentecost, while also a holiday in Belgium, wasn't quite as big of a deal there for going to amusement parks. Joseph (who of course came with me) checked on his coaster counts and determined that he would be getting his number 300 coaster milestone at Nigloland. If everything went according to plan, it promised to be both an exciting academic experience and a once-in-a-lifetime coaster tour.

And that's where I'm leaving the introductory part of my trip report, to resume later with our first epic, elongated day of travel, during which I saw a carousel I thought I would never see.