…not a song by War
CritterCon 2025 (#18)
Trip Day Six
In which we travel in our sleep, awaken back in Canada, see roadside dinosaurs, encounter a clown parade, have a Taco Wednesday, see our latest beer museum, sing goodbye to a rock legend, resume a cherished tradition, and finally get to the convention.
At 3:00 in the morning, Sweetie cloaked herself and flew us south over Lake Huron until we were in Sarnia, Ontario. This cut about 400 miles of driving off of our day. That is a good thing, as was the fact that we sent out a few drones to watch for trafffic and cops. That allowed us to average about 80 miles an hour.
We left Sarnia after breakfast, and didn’t reach our first roadside attraction for about an hour. That was when we got to Dinosaurland. Unlike many other such dino based places, this one was not built as an attraction or to advertise anything. It was built by local school students from several schools, purely to show they could build something neat.
My friends, there are about 160 dinosaurs here, but they are A: All no bigger than about 6 foot tall, and B: Not limited to depicting realistic dinosaurs. Indeed, there were a couple of Godzillas. There were even about a dozen kids there building more dinosaurs. We spent almost an hour there.
Sadly, in 1975, the local river flooded and wiped Dinosaurland out. However, in 1999, students began rebuilding the attraction. We may check it out someday.
Later down the road, and after a few games had been played, we entered the town of Brantford and saw a street full of clowns. Like, a couple of hundred of them. Seems like it was time for the annual Clown Parade. So, most of us being okay with clowns in the light of day, we stopped to watch it.
There were professional clowns, amateur clowns, old clowns, kid clowns, families of clowns, dog clowns, horse clowns, and even a goat clown. There was music, magic tricks, slapstick humor, and general merriment. It was pretty fun and only a bit creepy. We watched the whole parade pass by, which only took about half an hour. Upon getting back on The Bus, I looked the parade up and found that they stopped doing it in the mid-80s due to “drunken troublemakers”.
It being a bit after lunch time, the kitchen staff set up a great taco bar for us. There was pretty much every sort of taco ingredient you can imagine I personally put away two fish tacos and two shrimp tacos. Everyone left the dining room full, which resulted in several naps.
When we reached Buffalo, New York, it was time to visit our last attraction, The Buffalo Beer Museum. We’ve beeen to a couple of beer museums before, but many states south, and generaly in Current Time, so we figured this would be cool, and it was.
Being in 1964, we saw old beer cans & bottles that were way newer than in the 21st Century. They had about 300 different beers represented. They also had signs, lots of promo stuff, and even several wooden kegs. It was fun for some of us, but the kids got back on Sweetie after about 10 minutes. And yes, they had merch and we bought it.
Once we left Buffalo behind, we popped back into 2025 and shortly learned that Ozze Osbourne had died on Tuesday. It didn’t take much discussion to decide that our song & dance break would be “Crazy Train”, in his honor.
A few hours later, in the small town of Mosherville, we stopped and did it. It was quite a wild song & dance, and several locals saw it. We didn’t care. Thanks for the great tunes, Prince of Darkness.
We had just about caught our breath and were heading to The Bus, when Blue said, “Wait. I…I think….Fuck it! Sweetie, hit us!”
And then we were singing “Bohemian Rhapsody”, the song we used to sing when members of the Awesome Eight were still alive. It was both emotionally wrenching and cathartic. When we were done, only the kids were not crying. Then we all got back onboard and explained to them why we cried.
A little less than an hour later, we were in Vermont and turning offf the road into a state campground. Then we turned onto a road that only we could see and descended underground into a well lit tunnel. We cranked our speed up to 90 and were coming out of the tunnel into Critter City, Vermont for the first time.
Folks, it’s late and I’m tired and a bit tipsy, so I’ll talk about our arrival tomorrow. See ya then!
Destination Sign When We Started: Barsoom
Destination Sign When We Stopped: Mars
QM Radio Station: MROW Cat Rock
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