Feria Tepatitlan de Morelos

Time for the first fair of the trip and in my hobby you'd have to be pretty stupid or devoted to spend as much time researching and finding parks around the world as I do. You'd have to be even more stupid to do the same thing for fairs as their transitory nature makes it nigh on impossible to work out what would be where when. Thomas is way better at finding fairs than I am and our rivalry inevitably ends up leading to us finding so many fairs that Tal has to rein us in and tell us to stop. 

The first fair was located on the drive back to Aguascalientes in the small town of Tepatitlan de Morelos. Thomas knew it had a fair in April but there was no visual evidence of what rides, if any, they had.

So it came as a complete surprise to be welcomed by a custom mouse coaster with a rather ridiculous helix element which looked to be too tight for the car. 

Ratoncito ("Mousy") is a horrible ride, which starts off fine but as soon as it hits that element the lateral whiplash is too much. Before riding a little local kid tried to gesticulate for me to take my glasses off but I commented they'd be ok. Needless to say when I came out of that helix I was furiously try to grab them, the smashing of my body into the side of the train had sent the glasses flying off my face. So a word to the wise, heed the locals advice :)

Gus, we'd come to discover is a popular name for these kiddy rides. Whether or not you get permission to ride these seems to depend on whether the operator gets your money or not. If you pay per ride in most cases you can ride no problem, however if you pay once to enter the fair, as we did here then they already have your money and can turn you down.

Unlike some enthusiasts who'd do all they can to ride whether it's bribes, intentional waiting by the ride, or physical imposing on the operator, I'm pleased that I have good company that doesn't get too upset when denied a ride although they did have to drag me away when I claimed I could have the operator in a fight (it's the kid in white - yep he must be about 12)

The powered Dragon was located away from the other rides and didn't appear to be running.

The fair had a really good selection of rides.

Wacky Worm #3 was an easy one for us to ride. No challenge here at all.

Standard fair staples were also in attendance. The matching colour schemes perhaps a sign that they belonged to the same showman who had too much bright paint close at hand.

Mexican Tagadas feature the dancers in the middle who encouraged the public to come and join them in the centre.

The Dragon did open an hour after we arrived, so we did get to ride it after all.

and that was the fair. We weren't expecting anything here so to have gotten 3 of the 4 and one of them being a decent sized mouse was great. What wasn't so great was the emotional scars that ride left with us, but at least we have a story to tell the grandkids I'll never have.

On returning to our car we realised we must have driven through a cloud of bugs as quite a number of them chosen to fly into our car. What's the last thing to go through a fly's head when it hits your car? It's tail.

From this fair we drove to another fair

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