50 for 50: 22 - Play Carnival Games with Peggy

Peggy delayed in picking a 50 for 50 thing -- her husband and son signed right up, but she left it for later.  I guess she was just waiting for the perfect thing to magically appear.

So, a coupla weeks ago, she suggests we go to the LA County Fair and play all the carnival games.  Great!  I'm in!

We did not play ALL the carnival games at the Fair.  They have about 40 of them and the cheapest is $3.  (Although they do their best to hide that from you.  They sell you a bunch of tickets for 50 cents each-- Actually, they do their best to hide THAT from you, too -- never actually saying the tickets are 50 cents each, just offering 40 for $20 and various other "packages" of tickets, all at the same price ratio which they never actually STATE.  And it isn't even tickets -- you just get a single ticket with a bar code on it, and every game just scans the bar code to subtract the amount of tickets you're paying to play.  And the games are all 6 or 10 tickets.  Frequently 6 tickets for one try or 10 tickets for two.  ALL OF WHICH is a fantastic way for them to avoid saying, "This game is $5.")  ANYWAY.  There's 40 games at a minimum of $3 a pop; we weren't going to play all of them.  But there were a lot of duplicates, and we did make a pretty good effort at trying one of (most) everything.

I should back up for a moment and note that GETTING TO the LA County Fair, on the last weekend, is an exercise in ... well, given how far you have to hike from the parking lot, it's just an exercise.  They charge $15 for parking or $25 for "VIP" parking; the distinction only being how freakin' far from the Fair you're actually parking.  (There was a nearby hotel offering parking for $30, which was much closer to the Fair, but not really closer to the carnival games PART of the Fair, so I'm glad I was too cheap to park there.)  I was meeting Peggy (and family) there, so we weren't even sharing parking.  I ponied up my $15 and commenced walking toward the Fair.  About, I don't know, halfway there, I saw a line for the little tram to take you to the entrance.  A guy in a bright yellow traffic-directing vest told me it was only another 1/4-mile, so I figured I'd walk it.  I looked at the crowd around me and it dawned on me that this should probably a test.  Assuming you're an otherwise non-disabled individual, if your heart isn't able to walk the quarter-mile to the Fair, you probably shouldn't get that deep-fried Oreo once you get there.

As it turns out, Peggy got there just a few minutes after me, so parked in an only slightly-worse location.  We found each other just inside the gate.  Which was conveniently right where the carnival games were.  I bought a ton of tickets.  Seeing as there were three of Peggy, Sabing, and Jacob, they bought a megaton of tickets.

We.  Played.  Everything.  We stunk at the rebound-ball-against-angled-board-and-into-laundry-basket-below.  We also failed miserably at beer-pong-hold-the-beer.  I did poorly at shoot-out-the-star-without-enough-ammo-for-a-massive-prize-nobody-ever-wins.  But there were some upsides.  Jacob won a small prize at Skeeball, and a medium (I think) at pop-the-balloon-with-a-beanbag.  Working together, the three of them got a fidget spinner at shatter-plates-with-baseballs.  Our first real breakthrough was at roll-the-ball-to-move-your-horsey-across-and-there's-a-winner-every-game.  We joined a game of that and Sabing won!  And I discovered I have a knack for shoot-the-water-gun-at-the-tiny-target-and-there's-a-winner-every-game.  I won that one -- and was pretty pleased about it, because the prize on that one was a stuffed Groot.  And then later, Peggy noticed that one of the other stands with the same game had a stuffed Deadpool as a prize, so I played that one and won me a Deadpool!  

There was also a vast amount of teamwork at one of the more "play it enough and eventually you'll win" games.  That was one where there was a big flat board covered with divots your ball could land in, and you just pitched balls onto the board.  If you landed on a blue divot, you'd win a small prize, and a purple divot gave you a large prize.  There were lots of divots that didn't win you anything, but 20 tickets bought you 15 balls, so you had a lot of chances.  Jacob picked up two small prizes and a large one.  I picked up something like 6 small ones.  It took 9 small prizes to trade up for another large one, and we were one shy, so Peggy bought another set of balls and, on her very lastest try, nailed our 9th small prize -- so we were finally able to trade up.

(At this point, Peggy and I noted that we very likely could have stolen the 9th small prize.  While, at most games, the people running them are keeping custody of the prizes and have to hand them to you, this was not the case with the crappy small prizes at, let's call it toss-the-ball-into-the-blue-divot.  The crappy small prizes were kept in a tiny bin which was just over the railing right near where I was standing.  As I was playing the game, whenever I hit a blue square, one of the game attendants just told me to reach in the bin and grab a small prize.  This repeated.  A lot.  I tried to make eye contact with them so they'd verify I'd hit the blue divot before I reached into the bin, but lots of people were playing and they were not paying super close attention.  When the whole thing was done and they added up my crappy small prizes with Jacob's crappy small prizes and realized we had only 8, it was very clear to me and Peggy that we could've easily sneaked a 9th one in there and nobody would've noticed.  But we didn't, because it would've been, y'know, wrong.)  

When all was said and done, we'd actually obtained a reasonable quantity of prizes.

We stopped for some food -- I made some bad choices, but somehow managed to leave the Fair without partaking of anything deep fried (or "onna stick!"), so I'm putting that in the "draw" column, if not an actual "win."  (We also took a brief detour into the Zoo part of the Fair, and saw an ostrich, a zebra, and a giraffe -- sharing the same enclosure, for some damn reason -- but they didn't seem real happy to be there, and the part of me that thinks zoos are probably a really bad idea took over.  Peg shared the same thought, so we departed the zoo while some keeper was getting started on a monkey show.)

We must also include this photo of Peg holding a bunch of the prizes while Jacob and I were playing Skeeball, because she made the fantastic discovery that the donuts double as fancy hats.

Carnival Games was one of those "50 for 50" choices that wasn't exactly a "bucket list" item.  I mean, I've played carnival games before -- although generally in moderation, keenly aware of the conversion rate of tickets into money, the cheapness of the prizes, and the ways in which most of the games are (if not actually FIXED) designed to be harder than they look.  This time, approaching Carnival Games as an end unto itself -- kinda like if we had gone to a casino to blow some money at the tables -- it was just a few hours of silly fun.  We got to play together and encourage each other (and team up to get the second donut) and we ended up with a bunch of a fun stuff (including my adorable Deadpool!) to remember it by.  Utterly satisfying.