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Today was supposed to be a big day for our family.  We were finally going to go to Kiddieland.

I guess you’d call Kiddieland a miniature amusement park.  It has a gazillion rides, food, games, etc.  But, it’s for the younger set.  No gigantic roller coasters or drop-from-a-million-miles-up rides.  Mostly spinning, swinging, coasting rides.  Kiddieland has apparently been a fixture in a town close to ours since 1929, but this is it’s last year of operation.

One of the cable channels the kids watch advertises for Kiddieland and my kids are always begging to go.  They can recite the commercial verbatim.  So, imagine their excitement when I told them we were going!  It turns out that Jack’s new scout troop planned a family outing to Kiddieland for today.  We turned our money in last week to get the discounted fee and packed the kids up late this morning.  The flier said to meet at the front entrance (there’s only one) at noon.

We were about 15 minutes early and walked over to the front gate, bypassing a HUGE line of people.  We didn’t see anyone we recognized, but being new to the troop, that’s not surprising.  However, we also didn’t see anyone in a scout uniform.  Or anyone handing out tickets to a group of people.  At noon, Kiddieland opened it’s gates and the people with tickets already in hand went to the left and the ten thousand people without stood in line until it was their turn to purchase tickets to get into the park.

Still, we saw NO ONE.  No one giving out tickets, no one in a uniform, no one recognizably from our school, and no one standing around like us looking around for someone to give them tickets.

The kids, of course, were increasingly impatient.  They couldn’t WAIT to get into that park!  Dan and I started snipping at one another.  Finally, we split up.  I stayed at the front gate with two kids, while he took the other two and perused the parking lot, looking for someone we knew, a uniform, or a car with our school’s logo on it.  While I waited, I pulled out my trusty iPhone, pulled up the email that was sent about the event and double checked my facts.  (I have been known to screw up a date or two.)  This time I was right on.  When Dan returned, defeated, I showed him the info and asked him to read it, too.  He agreed we had all the info right.

I emailed the two people that had sent out the information, then managed to find their phone numbers as well.  I called, but of course they weren’t home.  I did leave messages – in the off chance I was talking to a cell phone or someone would check their messages remotely.  After all, we really wanted to get into Kiddieland.

We saw no one.  We heard from no one.  The kids were starting to melt.  I had to pee.  We decided to leave.  We hated to do it, but the line to buy tickets was well over an hour long and, anyway, we had already bought tickets!  $117 worth!

There were tears and some gnashing of teeth.  A wail or two.  Dan and I just felt completely downtrodden.  How awful!  We promised our kids Kiddieland, built up the excitement, went there, and then had to pull them away and tell them we wouldn’t be going in.

We told the kids we’d head over to the nice McDonald’s to grab some lunch and play, which seemed to mollify them.  Once there, we even got everyone an ice cream.  This returned the smiles to their faces, at least temporarily.

Dan and I, however, are still seething about it all.  How could this happen?  Even if the person with tickets was late or in an accident or something, we still would have seen other people from our group by the entrance, searching and milling about, right?  We didn’t have the date wrong.  I had several emails about the event (and others) so clearly I would have received an email if it had been canceled.  Right?

This was our first scouting event with our new troop.  This does not bode well.