Sunny, mostly calm, mid 80s. Again.

Pretty hard to complain about today.

I think the Fairgrounds might have been open yesterday.  After my ride I drove past on the way to the bakery.  It sure LOOKED open but I was in my car on my way to the bakery, I don't know.

I know for sure the grounds were open today.  I was on my bicycle out for a nowhere in particular to go anyway bicycle ride and I went inside.

In special recognition of the Kiwanis Rest Stop located in Michigan and occasionally highlighted on this blog, here is the Kiwanis Malts location in front of the Fine Arts Building.

It's also a great shot from immediately after the Fair with a couple of the portable concession stands still in place.  Here you get both a Pronto Pups stand and a Foot Long hotdog stand.

Of course cuisine over there has evolved from when these were cutting edge eats at the Fair, but still, this is real old school junk food at the Fair stuff.  There's real Fair food history there.  Probably also of interest is that that part of the Fairgrounds is adjacent to what used to be referred to as Machinery Hill.  Used to be referred to that way, there are no tractors there any more.

I really wanted to get back on the grounds before it rained and by getting there today I was successful in that quest.  I didn't want to miss the chance for one of my favorite post Fair photos before the rain washed a bunch of the grease away.

This is right outside the Food Building.

The ungreased area is where that onion ring stand was located.  The big grease stain foreground is the location of the pick up your order window.  Off to the right is the order your greasy food and maybe have to walk around to get some napkins or seasoning area.

Greasy, no?

The midway is mostly gone but even on this Thursday after the Fair there is still lots of machinery that is still being disassembled for trucking to the next place where they are going to need something that big.

That guy frame right is reattaching tail light assemblies to a trailer that was for the course of the Fair part of the attraction.  It didn't need tail lights then, plenty of other lights clearly visible, so the tail lights were disassembled.  That stuff needs to be put back on before that big rig hits the highway to the next stop.

Just riding around I also found that arch that was discovered last fall in the wooded area a couple of blocks off the Fairgrounds.

The arch has begun the refurbishing process, old paint stripped, primer applied.  I don't think that the finished product will look even remotely like this but at least now I know where it will be located.

Anyone who is not a fan of John Sandford can pretty much stop reading now.  The rest of this is going to be a pretty heavy dose of Lucas Davenport.

At the recently concluded summer reading festival I breezed through the two Sandford novels (one Virgil Flowers and one Lucas Davenport) published since the last previous summer reading festival.  Of perhaps more import to this discussion is that during the past season of too cold and too much sleep (aka winter) I breezed through, oh, I don't know, the first maybe eighteen or so, or maybe more, of what is as of this moment the twenty-four novel Prey series.

I had some impressions about exactly where Lucas lives and the location of the big new house.  In the massive re-read I paid particular attention to references to the house.

One thing that really stuck out is that the house is described as being located where Lucas could see the red buoy in the Mississippi above the dam from the upstairs window of his house.

That red speck out there is the red buoy nearest to the dam on the upstream side.

Here is the house closest to where I stood to take the buoy picture.

It has a second floor, an upstairs if you will.  I am pretty sure you could see the buoy from that window over the garage.

The house also qualifies as it has a driveway in front, there are many references to Lucas pulling the Porsche off the River Road into the driveway.

But I don't know, tuck under garage just doesn't seem right.

But it does qualify as being very near to the Ford Parkway pie shop/restaurant where Lucas and, was it Del, or Sloane maybe, meet for lunch on at least a couple of occasions.  The restaurant is described as being within a mile of Lucas's house.

This house clearly satisfies that criterion as well.

And here is the only other house that fits the can see the buoy from the upstairs window criterion, it is not quite next door to the first.

Same problems with the tuck under garage, but also same can see the buoy from there, same pull in driveway, same within a mile of lunch location.  This one also is closer to an intersection and there is a reference in one of the books to a miscreant who was stalking the detective who parked on a nearby side street and walked around to surveil Lucas's house.

There is also the question of the BIG NEW HOUSE.

Sandford uses a lot of stuff from his personal life (write what you know) in the creation of his characters.  So even though neither of these houses qualifies as the big new house, after some consideration I have come to believe that the autobiographical nature of the details concerning the new house relate NOT to whichever house was the original model for the house on the River Road.  I know that Sandford himself built a BIG NEW HOUSE out there in, was it Afton, or was it Hudson?  The details of the building that he used in the books where the new construction is part of the narrative are from the house out on the Saint Croix.

After all, there was never an actual shoot out in whichever house was the model for the original Davenport home.  There is no reason to believe that the location of the model for the original house requires that there have been massive reconstruction.

I therefore no longer consider the house that I previously considered to be the most likely location of where Lucas lives to be the real deal.  I now like one or another of these.

I warned you.  Don't read it it you don't obsess over where Lucas Davenport lives.

I also have an opinion or two about which of those downtown warehouse buildings is the actual converted to condominiums location which is the current residence of Kidd.