You Win Some, You Lose Some, You Win Some

Every year in Maine we carefully plan our activities around the weather. We usually have only 5 or 6 days so if we plan non-beach activities on a sunny day, and end up with nothing to do on a rainy day, a good portion of our vacation will have been misspent.
This is why Mrs. Poop carefully selected the day we would take Chase to the amusement park at the pier.
We bought the unlimited ticket and for $23 (it's $2.40 for individual rides) little Chase could ride to his heart's content.

He rode the bear, the elephant...



the motorcycle, the jeep and several others.



We counted. He got to 10. And then they shut the ride down because of an impending thunderstorm. We thought it would pass. It didn't, we never got back on the rides.

But we did hit the arcade. At first we were just waiting under cover hoping the rain would stop. Then we all started to get antsy until I spotted a video game the whole family could enjoy: Deal or No Deal.

In the arcade version of the game you play for tickets instead of dollars. I let Chase pick every case number by hitting the buttons and he chose case 10, then proceeded to go on a ridiculous run, nailing 5 of the 6 smallest cases in the first round. We decided to keep going all the way to the end because we still had the 1000 tickets in play. But when we eliminated 75 with 3 cases less I told Chase to take the deal.



The best part of it was, it took a few minutes to play the game, but it took at least 10 minutes for it to dispense 502 tickets. And unlike the old days they don't want their functionally illiterate counter employees counting tickets. So when you are done, you have to insert your tickets into another machine to count them. Then it prints you one slip with a big number on it and you take that to the toy counter.




That took another 10 or 15 minutes. Chase ended up with a light up toy car that wasn't even worth the two dollars we put into the game, but by the time we were done it had let up sufficiently to allow us to go somewhere else for dinner.
A good deal if you ask me.