Fishing time.

This weekend is a statutory holiday in British Columbia, which means my crew is off enjoying themselves and getting paid too. It was only fair that I did a little enjoyable work on my mechanical fish project. The deadline is now less than a month distant.

Today was time for some serious paint. I first laid on the base coats for the rockwork, painting from five different color cans of paint at the same time. The colors were a little bright (on purpose) but I'd tone that down in a bit.

The look I am going for is built in the 1930's, used heavily for three decades and then abandoned and forgotten ever since. The piece needed a serious coat of grunge and grime to make it believeable. Lots of rust on the cast iron would also help.

With all the hard to reach bits now painted it was time for one last coat of the metallic blue and then final assembly of the dock. I loved what I saw.

The fish was then docked for storage, while the paint cures and the rust finishes forming. It is a twenty-four hour process.

Now it is time to get back to work getting organized and ready for the crew, bright and early tomorrow morning.

Stay tuned for the next installement...

-grampa dan

FUN! Everywhere we turn.

Today was spent moving our son Peter into his new house. As I was on the road I thought about a cool directional sign for the adventure park. The park is small enough that we can see from end to end and folks should have no trouble finding their way around. Still an imaginative directional sign would be fun. Then the perfect solution came to mind.

How about a directional sign pointing out that fun is every which way we look?

-grampa dan

Meet me at the saloon

Designing a theme park is probably one of the most challenging things I do. For better than ten years I designed and led our team as we worked on building new themes for existing attractions at West Edmonton Mall. Occasionally we worked on new rides which was always exciting. All of that was great training for the project now in progress. I'm sure glad I have that decade of experience to draw on as we'll as another decade and a half of designing and building smaller theme parks.

Now we are on a fast track to design and build an entire medium sized theme park from scratch. Traffic flow, sight lines, staffing, ride envelopes and a hundred other things all come into play. Because some of the rides are previously owned, we also have to figure out ways to blend themes and yet keep a believeable story line with Giggle Ridge - a turn of the century (1900's) logging camp. It is all challenging.

One large area of the new park will be western in theme. A saloon building (to house a concession and washrooms) was an obvious choice of themes. Today I worked up the concept art for the building. I called on distant memories of my visits to Knott's Berry Farm and old spaghetti westerns from years ago, blending that with a little of Giggle Ridge. The name of the saloon was a nod to Giggle Ridge as were the tree posts on the front and back porch. The date '1864' is a celebration of Chris' (one of the owners) birthday but backed up a hundred years.

The old time saloon will be a great place to grab a root beer or other beverage of your choice without a doubt and the two benches out front will be prime spots to watch the gun fights at high noon. See ya there pard'ner.

-grampa dan