Here's an odd meme question I'm just now inventing:

If you could time travel as far back into the past as you wanted, but could only go within 100 miles of either your hometown or where you are right now, and couldn't actually see any people you know (paradoxes and all that, you know), where would you go and what would you do?

I'm thinking about this at the moment because I've had an awfully powerful yen of late to go back to the Lakeside Amusement Park in Salem, Virginia, which operated from the 1920's through 1986. It operated through most of the year and boasted a music hall (which hosted some big names of the time), a wooden roller coaster (the "Shooting Star", now at Emerald Pointe in North Carolina), and numerous carnival rides ranging from a merry-go-round and a ferris wheel to spinning cars to a multi-story slide. Up until the early 1980's you didn't even need to pay to get in--you just paid per ride. It was a lot of happy simple fun that's hard to find nowadays, at least not without traveling a lot farther and paying a lot more.

It got whacked by a triple-whammy: the Flood of 1985, the fact that the family who owned it kept passing it from year to year to different family members as a sort of tax dodge, and then a groundskeeper being decapitated by the roller coaster when he stuck his head up through the platform without noticing that the coaster was coming. That area of Salem is still called Lakeside but the site now has a strip mall and restaurants built atop it, though the rides (including the coaster) still exist, just dispersed.

I must be in a playful mood today, because I'd also go to the Smith Mountain Lake Waterslide, which ran through the 1970's to mid-1980's until it no longer made enough money to operate. For that matter, I'd love to go back and see any part of Smith Mountain Lake itself in the pre-rabid development days, when campgrounds were cheap and plentiful rather than built up with sardine-packed condominiums or McMansions.

And, knowing me, I'd probably also head back to our local K-Mart in 1977 and buy a horde of Star Wars toys.

Where would the rest of you go?