SA funfair specialty popular with amusement park lovers, handling Mickey’s tail is not for everyone. Using a cord to twirl a plush mouse with a detachable appendage requires maximum dexterity and a minimum of experience. In Paimpol (Côtes-d’Armor), Jean-François Le Moullec has been doing this for over forty years.
The owner of the Meteor 2000 – a ride with around ten cars, fire trucks and other helicopters bearing the image of characters well-known to children under 10 (Frozen, Lilo and Stitch, Paw Patrol, etc.) – has no equal when it comes to driving a cheerful clientele crazy, with their handcuffs held up to the sky. “It’s my hobby, explains the manager. I play with children, I like to tickle their noses with the pompom, to gently excite them, knowing that at the end, there is always a prize. In this case, a free ride for the fabric trophy winners.
Except that the heart is no longer in it. Or much less so. In January, the town hall informed Jean-François Le Moullec that it wanted to install permanent games on site and redevelop the square where the merry-go-round is set up during school holidays, except at All Saints’ Day when the attraction joins the local funfairs. “At the end of August, it’s over!” decreed the municipality, explaining that it wanted to highlight the local heritage. Remains of an 18th century churche century, a bell tower listed as a historical monument stands in the middle of the small square. Old stones and a kitsch carousel coexisted silently until then. “It didn’t bother anyone, laments the fairground operator in his booth. In a way, my ride is also part of the heritage, since we have been here for so long.”
Illustrious fairground family
At first, nothing predestined Jean-François Le Moullec to pilot a French-made rotating platform (Someplas brand). When he was younger, his future even seemed all mapped out: to succeed his father, who owned a household appliance store in Pleumeur-Gautier (Côtes-d’Armor). And then, the funfair stopped in the village. The Breton had a crush on Géraldine, the daughter of the managers of the Tourbillon, a caterpillar ride. Géraldine is “a Leprince”named after an illustrious fairground family from Normandy. The couple bought their first ride in 1980, which they installed in the car park of the Mammouth supermarket in Paimpol for its inauguration.
Finding a name for it was not easy. The association of a brand of beer tasted one evening at the bar and a date synonymous with the new millennium would finally do the trick. Acquired in 1993, a second ride would also be named Meteor 2000. The machine mounted on compressed air jacks has not changed one iota, with the exception of the resin heroes represented on the vehicles, renewed every five or six years, according to television fashions. Its regular installation in Square Théodore-Botrel – named after the creator of The Paimpolaise (1895), famous local song about a cliff that does not exist in Paimpol – dates from the end of the 1990s.
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