We do have a carnival in our second episode, and in the third episode, Elena and Damon and Alaric travel together to Duke University, where Isobel, Alaric's wife and Elena's birth mother, met and lived together. She studied the paranormal and was an expert in the anthropology department which is how she disguised her vampire research. She had become obsessed with Mystic Falls and dug deep into the history of the town. So on their trip, they dig into her dusty files to see what she may have known that they don't know.