Having gone to Coral Gables the day before our anniversary, what was there to do on our actual anniversary but visit an amusement park? I took the day --- a Tuesday --- off work and pitched that we might visit Indiana Beach, which we haven't been to in years and which is having its centennial. But that's a very long day trip and we'd have to both leave the park before sunset and I'd get short sleep. Instead we went to Cedar Point, which among other things made it easy for us to get to bed on time as they closed at 9 pm.
We hoped that a midweek visit might be a return to the low-attendance days we enjoyed before I had an office job with specific hours. Also we hoped that the weather might keep people away from the park or at least keep them in the water park. Perhaps it worked too well. We would have great riding, with the triumph being Steel Vengeance on a mere fifteen-minute wait. (This partly because the ride was closed for a while and we happened to be nearby when it reopened). But the weather ... well, this was that part of late June/early July when the heat dome was smothering us and we were facing sequences of days above 495 degrees.
So while we shared the park with relatively few people, we also shared it with a blazing sun making it impossible to move between attractions, at least not without dreadful cost to our health bar. We had to pretty near stop in for a fountain drink any time we wanted to go from one ride or attraction to another, and at that still had to sit in what shade we could find and recover.
Besides trying out all the freestyle coke machines at the park --- and finding how many of them had run out of ice (you know it's hot when I'm looking for ice) --- we also somehow managed to miss the fries/cheese-on-a-stick stand up front being open, although we saw the customers of the day going through it at like 3 pm. Maybe it's some staffing shortage thing. American employers never have really recovered from the pandemic when they decided to kill a million people lest The Economy suffer.
The park was decorated, in part for the sasquatchcentennial. Want to feel old? July 4 was not even six weeks ago. Remember anything about it? Nope. But they had 250th signs up front, and inflatable statues all over, including a fun one of of a fries-wielding seagull in Uncle Sam top hat. We had the bad luck to go the one day of the week that had a minimum of special events, though --- a Peanuts show, a costume contest that we missed, and an eating contest we would not have gone to --- and I was startled they didn't even have fireworks for the week. (They had them scheduled only for the 4th of July.) They also had a little Presidential Walk of Fame set up showcasing the eight Presidents who came from Ohio, half of whom did not die in office and several of whom did not leave behind legacies of incredible corruption and malfeasance!
And, as mentioned, the riding was good, if for nothing else because the breeze took an edge off the heat. The most anomalous thing was that Raptor was down, for maybe the first time ever; but Gemini was running both trains --- and we got walk-on rides to both --- and Mine Ride was in good order and as mentioned, Steel Vengeance had only a fifteen-or-so minute wait. We also got a ride on Siren's Curse, which had a more nearly normal half-hour wait. That was great, though, as we got a seat closer to the front than we'd ever had before, one where at the train's gimmick --- the moment where on the top of the lift hill, it pivots until it faces directly down --- we couldn't see the end of the track, giving a better illusion that we're held in place only by gravity not yet having caught us.
We also got to all the carousels, with the most curious one being the Cedar Downs Derby Racer. This racing carousel had, for years now, been using the audio track of a real historic race as soundtrack for the ride. But last year, in a fit of nostalgia for what came before, they returned to using the music Championship Season, a bit of stock music amusement parks and, sometimes, late night talk shows doing a sports-themed bit will use. They had used that music for decades, replacing (I am told by ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
bunnyhugger) a much older, much warblier audio track of some called race. This year, though? They're apparently doing both, playing the music and the race calling, a compromise I assume everybody is angry about.
So this made our first visit to Cedar Point for the year, and it was a pretty good one despite the heat. Looking forward to the next couple.
Now to close out Pinball at the Zoo for this year. Try and guess whether the next thing in my photo roll was pinball or amusement parks!
Miscellaneous small merch for sale, including Tiny Pac-Man Pinball and a book that you had if you were a kid in 1983.
Something we'd heard about but not gotten the chance to play before the last day: Alice Goes To Wonderland, a boutique-pinball game that we got nearly all the way through the game of before it crashed.
Stern row showing off some of their most recent games, including the first place where I got to play Pokemon any.
Closing up Pinball At The Zoo. Sonic Spinball is not the new pinball game Jersey Jack's put out, but rather a home-brew one that shows a bunch of Sonic the Video Game stuff on the backglass and uses sounds and stuff that I know from that. There was always a line for it.
Aw, somene left behind half of a 1980 Star Trek.
Rolling things up to put back in the Pinball Warehouse until next year.
Weirdly, I didn't bring my camera in to MJS's afterparty this year. That would have been my last chance to get a photograph of MWS, who visited it briefly ... I'm not sure I'd want to share it, though, given how he did look by then.
Trivia: Alan Shephard and Gus Grissom were examined by a psychiatrist the morning of their (suborbital) Mercury flights, prior to putting on their pressure suits. They, John Glenn, and Scott Carpenter were given a thorough psychiatric assessment after their flights. Source: To Touch The Face Of God: The Sacred, the Profane, and the American Space Program, 1957 - 1975, Kendrick Oliver. Psychiatrists had good reason to think long periods sitting in an unchanging chamber could be disorienting or worse; the steady yet varied workload mitigated against this, though.
Currently Reading: Midway Park ``A Century Of Fun'' (1898 - 1998), Ron Gustafson.
