You maybe noticed I didn't mention checking in to our hotel before we went to Sylvan Beach. We didn't. Our hotel for the night was near Syracuse, on the far side of Sylvan Beach from our north-of-Lake-Ontario approach. So after our wonderful bonus extra hour at the park we had nearly an hour more driving to get to our hotel. There were hotels closer to Sylvan Beach, but much more expensive, as the park is on Lake Oneida and so is part of a big summer-getaway location. We wanted cheaper lodgings.
This did produce a bit of tension, though, as I drove through roads smaller and more country than quite felt safe for the posted speed limit given how late it was. I mean, what if something leapt onto the road? Nothing did, but I did get a glimpse of a fox by the side of the road. The time would be important, though, as ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
bunnyhugger had only until midnight to take a quiz for her online calculus course. And couldn't even study, as her cell phone (used as a Wi-Fi hotspot) was getting no service. My prediction that it would get service as we approached Syracuse proved correct, but she was still going in to the quiz with less time and less review than she would have liked. We set up in our hotel room and while I fussed and fumed about my lost pens she plunged into the quiz. The quizzes (and exams) for this course were worse than should have been, with the online software making up for the impossibility of proctoring by giving short testing times and being obscure and fussy about what it counts as a correct answer. (Is ``cos(π/4)'' acceptable? What about ``1/sqrt(2)''? Or does it have to be ``sqrt(2)/2''? Or worse, does it have to be decimals? How many digits?) And, in this case, giving an all-or-nothing question. bunnyhugger is an excellent mathematics student, building a solid understanding of what she is to do and why, but she makes the small calculation errors we all do and here she ran out of time before finding where a plus or minus sign went astray.
And so we went to bed after a day that just kept getting better and better with the night spoiled, forced to hope that this unhappy endnote wouldn't overwrite how good we felt an hour before.
In the morning I might have committed a felony against Canada. It was Saturday morning; we planned to drive through Canada, to home, on Sunday. So we needed to fill out ArriveCan documents, proving that we had been vaccinated and had a plan in we should need to quarantine. Our plan was to get home and stay home if needed. The first trouble is ArriveCan's web site asked which countries we had been in besides the United States in the last fourteen days. Canada was not on the list, but the question did not ask ``any country besides Canada and the United States''. All right; allow that as an oversight, albeit one it's surprising lasted more than a week after the web site went live.
The site also asked where we planned to stay, while in Canada. We did not plan to stay, though, and there wasn't any compelling reason we should. I could not find a way to express that, though. I tried closing things out and restarting the application, in the hopes that maybe there was a ``merely transiting through Canada'' option that I had missed, but the page would not let me start from scratch. I searched for advice about people transiting and the only advice they gave was for people driving between Alaska and the contiguous states.
I called their help line and got hold music. A lot of hold music. More hold music, too. All this while time for our next amusement park ticked away. (Not too much of that time; I was doing most of this while bunnyhugger showered and dressed and packed. Still, some time.) No hint of anyone getting back to us, though, just the promise that our call was very important and caller volume was abnormally high.
Thus were we forced into lying to immigration forms. Maybe. We picked a hotel near Niagara Falls, where we planned to visit, and declared to ourselves that we intend to stay there but of course we are open to changing our minds if we decide we'd rather sleep in our own beds. And put that down as our very weakly intended destination; I did wonder if we ought to at least make a reservation, if one could be made without a nonrefundable deposit. But ArriveCan's web site gave us the approval and I figured not to mess with success.
As bunnyhugger handled checking out I went to the business ``center'' and tried to print our ArriveCan receipt from the lone computer's printer. It turned out, whirred a bit, and then shut down. And again. Finally I called help over and the guy tried printing, saw the printer turn on, whirr a bit, and then shut down, and declared that there was a problem with the [ printer component ] and someone was coming to fix it but wouldn't be there until, maybe, Monday. Well, this is why I wanted to print it out Saturday, so we would have a second hotel's printer as a backup and, if that failed, some Kinko's office somewhere. (When we first entered Ontario the guard told us we didn't need the paper receipts, as it was linked to our passports already. So be it; I feel more confident having a receipt I can hand someone. Yes, I could have got the important part of the receipt, the QR code, on my iPod, but again, I like the paper.)
That's enough. We got out of our Syracuse-area hotel and drive the hour and a half or so to Rochester. We had a park to revisit.
Night finally arrived at Indiana Beach and here's the photographs to prove it.
We finally got to the night but had almost no time at the park left. Here's the boardwalk illuminated, though, with wonderful reflections in the cement.
Also, ooh, bricks for sale. I don't think we knew about this or we'd surely have bought one.
The south end of the park, with its Ferris wheel (we didn't ride) and the Flying Bobs, a Matternhorn ride that's new to the park. This one used to be at the Coney Island park in the Athens of the West, before they shed all but their water park attractions.
Hoosier Hurricane seen by the setting sun.
And oh, there was just the youngest moon that night.
Lake Shafer, formed by the river dam that also gave us Ideal Beach, by night.
Trivia: In the 1890s was a journal, the Illustrated Phonographic World, devoted to typing and shorthand. Source: Wondrous Contrivances: Technology at the Threshold, Merritt Ierley.
Currently Reading: The Sputniks Crisis and Early United States Space Policy: A Critique of the Historiography Of Space, Rip Bulkeley. ``In the 1950s, however, it was discovered that maps of Panama had failed to include a 125-mile long range of mountains, with peaks as high as 5,000 feet. Test of missile navigation systems sometimes revealed serious mapping errors even within the United States. For example, work on the Navaho guidance system showed that `El Paso is a mile and a half away from where it is supposed to be`.'' Um, er ... whoops?
