At some point here I mentioned our skipping a Tuesday trip to Cedar Point their last full operating week of the year. A sham, as reports say the park was a ghost town with walk-ons to almost everything, including the impossibly high-demand Steel Vengeance roller coaster. But we thought we had a second-best alternative, the Friday after Labor Day. This would what the park used to call a Bonus Weekend, after the regular contiguous operating season but before Halloweekends starts. The park would be open only until 10 pm; normally a Friday for the regular season or for Halloweekends they're open to midnight. This implies they expected there to be few enough people in the park at 10 that it wouldn't be worth staying open, implying low attendance all day. And it makes sense; kids should be back in school, leaving the daytime attendance to adults who don't have something better to do on a Friday. It might pick up in the evening, but if we got there early enough? We could probably get some really good riding in. So this became our plan.
A complication to the plan: ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
bunnyhugger had an early-morning commitment Saturday, a 5K race that she'd have to get up early for. So we couldn't stay until the 10 pm closing anyway. We'd have to leave as close to 8 pm as possible and bunnyhugger doubted our ability to do that. Well, we did miss the 8 pm deadline --- we were at the GateKeeper roller coaster when the hour struck, and spent a little time after that in shops and getting ice cream --- but we were not too far off. Our biggest unexpected time sink came an hour after we left the park, when the Speedway in Maumee that we always stop at turned out to have every teenager in the world there and buying something from the one cashier. I don't know what that was all about although now that I think about it maybe the high school football game let out and what are you going to do when you're in Maumee and a teenager at that hour of a Friday night except hang around Speedway?
We knew it would be easier to leave early if we got there early, though, so that's what we aimed for. And succeeded: we got to the park about 12:30, just ninety minutes after the park opened for general admission and way earlier than I would have thought we could manage. We had some lucky breaks, including light traffic and my discovery that we did so have sunscreen, hidden in the secret compartment of my trunk. The last molecules of our other sunscreen were exhausted in our visit to Michigan's Adventure that Monday, a thing that was all right because the day was cool and overcast and we were wearing hoodies most of the day. (That had been a small disappointment to bunnyhugger as she'd worn her Big Bad Wolf T-shirt, representing a now-gone coaster at Busch Gardens, for JTK to see and she couldn't just show it casually.) This was a bright, sunny, hot day and if I hadn't found this we'd have had to make an extra stop at a convenience store (or, probably, seen where they had it at the Maumee Speedway) or worse buy some it park prices.
We were hungry. We'd talked often how we should get something to eat at The Wild Turnip, this vegetarian/vegan/gluten-free food stand in the Old West-themed area. Rumor was that the stand was closed for the rest of the season, though. Rumor was true enough for the day, as the place had a sign apologizing that they wouldn't be operating today. We went to one of our reliable second choices, the Happy Friar, for fries. It turned out that while this wasn't Halloweekends, this was a special event of some kind: the Happy Friar's Fresh-Cut Fries Fest. This celebration of 75 years since the park first got its (since evicted) french-fries concession meant adding to their selection of fries toppings. Particularly, they offered Bento fries, French Dip fries, Birria fries, and Thai fries. Also a fifty-dollar ``Mount Spudmore'', three pounds of fries, including cajun, garlic parmesan, and dried mushroom and truffle fries. I got my usual of garlic parmesan fries, and bunnyhugger got fries with a simple cheese sauce. And, over away from the dining area, there was a guy dressed as a Medieval friar, ringing a bell and posing for pictures that somehow we didn't go for. Day was starting quite nice.
Back a month-plus to another quite nice day. Here's photos looking back on the carousel and other sights of Sylvan Beach.
Getting another decent view of the Sylvan Beach park carousel.
Couple of their horses and yeah the second row horse has that bullseye target blanket again somehow.
The chariot is basic but it does have the two kiddie-size horses in front, as though they were pulling it.
Treasureland is (we infer) another arcade, although it was closed the day we visited. There's apparently rumors that it's haunted and the park's ticket booth had a sign for ghost tours after the park's closing. Also you maybe noticed ...
Remains of some long-gone park ride that, shorn of its arms, now just looks like a lost Venera lander. Though it's clearly not moved in a long while it still has an amusement-ride licence plate. I'm embarrassed not to have a good picture of the tags that might give some idea how long it's been there.
Reverse angle on the ancient park Venera probe. Trouble is there's any number of flat rides it could have been; so many of them depend on cars going in a circle around a fixed base like this.
Trivia: Lloyd Wright, son of Frank Lloyd Wright, submitted to the 1929 Lehigh Airport Competition a narrow, lasso-shaped structure, encircling a round landing field, with the hangars, passenger facilities, and runways integrated into a single unified structure. It drew no mention from the competition jury. Source: Naked Airport: A Cultural History of the World's Most Revolutionary Structure, Alastair Gordon. (Gordon notes the roof sloped at 1:7, matching an airplane's one-foot-vertical-to-seven-feet-horizontal rate of ascent, a nice touch.) You can see Wright's design as the top image on this page and yeah, it challenges ideas of what an airpot should be. (The lower right corner is water, for seaplanes or passengers arriving by boat.)
Currently Reading: The Adventures of Little Archie, Volume 2, Editor Victor Gorelick.
