Back to talking about Cedar Point. So after our session(!) riding Steel Vengeance we looked around and saw a half-hour wait for Maverick. That's more than any other coaster had the whole day, but it's still only about half the wait for a coaster that somehow seems to become more popular every year. We figured that'd be a pretty good wait for what is a thrilling ride. Also it turns out ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
bunnyhugger forgot we had ridden it already this season. For the longer-wait rides we're often content to take just the one ride a season, balancing getting the ride with not spending our lives in line. My recollection is the people riding in front of us included someone who'd never ridden before, so bunnyhugger tried to talk up the ride without giving spoilers.
Also, in a happy bit, the lights inside the tunnel were working, more or less.
After that not-excessive wait for the park's most popular ride? We would never have a significant wait again. The longest thing we waited for after that was the train leading from the front of the park to the back, and that just because they had only one train running so it takes time to make its mile-plus loop. We would have, and I say this with no exaggeration, our best coaster-riding experience in years. We got on to Millennium Force, always one of the top three waits and (deservedly) one of the most popular roller coasters at the park, with just the one-cycle wait, and got a second-row seat for that. The only line was people getting front-seat rides and, had we planned to be at the park to closing, we'd probably have taken that opportunity. But no sense waiting an extra ten minutes if we didn't need to.
This wasn't a thing we planned on and we only noticed it, silently, over the course of the day. If we had been trying to ride everything we'd have gone about it in a more systematic way, probably taking the park with less back-and-forth walking. Also, we'd have gotten on Woodstock Express, which is a kiddie coaster but that unaccompanied adults are allowed to ride also. (Wilderness Run, formerly Junior Gemini, can be ridden by adults accompanying children but we've never had a child. JTK, my brother, and my sister have said we could borrow their kids to ride, but we've never been at the park together.)
As it is, though? We had an amazing roller coaster riding day, getting on all of the non-kiddie coasters that were running. Only one train of Gemini was running, so we couldn't ride the blue side. Also, oddly, about half of the cars on Gemini were blocked off, which seems inconsistent with those times a few years ago that we got trapped on Gemini when they didn't have enough people to send out the train ahead of us. But we were able to ride and didn't have to wait for trains to fill.
And Top Thrill Dragster was closed, as it's been all season. Cedar Point recently posted that Top Thrill Dragster ``as you know it'' is closing and many people are acting as though the park is tearing down the coaster. I can't believe they're doing that, not for their tallest and still popular ride, even granting that a piece did fall off and maim a person. Their announcement was that they're working on a ``new and reimagined ride experience'', and the roller coaster was blocked off by construction walls that looked surprisingly good, like, things you could leave up for a year or more and not look chintzy. From some of the taller rides we could see over the partitions to notice ... nothing, particularly. There's work going on but all anyone was confident had happened by our visit was that the had taken the 'Top Thrill Dragster' ride sign down.
Time now to get back to seeing Sylvan Beach and looking for something exciting next to the Kiddieland.
And what's this, next to the kiddieland area and away from the midway games and Playland? Could it be another arcade? Yes: it's the Pennyland Arcade.
It is! With some modern pinball machines too. We played the Stern Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles because we felt the need to play something in support of having pinball at amusement parks. We also figured that since Ninja Turtles is a much more brutal game than Star Wars --- not that Stern Star Wars is a friendly table! --- we'd be done sooner. I got to be the Michelangelo Champion, partly from having a decent game and partly from I guess not many people playing Michelangelo.
The Simpsons was the other table there and ... oho! What does Grandma Say? Your Answer Is here! This fortune-telling machine is a rare model and somehow, inexplicably, I didn't get a better picture of it than this and bunnyhugger didn't get a picture at all, even though she got a fortune from the machine that Knows all! Tells all! Don't Pass Her By!
And yet somehow I did get pictures of some of the penny ride machines, which are nice but you can see horses at Meijer's. I think bunnyhugger identified the horse as a model that Meijer's used to use for their Sandy penny rides.
Back outside now, seeing the Junior Whip and the Tip Top lit up for the early evening light.
And here's the Bomber, the Roll-O-Plane ride, in the early evening light. Wikipedia lists six amusement parks to still have a Roll-O-Plane and we have visited three of them.
Trivia: For many years the New York Yankees refused to license the sale of team caps, on the grounds that letting non-players wear Yankees caps would cheapen the logo. Source: A Game of Inches: The Story Behind The Innovations That Shaped Baseball, Peter Morris.
Currently Reading: A Mathematical Tapestry: Demonstration the Beautiful Unity of Mathematics, Peter Hilton, Jean Pedersen, Sylvia Donmoyer. A little walk through various recreational mathematics topics.
PS: Have You Considered Spending Next Month Drawing Mathematics? For people who think the regular Inktober events are too easy.
