We would not only ride roller coasters our little extra day at Cedar Point, but it came close. For one we rode the train from the front of the park back to Frontiertown; Cedar Point has five actual steam locomotives; trainspotters keep watch on what's running and are mighty excited when it's a three-train day or one of the rarer ones come into service. The Myron H was the train running that day, for us.
We also got a ride on the Kiddie Kingdom Carousel, partly as it has the most significance to ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
bunnyhugger but also as a favor. Someone in a Facebook group she's in wanted reference photos of one of the horses. This seemed like it should have been easy enough but it turns out a half-dozen horses match the description bunnyhugger had. She took pictures of all that she could, in-between kids running onto and off the horses, but who knows if the desired horse was among them, besides bunnyhugger.
An unexpected event happened on the carousel. During the safety spiel the ride operator said that this was one of the few rides where persons wanting to take pictures were allowed to use their phones or cameras during the ride. This is new and very different. To the best of our knowledge the only ride this was explicitly allowed on was the train, although it's hard to imagine people on the Sky Ride or the Ferris Wheel don't. We tried to guess what the meaning was for this, a rule that's changed for the Kiddie Kingdom carousel since our visit in June. Possibly they're thinking that if they allow phones on some rides they can hold the line against phones on the seriously risky rides, like any of the roller coasters? bunnyhugger used this rare liberty to get pictures of the world in motion around the ride, and of me on the ride. I somehow failed to take any pictures, as though we hadn't been told this was okay.
An even more wonderful thing almost happened while we were walking the Frontier Trail. Among its features is a 'historical' farm that's mostly a petting zoo, and that has slowly drifted away from showing animals that might have been on a 19th century Ohio farm into things that are cute and pettable. bunnyhugger went into talking about the absurdity of this and how what they ought to have is a turkey and how she wants to pet the knobly head of a turkey. And then I pointed to the turkey she hadn't noticed walking free within the farm area.
The turkey showed little fear of people, as you'd expect from a petting zoo animal, but also a desire not to be handled by them. bunnyhugger spent a while crouched down and trying to draw closer to the bird. She was able even to brush his back and feel the strange silkiness of his feathers. But the turkey was not going to let her touch his head, not on so casual an acquaintance. Still, she got much closer than she's ever done before, and I wonder if --- given, like, a half-hour and maybe a cup of feed --- a turkey might be coaxed into allowing a brief pet of his head, or at least neck. Maybe sometime.
At the end of the night our last ride was to be GateKeeper, the wonderful, smooth wing coaster that we know bunnyhugger's parents would like, if it were humanly possible to coax them into riding it. (It's quite smooth without losing any of its thrill.) Our last ride would also, according to the ride operator, be the last ride for the train dispatcher, whom he claimed was leaving her job now. So everyone gave a round of applause since, why would we not?
Very happy ride and a great close to the night and then ... our train just sat, at the braking area, for what seemed a very long while. I'm not positive what happened but on the other side of the track --- the coaster seats are put on either side of the track, making it a 'wing coaster' --- it looked like operators were mopping and sweeping. My supposition is that someone got sick and there was cleanup needed, but given where we were we couldn't see for sure, and couldn't hear anything for sure. If I had remembered the name of the just-retired train dispatcher I'd have called for getting her back, she seemed to have none of this kind of trouble.
After the ride finally let us go, we did a bit of shopping for Squishmallowes and bunnyhugger would get a lovely ValRavn doll; it's got this crown that's just adorable. We would also finally make good on the resolution hours ago to get some ice cream, so that our departure was a fair bit after the 8 pm we resolved on, but still, not too bad. Had we not had every teenager in Maumee, Ohio, ahead of us in line at the Speedway we might well have got home by midnight.
It was a fantastic day. They don't make them like that anymore.
Now here's a bit more of Sylvan Beach, from the extra hour we didn't know we were going to get at the end of that sweet day.
Rotor, seen illuminated for the night, from the Galaxi platform. Just gorgeous and I'm only sorry the ride wasn't running that day.
Ride operator overseeing the operation of Tip-Top. The employee shirt reads on the back 'My Job Is Amuse-Ing - Sylvan Beach'. (The company )
I managed to get a tracking shot of one car spinning around on the spinning platform and it came out nearly right!
The Bomber, the Roll-o-Plane ride, that we would use our unexpected last hour to ride and, I believe, lose my pen and my backup pen.
Getting a photo of Laffland as it turns off lights for the night. And then --- you see the operator there, on the left, behind bunnyhugger?
He turned the bottom lights back on so we could get a couple night photographs in. It's ... kind to do but I'm not sure it makes that great a difference.
Trivia: In 1906 there were two vaudeville houses in Detroit, the Crystal and the Temple. By 1921, when the city population grew to 993,739, there were five: the Temple, Columbia, La Salle Garden, Miles Regent, and Palace. Source: The Encyclopedia of Vaudeville, Anthony Slide.
Currently Reading: A Mathematical Tapestry: Demonstration the Beautiful Unity of Mathematics, Peter Hilton, Jean Pedersen, Sylvia Donmoyer. OK, sorry, this does blow my mind a little: the digit sequence 111 divides the sequence 10101 whatever base you write those numbers in. (That is, base two, 7 divides 21; base three, 13 divides 91; base 10, one hundred eleven divides ten thousand one hundred and one; etc.) The digit sequence 11 divides the sequence 10101 only in base two (where 3 divides 21). And yeah, yeah, this comes eventually out of the flexagon stuff but I still don't care about flexagons.
