Happy birthday, dear ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
bunnyhugger.
Thank you for choosing to spend this past year with me, and for wanting to do the same the year ahead. I hope it's a gentler time coming, and that we will see your next birthday with so many of the things we fret about today only dim memories.
For other folks, I'll share a bit about something we considered, and thought seriously about doing, fot tomorrow and chose not to. bunnyhugger occasionally sulks at me that my birthday, in late September, is one that can still reliably have pretty good weather and that we can often go to a park and ride a roller coaster in. (We did that last year, at Cedar Point.) But hers? The weather's often rough and there's no amusement parks anywhere near us open.
Except she learned from a chance comment on (Reddit? Somewhere) that Six Flags Great America is open for two more weekends into November this year. She's been to the park, but not in a decade and a half. I've never been to it. The catch is ... how would we get there? The park is on the far side of Chicago, near the Wisconsin border, a drive of something like five hours one way. And going through almost all of metro Chicago, from Gary through to Waukegan. She had day-tripped it once before, in her youth, and thought that madness, something to never do again.
And the park would be open for only six hours, noon to 6 pm. We'd have to get up fearsomely early --- we'd have to be in bed, asleep, two hours before this posts --- and drive a crazy long time to spend about that same time in the park, and then drive that same time back, maybe getting home before midnight if we're lucky. With no idea what the park attendance would be like. Would it be packed? Would it be walk-ons? What roller coasters would be open? The weather seems agreeable, the forecast being for being in the 50s (Fahrenheit) and the only significant chance of rain in the morning, before things open. And she could find no guidance about what kind of park experience to expect; nobody seems to have recorded a trip report for the same weekend in previous years. A park-queue-estimator site even denies that Great America will be open this weekend.
The less-mad thing to do would be to board Sunshine with bunnyhugger's parents and make an overnight trip of it. But we didn't think we could arrange that on such tiny notice, and with all the other uncertainties we reluctantly gave up on the idea. This weekend, at least, nd this year. Maybe 2023 will be a year when we can do something as mad as this.
Now for an amusement park day trip we did make, back in August, and that was magnificently successful by every possible measure: Michigan's Adventure.
The queue area for Wolverine Wildcat. The roller coaster only has the single train (and doesn't have the switching track to support a second) so that's why, as you can see, there's no storage bins; you can just put stuff on the side of the platform since nobody's going to be passing by to swipe it or trip over it.
Looking the other way on Wolverine Wildcat, to see two of the hills of the double out-and-back coaster. The lift hill is foreground.
Now here, by one of the bathrooms (at the Wagon Train pizza stand), are some planters of the kind removed from the wall I shared yesterday.
The petting zoo, with goats being adorably goat-y here.
Hey hey, now, someone needs those barrels to dress themselves in an old-time cartoon about someone without any money.
And on to the bunnies, to see bunnyhugger working!
Trivia: Benjamin Robbins, born in 1707 to Quaker parents, was the first to measure the actual speed of a bullet, by using the ballistic pendulum he invented. (He found it at 1,139 miles per hour. Modern studies suggest muskets and cannon of the era had an initial velocity of 1,000 to 1,200 mph.) Source: Gunpowder: Alchemy, Bombards, and Pyrotechnics: The History Of The Explosive That Changed The World, Jack Kelly.
Currently Reading: Meet Me By The Fountain: An Inside History of the Mall, Alexandra Lange.
