After California's Great America closed for the day we had a couple questions for the night ahead. What to do wasn't much of one; we were content to maybe get to bed early --- 11 pm California time is 2 pm our native Eastern, after all --- and reset up for the week ahead. But also: what to eat? We'd settled on Taco Bell the night before as open, but surely we could do better? Or at least something California-local, a thing which would prompt us later in the week to explore Jack-In-The-Box.
From the hotel ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
bunnyhugger found a couple promising restaurants. And then discovered they were all at the same location, an improbably dense supply of purchasable food. What she worked out was that this is a sort of incubator kitchen type deal, a bunch of places sharing a kitchen and a take-out counter. Thus the ability to offer several vegetarian or vegan restaurants, or a bunch of restaurants with many vegetarian options.
We decided to give it a try, putting in an order and trusting that the time to get ready and drive over would give them the prep time needed. In this we were right. Also, bunnyhugger's phone wanted us to take a route there that involved roughly twelve million turns and popping onto and off two different freeways and --- this is not an exaggeration in the slightest --- a turn into an intersection that was sufficiently ambiguous to me, a stranger here in the dark, that I started driving head-on into a one-way street going the other direction before catching myself and a howl from my dear bride. Was this impossibly complicated path worth it, though?
In driving terms, no. On the way back my keen geometric reasoning skills let me notice the path one drive along this one street several blocks, make a left, and then keep driving a mile or so to our hotel. This spaghetti routing setting out there was saving us from the burden of one U-turn. We would go back the next night, but I ignored the phone's navigation until it told me exactly which of the streets we were supposed to make a right turn on.
That we did go back the next night tells you what the food was like; we'd love a place like this. When we got there we learned bunnyhugger had to scan a QR code that was partly obscured by the mounted iPad you were supposed to sign in to. This seems like a user interface flaw. Also initially there was no hint of our food being anywhere; it turns out they had alphabetized our order wrongly. The orders themselves weren't even picked up from the counter, but rather from lockers not far off what you get at amusement parks these days, the ones that open when you enter the right code on an iPad nearby. The experience was Automat-like enough that we felt some thrill of that, too.
Also one time we were there we could see the TV screen playing Disney's Aladdin, like, from the start, which was the first time I'd seen the pre-credits sequence in ages. I'm more willing to accept the hypothesis that the merchant doing the introduction is the post-freedom Genie now.
With our second visit, the next night, we got a coupon good for 15% off another order. We looked very forward to what we might get next, and never went there again.
In my photography segment let's get back to Cedar Point and our drop-in visit that was dragging out longer and longer.
Picture of the spaceships ride that's part of the set of Kiddie Kingdom rides nobody pays attention to. There's no particular reason behind this except that, y'know, it's been neglected a long while so it feels like they might be getting ready to renovate it and we don't want all memory of the place lost forever.
Control system for the ride, which seems like one it wouldn't take a long time to train up to. Note the little attendance counter underneath.
The spaceships come in a couple models, like the yellow one up here with a faintly jet-age comic book look and the purple one behind that looks like someone looked at a Mercury capsule and said ''fine''.
Another view of the control podium that gets a slightly better look at the paperwork on it. Based on the hash marks they'd had either six rides or six riders in the hour preceding this picture.
And here's of course the ride everyone wants on their spaceship ride, being crowded into a bubble helicopter with five other kids. ... Can you imagine how long it takes to put all the seatbelts on this? Yeesh.
And this is some of the structures with the Kiddie Kingdom sign outside, letting people know what they're getting into.
Trivia: The Soviet Union's Cosmos 936/Bion 2 satellite flew from 3-22 August 1977, carrying rats and fruit flies. Source: Animals In Space: From Research Rockets To The Space Shuttle, Colin Burgess, Chris Dubbs.
Currently Reading: The Billionaire's Vinegar: The Mystery Of The World's Most Expensive Bottle of Wine, Benjamin Wallace. Me, wasting time idly: oh, no sense checking this reference to ``Thursday, May 31, 1967'', but then I go ahead and run cal anyway and oh, May 31, 1967 was a Wednesday. This is not encouraging good habits in me.
