Friday was to be our last full day in California. Full-ish, at least; we knew we'd want to be in bed by 9 or 10 at the latest to get up for the airport Saturday morning. The excellent midafternoon single-plane flight to start our vacation couldn't be repeated going home.
And we'd had the question of what to do with the day. This was our least-planned-out vacation in a long while; all we had decided was that we had to see California's Great America at least once, and the Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk, and other stuff we'd get to as we felt like. In some ways this was great, in that we could adapt to fit our moods easily. In some ways, this left us with the tyranny of choice over and over again. ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
bunnyhugger suggested we spend Friday touring San Francisco proper, getting to at least some of the traditional sights. Or, if not them, to some of the antique carousels in the area; there's more than I had realized, but I should have been thinking better than that. There was another amusement park we hadn't touched, too, the Six Flags Discovery Kingdom. That's a park comparable to Great America --- ten roller coasters, so she could record her 300th ride there. But it is a park with no wooden coasters. A more serious objection is that the park used to be a marine park, stuffed full of water creature exhibits. They no longer have performing orcas --- or worse, a lone performing orca --- and it does seem like they're scaling down to the animals that can probably be kept humanely in the confines of a zoo. Their Wikipedia page, for example, shows an elephant show but doesn't list elephants among the current attractions. They do have bottlenose dolphins, and we're not confident they should be caged.
I'm not saying we have never gone to a park with animal exhibits that they maybe shouldn't have. My childhood home park is Great Adventure with a drive-through safari that everyone from New Jersey swears is where the Simpsons got the idea for that one episode where the lions trapped the family in their car. But it felt like we kept trying to think of reasons it wouldn't be so bad to go here, and that's a good signal that you think there's something wrong.
So Discovery Kingdom was off. Scandia Family Fun Center in Sacramento was a possibility, for one and only one reason: their Crazy Dane Coaster was formerly the Wild Mouse on Casino Pier, the first coaster we ever rode together. But Sacramento's a long drive from San Jose, for a pretty small payoff. There's one other family fun center with a kiddie coaster nearby we might have picked up too, but that's otherwise a lot of driving for a small bit of fun.
One of the people we played pinball with had a suggestion. She was, outside her pinball life, a marine biologist, just like the childhood fantasy said. She told us there was a good whale-watching cruise we could get from Santa Cruz. That wasn't an awful idea but, you know, if we were going all the way back to Santa Cruz we were going to spend another day at the Beach Boardwalk.
So we spent another day at the Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk.
For those of you who had ``three'' in the betting pool for number of days I'd fill with pictures of walking out of California's Great America? You win! Here we go.
Some of the banners for the park. I don't know if the pictures are unique to Great America or if it's a chainwide stock photo.
Look how happy everyone is at having to leave the park by 7:30.
The promise of being open year-round, although I think a good part of the time they're weekends only. More days, more fun doesn't sound at all like they snuck something off of Six Flags Great America, does it?
Got a picture of the park's welcome and guest information sign since that's the sort of routine thing that only obsessives ever catalogued.
And look over there, it's football going on! I mean soccer football, not football football. I believe the score was 1-1, Mexico-Qatar, at about halftime.
Ah, the pavilion entrance. Remember when I first looked at this and thought it was the way into the park? We were so young and naive back then. Funny.
Trivia: In Observationes Medicae (Amsterdam, 1641), Nikolas Dirx (1593 - 1674) wrote of the medical benefits of tea; he published as ``Doctor Tulpius''. Source: The World of Caffeine: The Science and Culture of the World's Most Popular Drug, Bennett Alan Weinberg, Bonnie K Bealer.
Currently Reading: Lost Popeye Zine Volume 28: A Two Million Dollar Comedy, Tom Sims, Bela Zaboly. Editor Stephanie Noelle.
