Let's see if I can't finish my Halloweekends report before the new amusement park season starts.
So the rest of Saturday was, as we expected, warm (though cooler than the previous two days) and packed. Just stuffed full of people. We considered eating at the restaurant that replaced the Antique Autos ride near the Town Hall Museum (still renovating after four years into a new experience, if you believe the sign for some reason) but the line was far, far out the door, and we braved crossing it to get a look at the menu and found there was maybe one thing vegetarian we might have eaten. Back to cheese on a stick with fries for us.
Also a line out the door: the women's bathroom just about everywhere. ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
bunnyhugger declined my suggestion to just go in the men's room, busy but not quite that busy. Some other woman, though, also telling her family how waiting for this would take forever, accepted my suggestion. This went without incident although if I'm not mistaken, she didn't wash her hands.
Another oddity? Around about 7:30 pm or so we wanted to take the train from the back of the park to the front. They announced this was going to be the last train of the night, too, something like four hours before the park would close. Nobody explained why that was, especially since the park was packed and the train is an easy way to put a hundred or more people on something --- and give them something to look at (the back-to-front leg of the trip takes you past Skeleton Town, a series of comic scenes populated by skeleton animatronics). Possibly some conflict with the stuff scheduled to happen at the main performance stage, which is close to the front end of the train ride. But it's not like it's that close. Possibly staffing issues, since no park has had enough people since the pandemic began, and Cedar Point's enormous size gives it an enormous appetite for staff.
Later in the evening we did something new for me, and that bunnyhugger hadn't done in almost twenty years. We sat for a story. Ages ago when Halloweekends was a small young event they'd do dramatic readings of horror stories and that came back this year. And with the same story they used to use, too: Edgar Allan Poe's The Tell-Tale Heart. This was lightly dramatized, and presented as the ranting confession of a well-we-thought-he-was-securely-straitjacketed man on Death Row. Since the story is first-person and a speech from the murderer to the audience, basically reading the story is what you need to do. His running out into the audience, and night, to disappear is all the dramatic license you need to take.
As the night wore on, and it was pretty well-worn by the time the murderer escaped, the park crowds had dispersed and everything was getting a nice foggy glow. Amusement parks turn into seas of diffuse light when it's hazy like that. We spotted that Gemini wasn't just open, but running trains on both the red and the blue tracks, and had a wait of five minutes or less. Earlier in the day it'd had waits of an hour and even earlier than that, I think, it wasn't running, so this was an excellent deal. We got lucky, too, riding the blue track just before that went down for some reason; if we'd started on the other side first, we couldn't have gotten both sides of the racing coaster in.
I'm not actually sure what our last rides of the night were. Plausibly Rougarou, since I have photos of that to look at, and maybe Blue Streak. I know we got to one gift shop with all the Halloweekends merch, including some pretty cute Audrey II-inspired plush we didn't get, and also Peanuts dolls with dubious choices like ``Charlie Brown, vampire'' and ``Woodstock in a witch's hat'' and ``Snoopy, but his fur is all yellow with dozens of tiny black bats all over''. Can't tell you what that's all about. But that closes out our Saturday from Halloweekends, and we could get back to the hotel room to sleep with a will.
Next on photos from our California trip? That's right, it's pinball! We found a place with the one tournament we could get to without a ridiculous drive or cutting short any other amusement park visit.
The venue. Lynn's is inside a fairly complicated set of strip malls huddling against each other and there was strikingly little parking, to the point that I let bunnyhugger out to get us signed in for the tournament while I found parking. I got back in time anyway but we couldn't be sure of that.
In the time before the tournament I put up one game of Gorgar and it was a darned good one. I liked my chances for the night and even picked Gorgar as one of my games and did not do nearly this darned well.
Something we loved here was the older games, including the late-70s Dolly Parton game, the early-80s Dragonfist, and ... uh ... the early-80s Paragon, which has a killer theme but is too difficult a game for anyone to play.
bunnyhugger at the bar and giving some sense of scale to what all's in the place. There were fewer players than usual that night, a shame but a boost to our chances to survive.
Junkyard's a fun game, and one (then-) recently lost from our local venue. But the special thing is one you have to look closely at the table for ...
See that microbus, and the stuff at the end of the track there? Early concepts for the game had it possible to lock a ball inside the microbus and set it up for a multiball. That feature was dropped from production, but a prototype game like this particular unit still had the openable microbus door they planned on.
Trivia: In June 1790 President George Washington took his Cabinet fishing on the Hudson River. (The government was still based in New York City at the time). Source: The Money Men: Capitalism, Democracy, and the Hundred Years' War over the American Dollar, H W Brands.
Currently Reading: Miscellaneous comic books.
