Tugging us away from Motor City Furry Con was not the draw of home, this time, but rather the eclipse. Totality would pass over a surprising number of amusement parks; the one that caught my eye in 2017 was Cedar Point. To everyone's delight the park noticed this and arranged to open a month ahead of the normal season for this. To lesser delight, they opened as a ticketed event that even our Platinum Passes did not cover. But we had tickets and ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
bunnyhugger had found a hotel in the Sandusky area, close enough to the park we wouldn't face a terrible drive in Monday morning. (I had voted for driving down Sunday night as being much easier on us.)
This was the first time, to my knowledge, that we've ever driven to Cedar Point --- well, to Sandusky --- by night and much about the trip was strange and novel. Like, noticing the water tower in Maumee, where we make our traditional rest stop just before the Ohio Turnpike. Lit up by night it stands out as well as it blends into the background by day. Also novel: the variable message sign on US 23 South into Ohio warned, 'ECLIPSE TRAFFIC - MAKE PLANS'. We were chuckling about this when something terrible happened.
The terrible thing is an opossum puttering their way across the highway. I saw it but didn't process what to do fast enough, and between the short notice, the just-enough-rain to make the roads slick, and my car's speed ... well, we heard the hit and hope it didn't suffer. bunnyhugger particularly has had a string of bad or near-bad encounters like this while driving recently and we did not need another. It's easy to think of why I shouldn't feel guilty about this, but it's hard not to think how so many little differences, including pausing to take one more picture --- or hurrying up, taking one fewer picture --- of the evaporating MCFC would have spared the opossum's life.
But on a different anxiety. bunnyhugger casually mentioned how hotels let you ``check in'' by phone these days, hours before you were even at the hotel, even possibly before they opened the rooms for the night. As with its airline counterpart this raises questions about what we even mean by ``check in''. And, then, she separately mentioned that hotels do overbook and with the rush of people to the path of totality --- and Sandusky was right near the center of totality --- well, how did we know our room would even be there? I started to worry, then, that we'd get to the hotel and find our room long since gone, and had sketched out alternate plans. (This would be try a reasonable number of the other hotels in the area, the strip mall district on route 250 there, and if nobody had anything then just sleep in the car.) Not on my plans: ask bunnyhugger to check us in, then. I didn't want my anxiety to feed hers. (I will learn moments after this publication whether she was thinking the same.)
As it happens we got in after midnight --- we had left Ypsilanti later than we planned or imagined --- but our hotel room was there. The clerk welcomed us and got us checked in and everything. Moments after we had our cards, and were figuring what exactly we needed for the morning, a woman came in after us asking after a room and was told they had just checked in the last room. So, I guess, a couple more pictures might have saved the opossum but left us sleeping in my car overnight.
In our room --- an order or two nicer than what we'd had in Ypsilanti, even though the hotels were part of the same chain (no great feat, as the only hotel chains anymore are ``Red Roof Inn'' and ``Literally Everything Else'' and I think they have a code-swapping agreement) --- I discovered I could not find my house keys. Not a crisis that night but a potential great inconvenience. (My car keys are on a separate ring.) So I went down to my car to search for them (no luck) and when I came back the desk clerk told me Corporate had ordered the breakfast service had been extended a couple hours for Monday. He professed not to know the reason and bunnyhugger and I debated whether he was being facetious. He must have been wryly joking; he knew why the hotel was 100% full. Right?
Well, to bed, then.
Tomorrow: eclipse day! Below: would have been pictures of Indiana Beach Night except LiveJournal's photo album wasn't taking uploads this evening! Oh well!
Trivia: To control the typhus epidemic following the liberation of the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, the British evacuated a thousand inmates a day, mostly to the German tank training center a mile away. By the middle of May 1945, the evacuation was complete, and the last of the wooden huts that survivors had been forced to inhabit was burned down the 21st of May. Source: The Last Million: Europe's Displaced Persons from World War to Cold War, David Nasaw.
Currently Reading: The Reckoning: Financial Accountability and the Rise and Fall of Nations, Jacob Soll.
PS: What's Going On In Gil Thorp? Why are Gil Thorp characters addressing the reader? February - May 2024 gets to exploring the question, why is Gil Thorp talking at you?
