``What the hell are you SMILING about?'' demanded ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
bunnyhugger as I exited the ride.
So yup, that's me, and you're probably wondering how I got into this situation. It really started at the end of last year, when I decided that I was going to ride Windseeker, the 301-foot-tall elevated swings ride at Cedar Point, this coming season, even if I had to do it without bunnyhugger, who does not like heights one bit except in the context of being on a roller coaster.
This past week we've been on a roller coaster trip, our big one for the year. The close brought us to Kings Island, Cedar Point's sister park just outside that city I can't spell correctly. Kings Island, too, has a Windseeker. We don't know when we'll be to Kings Island again. And I thought, well, it's been years since a Windseeker had that problem it was famous for. The first couple years of the ride one Windseeker or another got stopped at the top of the ride, leaving passengers stranded for, in some cases, hours. There's not much way to rescue people from the top; while there is an emergency service ladder on the tower, it's still a good twenty feet or more from the tower to where the seats hang.
But I told bunnyhugger I did want to ride this, and there was no wait (the ride loads 64 people in a cycle, and takes about three minutes from start to finish, so it's got capacity). She figured to get an ice cream and wait it out. They did not have the blue ice cream (a Kings Island specialty dating back to when they had the Smurfs license) she wanted. Meanwhile, I made a quick bathroom trip, figuring that while I didn't really need it, and while it had been ages since a Windseeker was stopped at its top for hours with no good way to recover the people, what are the odds it would happen now?
So you now know where this is going.
The normal part of the ride: it turns out they assign you a seat, probably to keep the load reasonably balanced. They also divide the queue, so after you get your number you go to either the 1-32 or the 33-64 queue to load. The swings are a solid block of plastic, with a restraint that locks over your lap and between your legs. The restraint's safety-belted to the bottom of the seat, but you don't have one across your lap. Given the ride doesn't go upside-down or do anything more than swing gently out, rotating, while up high, that's plenty and feels secure.
So we got up to the top of the top, and as the ride spun around the rigid bars swung out and I could see the Racer racing coasters and the new Orion coaster and The Beast, and all the main body of the park, and it was lovely. Kings Island is in a very wooded area, and the breeze that high up was steady, taking the misery off a brutally hot day. And then after a half-minute or so of this the rotations slowed, and stopped, me peering out over the toys of the Racer and of Orion just past my thigh.
After a few confused seconds a voice came over the scratchy PA system asking us to please remain seated (we could hardly do otherwise) facing forward with our heads against the headrest. The girls in the row ahead of me --- there was no one beside me --- gave voice to what happened: we were stuck. This is when I started laughing. I may have clapped. I was glad I'd gone to the bathroom right before this.
The girls started crying out in slightly overdramatic woe --- one was saying something like she's only fourteen, she can't die, she has so much to live for. So I felt safe piping up that this was fine, they're just going to have to restart the mechanism and they'll bring us down soon as they can. The girls started speculating about what if we dropped. I drew with confidence on what I thought I remembered about the mechanism and said we couldn't drop, it's a hydraulic lift and you can't make water do that. In researching afterwards I don't know where I got the idea it's a hydraulic lift, or really any information about how the lifting is actually done. It's likely done by whatever mechanism you would use for a thirty-storey elevator --- that is what this is, really --- so probably electric motors. But the important thing is those things don't just drop.
They did at least act soothed by this bearded stranger explaining that the ride's designed to stop moving if things break, instead of falling, and that if all else fails they could manually winch us to the ground, which might take time but would be safe. That last I believe is correct, now that I've had time to look at stuff afterwards.
Eventually --- after probably five or ten minutes; I don't have a watch and couldn't get my iPod or camera out of my pocket to check, and I didn't think to count dispatches of the Racer or Orion roller coasters as a timer --- and after another announcement we didn't quite get because we didn't know it was starting until it was almost over, we started lowering, slowly but with a confident steadiness. Then that progress stopped, and we got another announcement, this one that they were going to rotate the ride a little. This probably to get the seats placed so that seats 1 - 32 were at the end of the 1 - 32 queue and so on. This seems fussy, but I suppose the ride expects that as the rest state.
As that finished, and we started descending again, the girls ahead of me started calling out to the ride operator who'd done our safety check, telling him he lied, we were not good to go. I called down thanking him for the exclusive ride time, doing my bit to keep things merry. The girls said they wanted ``I Survived Windseeker'' T-shirts. They --- and I --- got cards from the main ride operator, vouchers for a free ice cream marked 'GAD' under the date slot. Not sure if that means 'Good All day' or 'Good Any Day'; I mentioned the shortage of blue ice cream and the day was so hot that drink stands had run out of ice. So ice cream might have been too much to hope for.
As we got to the ground and safely released I told our safety-check guy that I was glad for the experience and that my wife was not having the experience. He also asked about my T-shirt --- I was wearing a Conneaut Lake Park shirt --- and I explained it was this small park an hour and a half north of Pittsburgh that was great, but closed now that the new owner burned it down for the insurance money. This compresses the story down to where it's not quite true, but for the small time we had between people getting their ice cream vouchers and getting out of the way so maintenance can do something, it's close enough.
So I turned to the exit gate, started thinking where I might find bunnyhugger and how to explain this, and there she was, asking the question above.
Now you know how I got to this fix. Which was, as they go, no big deal as long as you don't mind being seated 301 feet off the ground. I felt secure enough for the length and as it went on only ten minutes or so total it wasn't horrible. Part of me was even a little happy to live through a freak event like that. It's the equivalent of having an emergency stop on a ride, or a walkdown from a roller coaster. I'm sorry there was no possible way I could take pictures from that position. I'll have to make do with remembering what it looked like from there.
bunnyhugger, meanwhile, saw all this from the ground and felt all the anxiety I did not. She was watching the ride after the blue ice cream rejection, and thought it weird that the rotations were slowing to a stop. But she wasn't sure this was not part of the ride's normal cycle, like, giving people a moment to look from a standstill before resuming. When it seemed to go on too long, this tripped over to worry, and as she approached the ride and heard other people saying the ride was stopped she got more afraid, and upset that I was not in the queue and not outside the ride so most likely up on it. (I was not only 301 feet off the ground, but on the far side of the ride, so it would have taken good luck for her to spot me. I never saw her on the ground.) The arrival of maintenance people crowding around did nothing for her humor and I fear she's not going to be happy reading me being so merry about it in these pages either, especially the above paragraph with me having kind of hoped something like that would happen. But the anxiety and worry and all passed soon enough, when I was back on the ground and could hold her and talk about my mansplaining rides to the teenage girls ahead of me, and how really fine everything went.
And then --- it's just possible that this small problem and not-particularly-great inconvenience saved us from horror. I intend to share that story tomorrow as I continue the saga of our hot-and-lineless amusement park trip. It was not perfectly lineless, but it was completely hot.
Another view of the fairy-tale mouse characters from the Ghoulish Golf course.
Here's ... not sure. Frankenstein Mouse on the left, but just a mouse witch with an orb on the right.
Hey, I didn't know Jack Pumpkinhead was in a band! But should have expected it.
Strongman mouse coming for me! Aieee!
Better-framed strongman mouse coming for me!
And here's the mummy mouse from behind, where you can see a tear that's trying to fool us into thinking it's a spider.
Trivia: Though there were book printers in Massachusetts from 1640, there were no paper-makers until 1728, when the Liberty Paper Mill opened on the Neponset River, eight miles from Boston. It never made a profit. Source: Paper: Paging Through History, Mark Kurlansky.
Currently Reading: The Mathematical Radio: Inside the Magic of AM, FM, and Single-Sideband, Paul J Nahin.
