austin_dern | I was never an achiever till I got the Beaver Cleaver Fever

Let me see if I can say anything about Halloweekends.

So, Thursday. The park only opened at 5 pm or so, and only select rides would be open. The opening day of a Halloweekends weekend is like that, and it's usually good riding for what is open. But counterbalancing this: it was a beautiful, warm day, the kind of warm, sunny day that feels great for early-to-mid September. Six weeks late. It's fine to have the occasional stretch of unseasonably pleasant weather, but we haven't had any seasonal weather yet.

This has been great for the amusement parks; Cedar Point has been packed every weekend as you might expect. It also implied that it might be packed this weekend, as coming the closest to Halloween while the weather was still great. And yeah, the park was fairly busy right when things started up. (Well, when they opened for the general public. We got in at early admission, a Platinum Pass perk, and were able to get three rides in on Wild Mouse. Two of them were on the cheese-themed car which, this day, was not more spinny than the mouse-themed cars.) Aided by many roller coasters being down, either for the day (like Corkscrew and Gemini, as scheduled, but they are ones that reliably entertain a lot of people) or for the weekend (Iron Dragon was undergoing maintenance, though that likely would have been closed anyway), or were Top Thrill 2.

So that didn't start out well. But we made the best of it, getting the daily exercise walk in, and getting to whatever huge restaurant they built to take the place of the Antique Cars ride near the Town Hall Museum. Turns out that while the place gets lines out the door and down to Town Hall, it serves people pretty quick --- there's a straightforward menu and they can just send people right on through --- and there is also the vegetarian option of getting three sides instead of an entree and a side. Also they have some good potato and brussels sprouts stuff that's better food than you expect at an amusement park. Good chance we'll go back to that in future visits, if we aren't intimidated by the lines.

We also used the chance to take farewell photographs of Snake River Falls, the Shoot-the-Chutes ride that Cedar Point put in and that never really got popular, even on the hot days. It was already closed for good --- the last ride was around Labor Day weekend and was apparently a bit of a scrum as there was some reward promised to the last riders and this lead to queuing incidents --- and we don't know that it'll be removed next year, but why would they close it if they didn't have plans for the space it takes up? So we got pictures of that and of other areas we thought likely to be renovated out of existence.

After all this farewell-tourism and eating and exercise and all, though, and the arrival of sunset? The park did clear out (or the population drained into the haunted houses/walkthroughs that we don't visit) and suddenly the riding became great. We endured something like a half-hour wait for Raptor, a ride which never has a wait, but after that it was five- and ten-minute waits for most everything. By the end of the night, we estimated, we'd ridden the majority of the park's roller coasters, as well as two of the carousels (we missed the Kiddy Kingdom Carousel), the Cadillac Cars, and some other flat rides. I believe that's the night we closed out on Steel Vengeance, taking advantage of a fifteen-minute wait for a ride that still gets three-hour queues, and if we had gone in a little bit sooner we might have been able to snag a second ride. No matter; it was well after midnight before we got off the ride and we were exhausted, after the drive and seven hours of park-visiting. We'd had a really good day at the park.

The next thing on my photo roll: Pinball At The Zoo. I spent a couple hours there Friday night and all of Saturday, not getting anywhere near competitive range. But other people? ... Read on.

Saturday morning. bunnyhugger enters, to shore up her standing in the women's tournament and maybe, what the heck, take a shot at main.

The main floor, outside the tournament, is about people showing off (and buying/selling/outfitting) their tables. I got fascinated with this mid-60s Williams Eager Beaver, for the outsider-furry art and the shout-out to the University of Wisconsin For Some Reason. Note the squirrel sign-painter at the bottom of the glass there.

Playfield art. At least two squirrels are aware of what the beavers working on the tree means for home.

Lower playfield of Eager Beaver, with a couple ... uh ... I guess they're beavers, to either side of the flipper? Or maybe on the left is that bear who seemed to be the timekeeper in the backglass art?

Upper playfield, with more beavers and a chipmunk and rabbit watching the action.

Someone had the Weird Al's pinball machine, an oddity from a boutique manufacturer that has all sorts of dubiously wise design choices to it. You'll see.

Trivia: German General Hans Krebs, sent the early hours of the 1st of May, 1945, to seek a truce with Soviet negotiators, told Colonel Vasili Ivanovich Chuikov ``I want you to know that you are the first foreigner to learn that on 30 April Hitler committed suicide.'' Chuikov answered, ``We know that.'' Krebs was dumbfounded. Chuikov was bluffing. Source: 1945: The War That Never Ended, Gregor Dallas.