Friday for Halloweekends we did something new to us. We went in costume, wearing kigurumi onesies. ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
bunnyhugger wore her popular and still fuzzy-soft Cerberus outfit, drawing a lot of compliments and complicating her attempt to wear a camera bag; I wore the red panda, discovering the tail was less of an obstruction to my sitting in ride seats than I expected. We had done this at Michigan's Adventure, but only tried it at Cedar Point this year after seeing other people costumed similarly last year. Knowing that if they stopped us at the gate we could just go back to the hotel room and dress normally made it safer.
This was a little frightening for me because where could I keep my wallet and all that? The kigurmi pockets are not that deep, and it was too warm to wear a hoodie with deeper pockets (or the heavy-duty hoodie that has zipper pockets to keep stuff safe on rides). The answer was my camera bag, which has just enough space I could slip in my season pass, hotel room key, and credit card, all that I'd need in the park anyway. I'd learned a similar thing about what I needed to go to furry dances in kigurumi. And it was a warm enough day that we were fine without hoodies or jackets, although I was glad I had and kept my less-heavy gloves with me, and bunnyhugger envied that I had gloves at all.
This was a much busier day than Thursday --- and on looking through my photos I realize this is the day we rode Raptor after a wait longer than the (new electronic) sign up front promised before the crowds died down and the riding got to be good on everything --- and we spent the early part of it on things that didn't have significant lines, like the Mine Ride, or that couldn't be said to have lines at all, like the petting zoo. Pardon, the historical farm. When we got there the turkeys weren't out, but one emerged from the caretaking building and seemed ready to walk right up to us. The turkey was trying to avoid some kids, and veered way around us to get back to where food and no-people were.
Here we were able to get on the Kiddy Kingdom Carousel, at last, and we went on to some of the other flat rides in the nearby Boardwalk Area, including the Atomic Scrambler, the Himalaya, and Calypso. We also confirmed that while we can both fit into a single car on Calypso (and Troika), we can't do that on the Himalaya, which slowed things down after a four-ride-cycle wait. We resolved that we have got to keep track of what rides we can fit in together and what ones we can't. I suspect we've made this resolve before but if we were going to take the simple steps that make our future easier we wouldn't be living like Americans.
Also starting on Friday: costume contests, for the kids. We happened to be getting pop when one of these was going on and it was a fun and well-populated array of costumes, including one kid in Stitch pajamas, one kid in a crocheted six-armed Stitch-in-spacesuit outfit that we loved (I believe their family also had crocheted outfits), and someone else going as the ghost dog from The Nightmare Before Christmas. Als some non-branded stuff like skeletons and witches and all that. In one of those weird moments the kids in the pictures I took all look like they're not happy, possibly because most of them had just learned they didn't win. Or just because kids are thinking about other things and not worrying about looking good for candids.
As implied, when evening came the park crowd thinned out and the riding became good again. Also a very light fog rolled in, blocking out the stars and giving our photos the backdrop of the park lights diffused back on themselves for a really photogenic sky. You'll love these pictures when I get to them in eight months or never or whatever. There's just so much depth. And we were able to close out the day on the giant rigid pendulum swing SkyHawk, and on Wave Swinger, the more normal swings ride in Frontier Town, before picking our last ride for the night. And in hindsight, I realize this must have been the night we rode Steel Vengeance and might have got a second ride in. Thursday night I think we closed on Millennium Force instead. It's not much of a difference. We had got in most of the roller coasters by this time, and could feel confident that the handful we hadn't ridden on would be easy to get in the remaining two days.
After we got back to the hotel bunnyhugger looked around the Breakers' gift shop, finding that they had some pairs of thin but weather-appropriate gloves for reasonable prices. Something like ten bucks or so, nothing uproariously inappropriate. Her hands could be a little less unpleasantly cold the rest of the weekend. And again I can't swear that she didn't do this on Thursday night instead. But these are things that were happening two weeks ago when it looked like we might have a good time ahead.
Photo roll time: more of Pinball At The Zoo. Remember that last time I was looking at a Weird Al pinball machine, so, here's a bit more of that.
A view of the Weird Al pinball machine. Its most obvious weirdness: the lower two-thirds of the table is a TV screen. This allows for some very complex changes in look and prompting the player about what to do, but it also means (almost) all the hittable targets are in the top third and you're making long shots or nothing. It also means that the flippers have to be operated remotely, with levers pulling them from far away instead of operating even slightly normally. This leaves them a little slower and weaker than the normal flipper of these days.
View of the Weird Al game from the side. It looks fun and it's got actual clips from the guy in it, and there's some fun modes from what I can tell but what I hear is the game is a maintenance nightmare (there's a reason nobody's wild ideas for different stuff to do with flippers have caught on).
Bally's late-80s Game Show pinball, a wonderful and fun game that, huh, I had a great game on. I'm sorry that Pinball Arcade never made a digital version of this as I'm sure it would be one of my comfort plays.
Here's the Game Show playfield. The spin-or-nudge mechanism is a really nice repeatable ramp that some modern game should rip off.
And here's an older electromechanical that I had a great game on. Just not quite great enough, but still, not bad for playing one or two times.
Did I mention that Big Casino is a really old game, from before they figured out the normal way to put flippers at the bottom of the game? This is why it is absolutely not cheating to nudge a pinball game: you cannot play this without a couple well-timed taps in the right direction.
Trivia: Nerf balls began as props for an indoor volleyball game. Source: The Game Makers: The Story Of Parker Brothers From Tiddledy Winks To Trivial Pursuit, Philip E Orbanes.
