In the Ferris wheel on top

Like many teenagers in the central New Jersey area I worked one summer for Six Flags Great Adventure. It wasn't objectively bad, as summer jobs go, although I was repeatedly ripped away from my assigned station to fry funnel cake in the hottest, least ventilated room outside 19th century Calcutta, except for when I was shoved into cashier-and-order-prep duty in a stand where I had no idea what the menu was and no one who would listen to my protestations that I should have any idea what could or could not be bought there before tending customers. So in a fit of pique afterwards I began, like many teenagers in the central New Jersey area, a boycott of Great Adventure.

As boycotts go this wasn't a strictly challenging one: following summers I was working nearly every spare moment on a rotating-shifts job in a chemical plant so I would barely have the time to go anyway. And then after that I was attending graduate school outside Albany, and after that working in Singapore, so I was ``boycotting'' Great Adventure with roughly the same energy that I boycott the Phoenix Coyotes hockey team, assuming they still exist.

Nevertheless bunny_hugger was shocked that I might live so near such a major amusement park, with so many roller coasters and a particularly antique carousel, and she very much wanted to visit, particularly since they have the world's tallest roller coaster and this could be her first chance to ride a world record-holding roller coaster. (She's ridden many which were record-holders at one point, but not until they'd been superseded in whatever their record was.) We might have gone originally, in 2008, but took in Seaside Heights instead; and we somehow didn't get organized for it last year, but this year ... this would be the year we certainly made it. We set for Monday as the target date, with Tuesday and Wednesday as backups in case of rain. It didn't rain.

( And thus began my first trip to Great Adventure in twenty years. Warning: this story is over five thousand words long, although some of the words are repeated.  )

Finally, ultimately, we were ready to leave, with bunny_hugger's new shirt but not a new plush. Pausing just long enough to completely forget to pick up a new and un-crinkled map, we walked out of Great Adventure and into the rest of our time together.

Trivia: Following the Trans-Earth Injection burn, Michael Collins reported to Houston that at the current rate of consumption Apollo 11 would not have enough chlorine ampules to treat their water supply to last until splashdown. Houston reminded the fatigued astronaut there was another supply cabinet full of ampules. Source: Carrying The Fire: An Astronaut's Journeys, Michael Collins.

Currently Reading: The American Circus: An Illustrated History, John Culhane.