And all she offered me were dreams

We had pretty much a walk-on to ride Mantis, which was shocking. It was as I say cold and dreary, so few people were in the park, but still, the roller coaster had less than a month to go. Nobody was rushing for last rides. If we hadn't overheard people being fooled by Cedar Point's publicity, trying to make out the change of seating type --- from a standing coaster to a seated one --- as replacing Mantis with a new coaster, we might suppose people were just not excited by the change. But even so, the ride would be changing massively, and people weren't rushing for last rides on the way it was. Disaster Transport was a roller coaster few were enthusiastic about, but its last days saw everyone in northern Ohio and southern Michigan rushing for a last trip on it. Poor Mantis didn't even get that last bit of love.

I'm glad the roller coaster isn't really going away, just changing its type of train. But it is a shame to lose the rare standing position; it makes the drops particularly feel completely different. But the general layout of the track is pretty good and maybe, seated, it'll be a more appreciated ride. Admittedly it'd be hard to be less-loved.

We went to one of the shows, the comic-music-magic show we've been to in previous years. They change the show out a little bit each year we've found. At one point the comic magician needed audience assistants to help him do an escape-from-the-docks trick, and called me up to be one of the people holding up the banner hiding his initial failed attempts. And then he involved me further: the trick ends with him out of the dock and one of the banner-holders trapped in it, and what do you know but he picked me as the one of the two people he had on stage. So that's how I made my stage debut in one of the Cedar Point Halloweekend magic shows. bunny_hugger tried to get a photograph but the lighting and the speed of the event worked against her, alas.

I don't want to harp on the cold or the low attendance, but it was cold and attendance was low, giving us the motivation and the chance, really, to go to some of the haunted houses. One of the ones we took this time was the Eerie Estate, in one of those buildings that obviously at some point served an administrative role but that's so familiar and old it becomes kind of invisible even though it's sitting right between the main midway and one of the Peanuts themed areas. This one's a haunted-estate manion in theme and felt really packed with performers as I remember it. I'm glad we had the chance to take in some mansions.

And of course the roller coasters were walk-ons or near enough; we got in a couple go-rounds on Mean Streak before retreating to the Casino Arcade for some pinball and warmth. On Blue Streak there were so few people waiting we were given the option to re-ride --- and we did, because of course --- and we're rather sure we'd have gotten another re-ride if not that because of the drizzling rain that closed the ride early, so we couldn't take that as our last ride of the night. We walked over towards Magnum XL 200, but that was also already closed, and so we went to Corkscrew, which we'd overlooked before, for the last ride of the night. The Corkscrew staff was joking about the Top Thrill Dragster, which is right across the midway from them, and which is noisy and was down all day because of the weather.

One delightful point about Cedar Point ride operator crews is they form rivalries and there's a compelling logic behind the late-70s Corkscrew viewing the modern and still crowd-drawing Top Thrill Dragster as its rival. That Top Thrill Dragster is ``always'' going down for weather or maintenance issues (watch this space), while Corkscrew keeps chugging along, is natural and really wonderful. So it was Corkscrew we were riding as midnight came and the park started bedding down for the night.

Trivia: The earliest recorded versions of baseball had an inning end when a single batter or runner was put out. In the 1820s versions arose in which all batters had to be put out. Source: Baseball Before We Knew It: A Search For The Roots Of The Game, David Block.

Currently Reading: Pioneers, Reformers, and Millionaires, Elizabeth A Homer.