The rain came pouring down

If Parc Festyland has costumed mascots we didn't see them. Or they didn't come out. They have characters, Festy and some female version of Festy, but we couldn't blame them if they'd decided the weather was too rainy to send them out.

They did have a 3-D movie theater and we ducked into one of its earliest showings, since it was looking more rainy and also seemed to be getting colder. This proved to be a twenty-minute-or-so computer-animated short about thieves breaking into a museum and getting chased by a pirate ghost. That was fun, partly because it was a point-of-view film, putting the audience in as one of the thieves. Also, it was done wordlessly, which is always a neat trick and probably makes the movie more accessible continent-wide. bunny_hugger and I had to agree, though, that if we were were museum-robbing and came across pirate ghosts, we'd try to disengage much sooner than the cartoon thieves did. Also we're not sure why the pirate ghost felt so strongly about his treasure being kept by the museum, considering. Just observing.

The theater fed out to one of the gift shops, one that surely violated Amusement Park Law by closing several hours before the park would. It had some sheltered areas, though, that we'd use to hide from the rain when that came back again in the later afternoon. There we'd sit and talk and reflect on the pity that the weather wasn't nicer. And we'd marvel at how far the ball-pit balls had escaped from the ball pit, considering we were seeing them rolling down a hill several attractions away and a fairly convoluted path along from the ball pit. It turned out there were other kids attractions with ball pits which we hadn't noticed at first.

Avoiding the chill and rain would constrain some of what we did. For example, the park has a Giant Discovery pendulum ride named Eretic. It looked good, and the station was decorated with nice attractions like dragons and gargoyles. But the idea of whipping through the chilly mist didn't appeal at all. There were a handful of squealing teenagers who rode it in those conditions, but they were obviously daft.

Many of the rides struck me as being the sorts of things, in size and excitement level, that would fit on an amusement pier, as at Casino Pier. For example, there's the Tour D'Esnambuc, another pirate-themed ride, entered through a small but effective dark tunnel and launching from within a Caribbean Fortress-themed station. It's compact enough to fit anywhere, and made interesting by being decorated well.

We did spend some time watching, fascinated, the people riding Pirat'Ak, a giant slide ride. Not just a giant slide, though: a giant water slide. There were even people racing on it, despite the weather. We couldn't imagine doing that. Just too chilly.

Trivia: In the 1970s Cleveland debated building a $1.2 billion jetport a mile offshore, in Lake Erie. Source: Naked Airport: A Cultural History of the World's Most Revolutionary Structure, Alastair Gordon.

Currently Reading: Authority, Jeff Vandermeer.

PS: A Summer 2015 Mathematics A To Z: unbounded, drawing near the ever-so-troublesome final letters of the alphabet for this little glossary project. Fifth since the last roundup.