Be one of the comfortable people

Our Pinburgh 2016 adventure began on Wednesday with the traditional bringing our pet rabbit to bunny_hugger's parents' house. For the first time this was something we worried about, not because her parents don't take good care of him, but because the previous time we'd done that he had been basically immobile the whole weekend and we worried he'd be dead by the time we got home. This time we'd be out of his life nearly a whole week. He made it through, and basically fine. He seemed to bunny_hugger's mother to be depressed and not eating much the first couple days, but that seemed to track his usual behavior. In previous vacations even when he was fit he'd be noticeably down the first few days. I think he misses us so, and it takes a few days to reconcile himself to being in a pretty nice spot even if bunny_hugger isn't there. After a few days of this he seemed to stabilize, to get to mostly eating his pellets and vegetables. And her parents were able to handle his medicines, which in the immediate wake of the fly strike incident were more numerous than they are now, and cleaning him. We'd be so stuck if we didn't have them.

We wouldn't do any more amusement park trips this summer, lest we stress our pet rabbit any further. But we could get naturally to one bit of unfinished business. A bit off the most direct path from Lansing to Pittsburgh is New Philadelphia, Ohio. Tuscora Park, once an amusement park and now a city park that hasn't got rid of its rides, is there. We've visited it on two previous trips to Pittsburgh for Kennywood. On the first the park was closed due to rain. On the second its antique carousel was running, but its slightly-less-antique Parker Superior Wheel, a Ferris wheel, wasn't. The Superior Wheel was once common, and now only two are known to still exist. The other's at Crossroads Village in Flint, and we do ride that. We wanted to ride the other Superior Wheel.

So we made our third visit to the small park, and finding it packed for the first time. Not even a spot in the park's lot. I think the adjacent high school had a baseball game going, which probably ate up a lot of parking space. We'd have to settle for somewhere outside somebody's home. But there's particular joy in a full park. We got rides on the carousel and then, finally, three years after our first visit to the place, a ride on the Superior Wheel. It's a Ferris Wheel, yes, so you know the basic routine, although it does run faster than the average Ferris wheel of its size (something like 50 feet). Good ride.

The park also has an antique steel roller coaster, a Little Dipper that's sister to Conneaut Lake Park's (the world's oldest steel roller coaster still running) and the one at Quassy Amusement Park (which we were able to ride). But that's limited to kids, so we could just look at it.

We would have liked to stay and wander around the park more. But we had several hours to go to get to Pittsburgh, and we wanted to get there early. Everything we had heard about Pinburgh agreed: for all that it's awesome it's long and exhausting days that start at 8 am. This implied an early bedtime, which implied we leave soon, which implied we could just dash through the most important stuff and that did spoil some of the visit.

Trivia: Thomas Twining established Tom's Coffee House in 1706, selling coffee, chocolate, sugar, arrack (a south and southeast Asian liquor), brandy, and tea. In 1711 he was named purveyor of teas to Queen Anne. Source: Tea: Addiction, Exploitation, and Empire, Roy Moxham.

Currently Reading: The Complete Peanuts, 1973-74, Charles M Schulz. Editor Gary Groth.

PS: Reading the Comics, October 8, 2016: Split Week Edition Part 2, as I didn't have any better ideas for titling the essay.