Sunday we packed up our stuff and put it in the car, tucked near the Oceana Gate at Cedar Point. Then we had to go make sure our bill was paid, at the hotel main lobby, and from there it was easiest to enter the park through the Hotel Gate. This was our critical mistake. But the Hotel Gate was a good place to enter, as it's the nearest entry to the Mine Ride. Which wasn't open, threatening to keep us from seeing what the Mystic Mine Ride theming actually was. But this did leave us near one of the newer Halloweekends attraction. Outside the Town Hall Museum, Cedar Point had set up a ``County Fear'', with booths that riff on the stuff you might see at a county fair. A goldfish pond where the bowls are empty and the fish (plastic) skeletons. A Wheel of Misfortune that tones down the misogyny by making it ``Visiting In-Laws'' alongside events like ``Spoiled Milk'' and ``Tax Audit'' and ``Buried Alive''. A ``Peep Show'' which, inside, has exactly what you should expect. A singing beaver animatronic that ![[profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
bunny_hugger thought might be salvaged from the old Jungle Larry's cruise ride. A ``Rack of Rats'' set up as if you could toss a softball and knock some over.
The ominous alongside the merry here: there's an antique cars ride in this part of the park. It was shut down, and based on the leaf accumulation and the confidence with which a squirrel prowled its tracks, for more than just the day. Maybe they just closed it to avoid crowding problems with the County Fear attractions. But Cedar Point did take out one of its three Antique Car rides to make way for ValRavn a couple years ago, and there's no a priori reason they couldn't be taking out another for some reason. It's understandable that they might; they've built up the whole Point and can only put new rides in by taking old ones out (or building new rides on top of others, which is easy for roller coasters and monorails and stuff, but hard for, like, a swinging ship).
We found a great lunch! They had grease trucks still. Not as many as they'd had for the Labor Day Weekend thing, which was some kind of contest between Ohio-area and Michigan-area grease trucks. But still, a bunch of trucks and CupZilla, that Korean barbecue one we'd gone to twice in that weekend, was one of them. Can't imagine we attracted any attention going back to it after seven weeks away. I did get the not-the-spiciest sauce because I'd forgotten I had already tried out the spiciest and found it just fine. I know, I struggle.
We poked into one of the theaters for one of the live performances. It was their 80s music show, although Halloweened up by declaring the performers were, like, Teen Wolf and Vampire and Catwoman and ``Spidora''. There was a loose ``we're in High School, or at least an 80s High School Movie'' theme that sort of drifted in and out of the thing. The important thing was getting to hear 80s Music again, and to wonder slightly when amusement parks are going to move on to 90s Music. I mean, 90s Teens are old enough to be taking their kids to the park, you know?
Then we hiked back to the far end of the park, to check in again on the Mystic Mine Ride, still closed. But we got a ride on Gemini (only running one of the two sides, but two trains on that side), and, walking back to the front of the park, our old reliable friend Corkscrew. And then back around the front of the park to the Casino, where we played Grand Prix and bunny_hugger put up what might be her best score ever on that game (388,120; the game rolls over at a million points). This left us at the front of the park, right where we wanted to be, in time to see a pack of people dressed as clowns or zombies or stuff walking even further front.
Trivia: A late 1944 estimate for the Supreme Headquarters, Allied Expeditionary Force, projected that at least eight million people would need repatriation at the end of the European War. Source: The Long Road Home: The Aftermath of the Second World War, Ben Shephard.
Currently Reading: Space Lash, Hal Clement. Yes, he did too build a story around dynamical stability. (Well, the conditions that make an L4/L5 orbit.) Which still seems incredibly Arthur C Clarke-ish. The protagonist making a dumb mistake works in that story's setup. But in this other, where an enemy agent tries to set a space station on fire and fails because he doesn't understand how convection currents work in space? I'm not buying the premise. Yes, the agent might not have had time to learn all the little things about how microgravity works, but surely the people sending him to destroy a space station would have sent a plan that could possibly work.
PS: And back to The Peaceable Kingdom!
View of the fairy shop from the windows inside the main shop.
There was a similar set of fairy windows underneath the other display window. This one looks like it's more of a back room for the fairy shop.
And then I noticed this: the fairy shop stockroom has a basement? That's just magnificent work. We pointed it out to a couple of people who were just noticing the oddity of the fairy door outside the building and told them what they could see if they went in and looked in the windows.
