Last Sunday we went to Cedar Point, our first amusement park trip of the year. Early in the season, yes, but we hoped it would be a low-crowd day. Also on our minds: we were planning to go to Anthrohio this past weekend, and if we caught Covid at that it would wipe out early June as a chance to go to parks. (No evidence of catching anything so far, touch wood.) And, if I should get either of those jobs those recruiters are hot for, that would wipe out weekdays in late June. (No evidence of that, yet, but here's hoping it does become a problem.) So Sunday was our best chance for an early-season visit.
The obvious chance at Cedar Point, driving up, is that Wicked Twister is gone, and the skyline's a bit diminished for that. I haven't heard anything about what the park plans to do with that space, if they have specific plans now. A subtler difference is that Top Thrill Dragster, their 400-foot-tall coaster, isn't running. It's often down --- it's very sensitive to wind, and the ride itself has a lot of maintenance problems anyway --- but last season a piece fell off and nearly killed a women in the ride queue. The ride's not scheduled to open this season and no one is sure what they're going to do with the ride. Many expect it to be removed. Me, I'd put my money on renovations, and a better-covered queue. But we have no information.
The invisible difference is paper. The park has gone cashless, part of a chain-wide drive to make everything less convenient for us but more trackable for them. (Perhaps on a similar vein they no longer stamp your hand for reentry to the park during the day. Season passholders just show their pass to reenter the park, which admittedly seems like it should have always been the way. People with day tickets go to a small queue to get a reentry ticket, which seems about as reasonable as a hand stamp, except this way they can time how long you were out of the park.) And not just cash is gone. They don't have physical park maps, now, expecting you to download their app and find stuff on that instead. If you know me, you know how I feel about this. (It's possible they sell souvenir 'deluxe' park maps, but I didn't notice them in the gift shop. I wasn't thinking to look for them either.)
The big exciting new merchandise item at Cedar Park's chain this past year was themed Squishmallows. These are these cute enough small pillow plushes, this time licensed to represent the mascots of various rides, mostly roller coasters. ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
bunnyhugger is particularly delighted by the cute ones for Canada's Wonderland's parks and even bought one off eBay last year. This would be our first chance to see Cedar Point's Squishmallows and ... they didn't have them. They had some generic Squishmallows, but none of the ones themed to park rides. They did have collectible/tradeable pins, though, an extension of last year's pins project. Among the new ones were pins for the carousels, including at least one picture of the Kiddie Kingdom's rabbits, and also pins from vintage maps. bunnyhugger got several bundles, including a couple blind bags, which we took to the car to have something to enjoy on the way home. (She also got a bin of Chicago corn so we'd have something to eat on the way home.) This gave us the chance to try out the new no-hand-stamp reentry system. That seemed to work all right. We got back in, didn't we?
So I was driving in to Okemos and discovered that the camel-back bridge slated for demolition, which I'd photographed on what I thought was its last day back in February, was still there. I stopped for a couple more photographs now that the weather was nice.
Looking at the Okemos Bridge, from the park to its east side. The bridge was one-way northbound, at this point; the matching southbound bridge was already torn down.
Looking through the gaps in one side of the bridge to the gap in the other and, beyond that, to the green pedestrian bridge that's maybe being kept? I don't know.
Looking south along the bridge from the northern end. There's a gap where the southbound bridge used to be, and there's Jersey barriers set up at what had been the median between the bridge approaches.
Trivia: During the era of the French Revolutionary Calendar, Robespierre inaugurated the `Decadic festivals'', to be observed every ten days and dedicated to patriotism, filial piety, and such, with the first on 8 June 1794. The festival was dedicated to the ``supreme being'', and held at the garden of the Tuileries; Robespierre officiated. Source: Mapping Time: The Calendar and its History, EG Richards.
Currently Reading: Women In Space: Following Valentina, David J Shayler, Ian Moule.
