Another thing which has not been secret: ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
bunnyhugger and I have been living cautiously through the pandemic. More cautiously than anyone we know besides her parents, really. We have had three vacations, two to Motor City Furry Con and one to Anthrohio. But we haven't had an amusement park trip since 2019. Between the pandemic nobody's even trying to control any longer and the exhaustion of my savings there wasn't much we could do. But bunnyhugger, restless and urged on by her mother, who thought (rightly) that it would help me considerably to get away for a while, looked for what we could do.
Sylvan Beach Amusement Park is a tiny boardwalk-style park in the Finger Lakes region of New York. It goes back to the 1870s. In the center of the park is a carousel that was installed in 1896 and has been going since then. (There are complications here I will come to in time.) We considered going to it in our 2019 trip to Canada's Wonderland and Western New York parks, but it seemed a bit extra far away. And their lone roller coaster was closed, due to ospreys building their nest on it. We don't insist on a roller coaster every park we go to, but if we're going all that way it would be nice to have more than just the one antique carousel ride to go there for. So we put it off that trip.
But now ... this year? We had reason to go back to Western New York. Seabreeze Park, in Rochester, celebrated the centennial of their Jack Rabbit roller coaster in 2020 and we're glad not to have waited for the centennial year for that. The day we were there in 2019 they closed early, before twilight, so we never got to see the park starting to illuminate. We could do a side trip to Canada's Wonderland, and go to Seabreeze, and to Sylvan Beach. We could even come back through Niagara Falls and have another taste of the tourist-trap district of Clifton Street. bunnyhugger also found a string of hotels in the same chain we use for Motor City and Anthrohio, letting us stay for free one night, and to build points for free nights at a later convention. And it could all be done in under a week, taking me away from a surprising cluster of job interviews for only three weekdays.
And so began our Lake Ontario Loop, a five-day amusement park tour with maybe too much driving, the limits of Cedar Fair LLC's database system, satellite navigation not knowing how to find amusement parks, near-extinct flat rides, the mysterious shortage of conditioner at one multinational chain of hotels, and my maybe kind of committing a felony against the federal government of Canada.
That's for later. Back now to Livonia Spree to enjoy the carnival.
Rich in ride tickets and ready to go!
And the Super Cyclone's ride sign. Six tickets, tied for priciest ride at the fair.
Operator watching the train on the tracks while another loads and readies for launch.
Train going up the lift hill. Also, I admire people who wear their masks even outdoors in not-crowded locations; I only put mine on if I'm indoors or it's getting crowded.
Hey, it's monsters! Who are not licensed theme products but are delighting the kids anyway!
A woman vends souvenirs to people ahead of the start of the races.
Trivia: The Tokyo tribunal --- equivalent to the Nuremberg trials --- returned no specific indictments against Japanese war leaders for crimes against humanity. Incidents which might have deserved the name were treated as ``conventional war crimes'' or straightforward murder. Source: Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II, John W Dower.
Currently Reading: Images of America: Seabreeze Park, Jim Futrell.
