What more can we do?

A bit of what we did next was exploring, getting to know the lay of the land better. This may sound like we weren't using our time efficiently but it was a hot day and we were tired and I needed to go slower and drink even more pop, for one thing. Also I noticed among the midway games was one with posters as prizes, or maybe for sale for directly. These started out like what you might expect, Disney's Fairies and Finding Nemo and Lego Batman Movie and the New York Mets and all. But then ... oh, there was a vintage air to these things. ... Like, the Jetsons movie. Jose Canseco. The 1980s Scarface. ``Don't Have A Cow, Man''-era Simpsons. Two different Dick Tracy movie posters. Alf. A sideways-hung poster for ``Barney Rubble Without A Cause''. The collection had aged so much as to tip over from ``funny because out of date'' to ``impossibly hip vintage posters''. We spent enough time looking at this that the guy running the midway games came over and asked if we wanted to play, or if there were anything we were particularly interested in. We demurred, bunnyhugger saying something like how we were just admiring the collection, and he accepted that.

He also told us what had become of the ospreys who'd disrupted a season by nesting on the roller coaster. They were set up in a free-standing nest on a tall pole, off in a bit of grassland away from the coaster and the amusement park. We'd driven and I'd walked past it a couple times without noticing but now, yeah, there it obviously was. It was a tall telephone-pole-like thing with a square platform on top, with a mass of nesting material up top where we could see the silhouette. We didn't notice the ospreys there, but they might have been obscured in the nest or off going about their business. Much of the day the nest was obscured by park structures anyway.

Besides the midway games, though, and the gift shop --- terribly short on the t-shirts or vintage photograph books we'd really like, although I picked up four postcards --- we got to the Laffland, the ``world's craziest ride'', with large old clown figures painted on the second floor of the frontage. On the wall underneath are ghosts and a vampire and demons and such. It promises the chance to ``ride and laugh'', which is fair enough, though what the ride actually is is your basic ride-through haunted house. This is exactly the sort of thing we want, though, in an attraction and we'd take a couple rides in it over the day. The cars were wonderfully basic old things, living evidence of the park's age.

The sense of age was prominent in the park. None of the rides were bad or unsafe-looking or anything, but they did look like ones the park might have had in the 1970s and had to keep since for want of the cash to buy something newer. To our perspective this is fantastic because we want to ride a Tip Top or a Matterhorn with 1970s painting. But you can also understand where this would give less vintage-attracted parkgoers the sense that the place is going to close as soon as the building inspector notices the place. (To affect a generic park snob's attitude; a lot of rides, really, will keep going until the metal wears out.)

For example and for a mystery we couldn't solve --- and belatedly realized we might solve --- was that there was a spot with the centerpiece for some lost flat ride, sitting there in the middle of the pavement. All of the cars(?) had been long removed, as had whatever fence the ride once had, or entrance or exit point. All there was was this squat metal block with folded arms, looking like an early Soviet space probe or something. That it was unguarded speaks to how long it's been there, as if it couldn't ever have been anything anymore. We couldn't guess what it was, or when it was anything. It sits in front of a large blue building labelled 'Treasureland' and also unexplained. I think that I overheard someone at the ticket queue talking about the place being haunted, and the park does offer ghost tours to walk through the park ``after dark''. We didn't have the time for that and I'm not sure it was offered the night we were there anyway, but it is a useful way to put a building to some service, if that's what it is doing.

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Here's a touch more at Indiana Beach's Historical Center. Something really special's coming up tomorrow, though.

Also set up in the historical center is a small dining table, along with a circa 90s menu for the Skyroom restaurant. Among the weekly specials was, for Tuesdays, all you can eat pancakes, $4.00. (Blueberry pancakes, $4.50.)

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Fortune teller set up in the historical center. We didn't give it a try, tough.

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Old park merchandise; note the secondary figure of Cornball Jones, mascot for Cornball Coaster. Also some of the pakr's Golden Ticket awards for the Frankenstein's Castle walk-thorugh attraction.

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Special Golden Ticket award given to Gene Staples for his work in saving parks. And a winning frog from the midway game.

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Indiana Beach serving tray and also a courtesy pass which we'd have liked to know more about. Also a wheel from Tig'rr Coaster that I trust they didn't need anymore.

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Trivia: Baron Gaspard Clair François Marie Riche de Prony's table of logarithms was calculated in part by a team of 60 to 80 clerks who were, before the Revolution left them unemployed, hairdressers for the aristocracy. Source: Jacquard's Web: How A Hand-Loom Led To The Birth Of The Information Age, James Essinger.

Currently Reading: Pogo's Double Sundae, Walt Kelly. (I've actually finished this but I didn't have my reading time ready.)

PS: Reading the Comics, August 5, 2022: Catching Up Edition as I point out how comic strips mention, like, arithmetic problems.