With the big-ticket rides ridden we could spend more casual time on Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk. We passed by the last couple minutes, for example, of a juggler's show, a husband-and-wife(?) pair doing some good bits while balancing on a board atop a cylinder, just like in the old Wii Fit balance game stunt. They announced when other shows were and we thought it'd be good to come back and catch the whole thing, which we never did.
We could also get to other rides. For example, the Undertow, one of the other roller coasters. This isn't an historic ride; it's just a few months short of being ten years old. It's the twin to Waldameer's Steel Dragon and Seabreeze's Whirlwind. Also to Laff Trakk, installed at Hersheypark after our last visit there. This also means we've been on one-third of all of that model of roller coaster (the Maurer Rides GmbH SC2000) installed, which is a neat accidental achievement. This ride had a longer wait than the Giant Dipper did, possibly thanks to its more prominent location up atop a couple other rides and an elevated portion of the platform. Certainly because the ride has a much lower capacity; each train is a single car with at most four passengers, although half of them get to go up the lift hill backwards, and the ride spins after that.
I'm not sure if it was in the queue for Undertow or back in the line for Giant Dipper that I noticed something about the sky chair ride. This, like you'd imagine, runs much the length of the boardwalk. I was as curious about riding it as ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
bunnyhugger was eager to never ride it ever. I was more curious when I noticed one of the chairs had a mannequin riding on it. And more so when I realized it was a mannequin of a caveman, of all possible things. This, it turns out, ties into boardwalk lore in ways we would have to discover over the day.
We explored more of the boardwalk. We thought very hard, for example, about riding the log flume. It's a nice old-mill-themed ride and looks like it might be a classic old Arrow flume, one of the dwindling remaining set. But we're also not really big at getting wet, and the ride does let passers-by shoot water canons at anyone not soaked to their tastes. We ended up not getting on it after all. We also thought seriously about the Rock-O-Plane, one of the few still operating. But we did ride a Rock-O-Plane at the last Pinburgh, and we put that down as a maybe-if-we-have-time ride. We ended up not getting around to it after all.
But we did get to many more things, and feel quite satisfied with them.
More of our serious California's Great America touring, here.
The loading station for Flight Deck,
And there it goes up the lift hill. It looks like the back two rows are empty, which fits with my recollection that the ride was a walk-on.
Components of some kind hidden behind Flight Deck. I believe these are for shows at the Pavilion, not needed just then.
Pinball! Four games, no waiting, plus some art of an electromechanical pop bumper. We'd have played but we didn't know that we had the time and we'd have had to buy a card and put money on it instead of just putting quarters in the games.
An actual factual map! We didn't see one of the park up front, but the All-American Corners area had a little slice of map here.
We liked the Space Age look of The Orbit, an Enterprise that's one of the park's original rides.
Trivia: There have been places named Garfield in five Michigan counties (Bay County, Grand Traverse County, Missaukee County, Saginaw County, and --- as Garfield Harbor --- Mackinac County). All but the Saginaw County Garfield were founded in the 1880s. Source: Michigan Place Names: The History of the Founding and the Naming of More Than Five Thousand Past and Present Michigan Communities, Walter Romig. The Grand Traverse, Missaukee, and Mackinac County Garfields were named in 1882.
Currently Reading: The World In A Grain: The Story of Sand and How It Transformed Civilization, Vince Reiser.
