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austin_dern

July 2025

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Sep. 19th, 2023

To pick up the pace of things at Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk some: there were two other really important attractions we went to.

One is the Haunted House, a dark ride and our favorite sort, a non-interactive one. You just putter through in the dark and things catch you by surprise. The ride had a pretty good wait for it, comparable to the Giant Dipper, and it's justified. The ride has a good blend of spooky and funny and we could have gone on it a dozen times except it maintained a good-length wait. The boardwalk itself has a nice blog post describing the ride here, including going into its history. And there's also a ride-through video from last year, that'll give you a fisheyed view of the proceedings.

Also a visit, and an upcharge at that? Fright Walk Under The Boardwalk. This was something we passed as we entered the boardwalk to begin with, and the door was flanked with large seahorse-style dragons that occasionally emitted smoke, immediately winning a place in our hearts. I pushed for taking the time to do the walk.

It was great to start with. The safety spiel's done by a couple chattering skulls above the door. The stunts are all pleasantly non-interactive, or at least, they're triggered by where you're standing rather than having to shoot at a something. It also, as promised in the name, has stairs and goes down and that feels like a risk, doesn't it? But, hey, we manage the stairs in the Noah's Ark at Kennywood and that adds rocking to the motion.

There was a short stretch of [personal profile] bunnyhugger's most hated haunted-house attraction, the large vinyl bags pressing together that you have to push through. On the other hand, there was also a stretch with the most amazing thing we had seen. It was a room with a smoke machine, yes, but also a laser projected at about waist height. The effect was to be walking through a ghostly sea, as your movement produced wakes and ripples that spread out and joined the motion of everything else in the room. And yet, of course, it was cool and dry. It's such an ingenious bit, simple yet new to us. Strongly recommend, if you should happen to be there.

We ended up not finding the time to watch any of the live shows. Nor to playing any pinball and, worse, not finding the time to go to another attraction. But that is a story for another day. Also we didn't get to the magic store before it closed. Not that we were particularly looking to get a box of amusement-park magic tricks, but boy, remember when every amusement park had a magic shop and you could theoretically learn how to do the ring-separation trick if you had far more patience than a kid actually has? This, too, would be a story for another day, although I have to admit, a shorter one.

For the pier closed at the surprisingly early 9 pm. We closed with a night ride on Giant Dipper, and found a hamburger place with pretty good vegetarian burgers that wasn't quite closed just yet, and made our way back to the car and then back to the hotel. We had two full days left in California.


Now let's zip back a couple days to California's Great America. Last we saw, I was up in the Star Tower observation deck. What about now?

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Continuing the descent from the top of the Star Tower. Nice look on top of the Gold Striker's first-drop tunnel as well as the parking lot that I guess is the corporate neighbors'?


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I am so sorry there's not a train coming out of the tunnel right there. Also I don't know what those planters behind are, but their existence and the picnic tables make me wonder if this is, like, the park employee cafeteria or had been at one point.


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Closing in on the ground now. You can see the Star Tower's queue underneath the tunnel. And hey, can you see [personal profile] bunnyhugger waiting on the ground? No, I couldn't either, and it was some time before we met up.


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Here we are, though, landed again. Amazing how much dingier the same window looks on the ground.


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Coming out and taking one look up the tower.


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And finish. This is totally different from the photo I took of getting on the ride, in that it depicts a later moment.


Trivia: Between the Civil War and 1890 there were 26 industrial mergers announced. Source: A History of Credit and Power in the Western World, Scott B MacDonald, Albert L Gastmann.

Currently Reading: Saving Yellowstone: Exploration and Preservation in Reconstruction America, Megan Kate Nelson.

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