Thursday of our trip we went back to Gilroy Gardens. I hadn't had enough of the place on Tuesday, and there were things we felt we could spend more time on. We could probably spend much more time there; if we lived in the area we'd surely have season passes. We didn't quite get on the road early enough to be there for opening, but we got close. The park would shut early, I want to say at 5 pm, but that fit nicely as we had thoughts about what to do for the evening that would be helped by an early amusement park day.
Along the way we made another stop at Jack-In-The-Box. For me, another couple boxes of fried vegetables. For ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
bunnyhugger, more mini-pancakes. This time they remembered the syrup which had been the only flaw of the previous visit. The pancakes weren't quite as piping fresh, a small drawback. But still, she wants a Jack-In-The-Box near us, or at least somewhere that will sell a dozen tiny pancakes any time of the day.
The park wasn't as crowded as it had been on Tuesday, the 4th of July. This justified their shorter operating day, and their having fewer events. (On the 4th they had some kind of Tastes-of-Gilroy event with different stands offering mostly non-vegetarian food, for example.) It also suggested we'd have even shorter lines and this was so. We went in, completely oblivious to the ten or so Circus Trees lining the main entrance.
Done with the Star Tower and reunited with bunnyhugger! So what are we up to now at Great America, back then?
On to our next ride, the roller coaster Patriot. And here you see one adorably tiny person walking around the stairs.
Looking up at the loading station. You can see the queue TVs, as well, showing whatever was going on that day. I'm more interested in the heaps of leaves caught in the net.
Here's what the top of the loading station looks like. The roller coaster used to be a stand-up coaster, and like a lot of stand-up coasters got converted to a seated one (compare Mantis/Rougarou at Cedar Point).
And off to another roller coaster. While approaching The Demon we got this nice side view of Berserker, the Bayern Kurve. So here's the side --- almost back --- view.
Demon has a lot of setting and decoration, such as these caves you walk through to go in. There's also a neat skull cave the coaster dives into.
And here's the Demon's loading station, seen here in film noir.
Trivia: Florenz Ziegfeld's first production, a decade before his Follies, toured the United States 1896-99 as the Trocadero Vaudevilles, starring strongman Eugene Sandow. Sandow, claimed Ziegfeld, could lift a man in each hand with two men standing on his back, could hoist 750 pounds dead weight with one finger, and could bear 3200 pounds on his body. Source: No Applause - Just Throw Money: The Book That Made Vaudeville Famous, Trav S D (D Travis Stewart)
Currently Reading: Saving Yellowstone: Exploration and Preservation in Reconstruction America, Megan Kate Nelson.
PS: What's Going On In Alley Oop? Why did the aliens stop shooting at them? June - September 2023 as we get through one and a half stories that I think are doing rather well, really. Some neat time travel stuff and a nice strange island like you might have encountered in 1930s pulp science fiction.
