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Finally the two or so hours of KennyKon-attendee-exclusive time in the park ended ... for now ... and the general public came in. With this, our visit reverted to something more like a normal Kennywood trip, apart from lacking the high of coming off of Pinburgh and the low of having underperformed at Pinburgh. The twist here was that the KennyKon organizers had set up a schedule of ITOTs, Informal Take-Over Times, when whoever wanted to would gather together and get in line to ride, say, Jackrabbit roller coaster or the Grand Prix bumper cars or the Noah's Ark funhouse all together.
One big special event that I'm not sure waited until after the park opened was the group photo, done on the infield lawn of the Thunderbolt roller coaster. It's within the curving hill that was added to the onetime Pippin roller coaster to make it into Thunderbolt. It's also about where I saw those Eastern cottontail rabbits prowling around one time, back before the pandemic began. The rabbits, or their descendants, did not put in an appearance. But many, maybe all, the KennyKon attendees did and it was the sort of milling around with people thinking they're in line of sight that you'd expect. For very simple ways to make us feel special, though, being allowed past the barriers into the infield of a roller coaster? One they had to stop roller coaster operations for? That's so much value for such a simple thing.
On our own, we did a couple things. One was eat: we went to the Potato Patch, in its 50th year serving fries that Pittsburghers believe to be the best root-based food ever. And since we got there early there wasn't any wait. We also decided, you know, today seems like it's going to be really hot. Why don't we get the souvenir free-refills cup? Other than that we couldn't find a place that was open and selling them. I, dispatched on a side quest for this, found one at the Pagoda that I'll write about when I get to how the park's changed in the four years since our previous visit unless I forget. The drink cups, first of all, turn out to be good for discount drinks in subsequent years, something that if we'd known about would have got us digging our old Kennwood cup from 2017(?) out of the attic. They also work with self-service soda stands, by way of an RFID chip that lets you refill once every fifteen minutes or so. It turns out the chip lets you dispense for about twenty seconds or so, which isn't enough to let you get a couple quick deep sips from the filling bottle and still fill it. Also if there's any problem with the drink, like your fountain's out of Coke Zero, there's not much time to recover and re-strategize. On the other hand, it's fifteen minutes to get some replacement, it's not like you're risking dehydration even when it is a hot and sunny day.
We would take time to do some other things that were just for us. Getting square ice cream, for example, in the double-headed ice cream cones. Or taking a ride on the Old Mill, re-themed back from Garfield's Nightmares to a more original and more traditional-like mild scare adventure. A friend in the area said a couple years ago that the re-theming away from Garfield's Nightmares --- which nobody liked, but everybody enjoyed disliking --- had seen ridership collapse as without the ironic riders who was left? But that doesn't match our experience, which was that of a long line that seemed to be people enjoying themselves. I don't know how much of this was that it was a hot, sunny Saturday in July, the busiest non-Halloween time for an amusement park. But at least our experience was that the ride was a well-received success.
Let's enjoy more time with Gilroy Gardens in photographs, now.
Gilroy Gardens is on a terrain hillier in more interesting ways than other parks we've been to. Even parks in mountainous territory like Santa's Village in New Hampshire or Santa's Workshop in Colorado don't have this sort of structure of significant passageways underneath others.
And then there's the occasional closed-off pathway! These stairs evidently used to lead to something but they're no longer in use.
It's a neat walkway but it does look awful for people with any kind of mobility issues, so I understand replacing it with something more friendly.
And then somebody left a bottle of --- not sure. Seems like a cleaner or sealant of some kind --- in this naturally-occurring shelf.
Back up the steps and to the main entryway again; you can see that stage with the mockup workshed or whatever in the distance, and the train bridge over that.
Oh, and we stopped for an ice cream/fruit drink. This was so very good.
Trivia: Eastman Kodak built deep underground facilities for testing mirror sizes for Manned Orbiting Laboratories experiments, the thinking being the capacities of the telescopes to be launched on the project would be better concealed if the sizes of the testing labs were obscured. Source: Spies In Space: Reflections on National Reconnaissance and the Manned Orbiting Laboratory, Courtney V K Homer. (Albert Crews here is quoted particularly as using thirty feet as a size, but it's not clear to me that isn't a for-example size rather than a particular measurement.)
Currently Reading: Lost Popeye Zine, Volume 29: Wimpy and the Whaleburgers, Tom Sims, Bela Zaboly. Editor Stephanie Noelle.
