When we got up, Eclipse Day, besides finding breakfast I also found my house keys. They were in the pocket of my messenger bag, where I had set them; I just usually put them in this deep pocket instead. That was a nice minor anxiety relief; not that I thought it likely that my anonymous keys, lost somewhere in Ypsilanti or Maumee or Sandusky, would let someone divine their way to our house in Lansing and rob it. Just that it would be a hassle to make do with one set of keys on Tuesday until I could get them copied.
The hassle we anticipated: reading that traffic was going to be unspeakably bad everywhere near the path of totality. Our hotel was in Sandusky but still a good twenty minutes or so in normal traffic away from Cedar Point. We allotted an hour to get there around the park's opening of noon and, what do you know, it took like twenty minutes to get there. I suppose everyone in Sandusky figured they had a good enough view of the sky.
And the sky was looking beautiful and clear, the forecasts of a two-thirds chance of clouds notwithstanding. The perfectly clear skies of noon would not last, but the change wasn't that important. By the time the eclipse started there'd be a light haze, which would have spoiled our view of the transit of Mercury, but there isn't going to be a transit of Mercury the same day as a solar eclipse until July of 6757.
As we approached the park we saw the place decorated with signs and posters for ``Total Eclipse of the Point''. The name's inevitability did not keep ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
bunnyhugger from protesting that ``Total Eclipse of the Park'' would preserve the sound of the original lyric. She's right, but Cedar Point has been using ``The Point'' as a nickname too long to switch to ``The Park'' for a day. The employee at the parking lot scanned our printed-out tickets (I'm still old-fashioned enough to trust holding on to a piece of paper instead of to the phone, the presense of which I tap my pocket to check every 75 seconds), welcomed us to the event, and handed us a parking slip to put in the windshield, a bright red page with a Cedar Point logo and giant E that will someday be a souvenir whose origin we don't remember at all. With Cedar Point selling only a small number of tickets, and our getting there early, there were few parking spots taken, and we got one right up by the fence between regular and Premium parking.
bunnyhugger wondered whether she should bring in her sunglasses and I quipped that no, today she would not need them. The logic of my joke did not prevent me from putting on sunscreen, though.
Now here's those Indiana Beach photos I had planned to post last night for you:
The Musik Express at full speed, more or less. Also with the lights on, so you can judge how those eight-pointed stars with the two points missing look.
And Falling Star, which is near the Musik Express, also by night. The background star neither rises nor falls.
Near the entrance to the Hoosier Hurricane. Also Rocky's Rapids, the main drop of which sends water splashing onto the walkway here. It hadn't been raining that hard, there just had been that many boats. Makes the place look nice and cinematic, though, doesn't it?
More of the cinematic street lighting outside the roller coaster and log flume.
And now the real fun begins: the Fascination parlor! Small crowd, unfortunately, and we only had time for a couple of games.
bunnyhugger is ready, though. You see the five-by-five grid of holes; the objective is to cover rows or columns --- or if the game calls for it, other patterns --- as in Bingo, by rolling a rubber ball down the lanes.
Trivia: In the 1950s Famous Studios offered employees five dollar bounties for good punny cartoon titles. Source: Of Mice and Magic: A History of American Animated Cartoons, Leonard Maltin.
Currently Reading: The Diplomacy of the American Revolution, Samuel Flagg Bemis.
