Having shared now the dramatic peaks of our recent amusement park tour let me go back to recount the whole, more or less in chronological order. It began a week ago Thursday, after the typical battening down of the house, watering of the garden, and housing of the pet rabbit at ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
bunnyhugger's parents. Also my stockpiling a lot of durable foods, in case we got Covid-19 during the trip and had to quarantine for a week or two. So far no sign that we have, but we've got a couple more days before we can be confident in that.
The trip began with me going the wrong way, as I'd assumed we would take I-96 to US 23 down to Columbus and keep going. This would be a tolerable way to get to the Queen City of the Ohio --- and Kings Island --- but this was not our first destination. We hoped to get to Louisville, for Kentucky Kingdom, and I learned how bad my mental map of Kentucky was by learning we were better off going to I-69 and driving down, basically, through Indiana. No difficult-to-correct harm done, though. It also meant we stopped for lunch at a Burger King we never would have otherwise and I at least found the Impossible Whopper noticeably better than usual. We would have a couple good fast-food experiences, finding --- most oddly --- a Taco Bell really good at its job somewhere on US 23 in the northwest corner of Ohio. Sorry I can't pin down the location more than that. It was kitty-corner to a Circle K if that helps.
With a couple stops at Indiana rest areas that delivered on the promised vending machines, but did not promise they would have vending machines with coffee, we got to Louisville in the early evening. It was hot and muggy, and our hotel was just up the hill from a huge brick building with a nice mural of various housepaint-type buckets on it. It was also in walking range of the expo center and Kentucky Kingdom amusement park. We thought semi-seriously about whether to actually bother driving to the park or just load up the car and walk there.
We, of course, loaded up the car and drove in, because as hot and muggy as it was that night, it would be the same the next day. And every day for the trip; I think there was only one day the high was below 90 Fahrenheit, and the humidity ranged between 90 and 130 percent. It wasn't hot weather following us, either. Thursday night, bunnyhugger learned from the neighborhood groups, the heat and humidity of home got broken up by a sudden thunderstorm dropping all the water in the world for about thirty seconds, with the temperature returning to normal but even steamier two minutes after that. This would be the weather pattern to expect, at home and on the road, for the whole of our trip.
So this would be a trip of us breaking our usual practice and getting souvenir refillable soda pop bottles at the parks; on a normal trip we content ourselves to one or two cups and don't worry about stowing the clutter on rides. This time, we'd need all the hydration we could get.
The heat and humidity meant it was a difficult expedition for getting around. On the other hand, this likely pushed the people who'd go to amusement parks into the water parks instead, where they wouldn't get in the way of what we wanted to do. With few exceptions --- most of them at Kings Island, the last days of our trip --- we didn't wait in line for anything. Thus the 'hot and lineless' tag for this trip report, a name that may not have the snappy cleverness of 'Rain Check Trip' but does at least describe what happened with approximate accuracy.
Tomorrow, all going well, I'll start in on the first park.
In pictures now I'm up to the last hour of Michigan's Adventure's operating season last October, and getting into pictures of the Great Casual Ambiguous Pumpkin Heist of '23. You ready for what you'll see? You sure? ... Here we go:
The 'Skelebration' event stage in the final hour of the season and, if you look to the left, you can see something that had been brewing since mid-day ... do you see her?
Yeah so people just started carrying out the decorative pumpkins.
Kid here with a pumpkin bigger than his head. We don't know if the park decided to allow people to take the decorations that were, at this point, just more things to clean up at the end of the season.
Or maybe people just started taking pumpkins and the staff decided they aren't being paid enough to argue with every family in the park.
But you can see, the pumpkin-taking was getting wild.
``My one regret --- is that I have --- bone-ear-tis!'' Inaccurate skeletal rat decoration in the gift shop.
Trivia: Though the second stage of the Gemini 2 launch vehicle was removed and stowed indoors before Hurricane Cleo struck Cape Kennedy in September 1964, there was not time to move the first stage, and it stood, lashed to launch pad 19, throughout the storm. Source: Gemini Flies! Unmanned Flights and the First Manned Mission, David J Shayler. This was a separate incident from the launchpad being struck by lightning.
Currently Reading: The Mathematical Radio: Inside the Magic of AM, FM, and Single-Sideband, Paul J Nahin. There's good reasons for it but the preface to this book is 62 pages and I just do not expect to see the preface page numbering reach lxii especially in what is, despite the subject matter, a non-academic book.
