Our day at Kentucky Kingdom started as this neat blend of great heat and great riding. We had time for a couple miscellaneous side adventures like trying to figure out how you were supposed to get to the farther side of the park --- it's bisected by an approach road, and you cross the road either on a bridge or at a designated pedestrian crossing --- by its bridge without entering the water park, which closes an hour before the main park does. You can, it's just not obvious when the water park is open and the bridge seems to feed you into the main pool.
Another minor adventure: trying to remember which roller coaster it was they'd taken out (T3, formerly T2, a replica of Thunderhawk at Michigan's Adventure and Mind Eraser at every Six Flags park ever) and where it had been (way the heck in back of the park, but we couldn't remember that on our own) and what replaced it (dunno). Also, what had been in this spot that clearly used to be something but we couldn't figure out what (no idea). In 2017 they put in Eye Of The Storm, a giant Larson Loop of the kind you occasionally see on the news leaving riders stuck upside-down (we didn't ride) but it didn't take up all that much of the vacated space.
After a ride on the carousel --- Bella Musica, created by the Dutch company Wood Design Amusement Rides --- and trying to figure out the collection of animals, and admiring its running board reprinting logos of 19th and early 20th century carousel carvers, including some deep cuts --- we sat in the heat to think what to do next. I had a course of action that would prove terrible.
My plan: ride the last(?) coaster we hadn't been on, the roller-skating themed junior coaster Roller Skater, and then get some ice cream. We would have been better off doing it the other order, as ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
bunnyhugger had suggested. Not that Roller Skater had a long line, understand, just one or two ride cycles. And we were amused the ride operator walked down the queue gates, tapping as though a walking cane the measuring stick in front of everyone, including me and bunnyhugger. (I observed afterwards this wasn't just the junior coaster operator that did it; one of the operators did the same on every roller coaster. We only noticed it for the first time here.) But then the gates opened and we walked forward, relieved that we weren't told we were too tall to ride.
I sat down right away in my seat. bunnyhugger walked through her seat, in the car ahead of mine, to set our souvenir pop bottle in the storage bin. While she did this a woman and two kids came up from behind us and the kid sat down in bunnyhugger's seat. And then in --- well, to me, I think it was under twenty seconds; to bunnyhugger it was much longer and more agonizing --- a very pleasant if hot day became miserable.
Because bunnyhugger protested, correctly, that that was her car. The woman who'd cut ahead of us said something or other, and the kid jumped out to get in the car ahead of bunnyhugger. But then the woman started protesting that bunnyhugger should sit with me, or something? Because it's two people to a seat. There isn't any way to fit two adults in a coaster with cars as small as Roller Skater. An adult and a kid, yeah, but if she wanted bunnyhugger to ride with her kid she wasn't saying that, at least as far as I could tell.
Before, I think, anyone knew what was happening bunnyhugger was hollering at the ride operators --- who I thought were dealing with some fuss at the front of the train; bunnyhugger thinks they were just standing around waiting for people to sort their seating out --- to do something. And then cried out why no one was backing her up here. And, then, getting out and leaving the ride.
I followed, of course. bunnyhugger insisted after that I could have stayed on; I can't imagine staying on the ride in those circumstances.
A miserable ... I don't know; twenty minutes? Three days? ... followed, me trying to reassure bunnyhugger that she had not made a fool of herself in front of everyone. Also trying the impossible task of explaining why the ride operators hadn't come and explained to the intruding woman that the line may not be long, but it was still a line and you shouldn't cut it. I can't know what the ride operators thought of the mess, except that I was sure they didn't think of bunnyhugger as a crazy woman or, after about ten minutes, as anything but a vague blur in their day.
We eventually rallied enough to get ice cream, and feel a little better for being a bit cooler, and farther from the clash, and we went off to other parts of the park to take advantage of the good riding.
The consequences of going to Roller Skater before ice cream, though, would come back by the end of the day.
In my Michigan's Adventure Tricks-and-Treats pictures I'm wandering around the Boneyard. Want to enjoy it with me? Or do you want to jump to that sweet, odd bit of trivia for today? Well, read for what you like, it's easier on both of us that way.
You know how cross bunnyhugger was with the bone-eared skeleton rat? The bone-eared rabbit did not make her any happier! Especially with the rib cage that goes past the thighs.
We can only guess at which of the many reasons this skeletal human is climbing the tree away from the spider skeleton.
But here's a more normal display of skeleton singers. They have good lung strength for not having lungs.
Some of the local wildlife comes by to explore the strangeness in their neighborhood.
Squirrel demanding to know, the rest of you saw that skull's sunglasses poked through its temple, right? It's not just them that saw this nonsense?
I'm sure there's an angle where this picture makes perfect sense but I seem to have missed it. Anyway, it's frisbee, and while context implies that's a skeletal dog in the middle there I'm just not seeing it myself. Sorry.
Trivia: Johannes Kepler sent Galileo a copy of his New Astronomy, containing the first two of Kepler's laws of orbital motion. There is no evidence Galileo ever read it. Source: The Clockwork Universe: Isaac Newton, the Royal Society, and the Birth of the Modern World, Edward Dolnick.
Currently Reading: The Mathematical Radio: Inside the Magic of AM, FM, and Single-Sideband, Paul J Nahin. In a fun aside (there's a lot of fun asides, mostly in footnotes) Nahin mentions regretting he can't describe the mathematics of the Dirac Radio, which receives all transmissions, past and future, when turned on. So far as I know that's got to reference the Dirac Communicator James Blish developed for his short-story-turned-barely-a-novel ``Beep''/The Quincunx of Time, which is fun, but seems obscure. Or has the Dirac Communicator gone on to be one of those things used in just enough science fiction stories that nobody quite remembers where it came from and I never noticed?
PS: What's Going On In Gasoline Alley? Why is Walt fighting a giant pig? April - June 2024 It's cornball comedy week in the story strips!
