Back in the park and fed we would have a couple hours left in Dollywood. We used a good part of an hour on the park's original ride, a narrow-gauge train ride up and down the mountain at the center of the park. This is on a coal-fired train, once part of the building of the Alcan Highway, they take the coal seriously. Particularly, the emergency cable running the center of the ceiling of the cars is intended not to stop the train but to call for medical attention when you get off the train. That attention is for getting fire in your eyes, because the engine is pouring out ash and some of it is still on fire and you would rather not have lasting agony there. The safety spiel explains what to do in case of this and also that it is not a cable-pull-worthy medical situation if you just get some soot in your eye. Let your tears wash that out.
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bunnyhugger and I --- forced to sit in separate rows because of the crowding of the cars --- put our sunglasses on. This wouldn't block every angle of eye attack but it at least reduces them.
As it chugs up the hill you get views from behind of a lot of the park, which is as we like it. We also saw a field where a couple park people were examining each of maybe two hundred gizmos laid out in rows and columns. I thought this was preparation for the firework show, and I get partial credit. They were prepping the drones that make up half the firework/lights show. The park has a pretty nice nightly firework show, in part because the middle half of the programming is drones taking on configurations that are getting more interesting but are, I assume, cheaper long-term than fireworks which are, after all, consumable goods. The fireworks and the drones coordinate so they appear at roughly the same spot in the sky, taking turns with the airspace. I couldn't figure where the launch site for the fireworks was.
Besides seeing wonderful angles of Big Bear Mountain, and smoke rolling in on the Smokey Mountains, we also saw this one lodge perched atop the mountain. The ride operator on the PA asked if we knew who owned that lodge, overlooking the whole valley and Dollywood particularly. Dolly Parton, everyone's natural guess. Nope; she doesn't own it. It's a rental.
After that we had been on, and enjoyed, all the must-see rides at the park and could spend the last couple hours taking things as they caught our eye. Or looking for the ``Roadside Attraction'' art-type exhibits. Or looking for the Coke Freestyle machine that I swore I had seen the day before, which we only found after the park had closed and the restaurant it was in probably was closed. Maybe not. By that point we figured we could just go home anyway.
But before that we got re-rides on several roller coasters and we did our level best to head for the Wildwood Grove so we could get a night ride on Big Bear Mountain and, if our calculations about how the park behaved were right, get there close enough to closing hour that we could spend most of the wait after the park was closed. And here, sad to say, after a day and a third of guiding us around the park as if I had ever been there before, my navigation sense failed me. I would have sworn that the branch leading to Wildwood Grove was before the Mystery Mine and when we reached that and saw no sign of the turnoff I thought we'd missed it. So I led us back downhill and got provably beyond the limit of where the branch could possibly have been. And without enough time, we figured, to get the whole way to the back of Wildwood Grove where Big Bear Mountain was.
To try salvaging anything we went back to Lightning Rod, which might not have been much closer but was all downhill at least. And there, I managed to start walking up the fast-lane line-cutters queue just like I had the day before, and didn't understand what bunnyhugger was talking about when she tried to explain what I was doing wrong to me. Eventually we got there, anyway. And --- after some waiting around for stragglers to get on --- did get to the ride, for the last ride of the night, enjoying the thrill of a quite good coaster roaring out into the night sky in the woods on a hill, with much of the ride spent hidden from the lights of the park. It was like blending the great parts of Cedar Point's Steel Vengeance with those of Kings Island's The Beast. It was a consolation finish for the night, but a pretty good one at that.
What did we get to after the Merry-Go-Round Museum? And before going back to Cedar Point for the evening that Halloweekends Saturday? Why, to the most curious structure in Sandusky that's not the pyramid without its building. You ready? Really ready? All right, then ...
So here it is: the U building. Once a thriving part of Sandusky's Something Industry, it's been sitting empty a long while and its big powerful U logo fascinates us every time we see or think of it.
Here's that U logo in the chimney in back. We do like a building with logos in bricks; you dont' see that anymore. After observing that, though, it's hard not to quip that we looked it up and they put this pattern in in 2007.
And here's the sign atop the building. Imagine what that looks like in neon by night.
Whatever the heck it's about there's at least this old hand-painted sign to ask us not to park around where we parked.
See, that's where we parked. Figured it was probably safe enough. And it gives you the basic layout of a place that looks like it should be a SimCity 2000 construct.
It's old enough to have that awful flimsy window old factories used to have, but hasn't been abandoned long enough for every window to get smashed in.
Trivia: A Reo Motor Car Company airmail shipment in August 1928 --- about a month after the Lansing airport was dedicated --- established that air travel time between Lansing and Chicago was slightly over two hours. It carried ten tons of mail, roughly 350,000 letters. Source: The Bicentennial History of Ingham County, Michigan, Ford Stevens Caesar.
Currently Reading: Lost Popeye Sundays Supplement Volume 10: 1948, Tom Sims, Bela Zaboly. Editor Stephanie Noelle.
