We did not get up early enough to hit Kennywood at opening, which we expected would probably cost us time on some rides. Exterminator, most likely, since the indoor spinning wild mouse ride gets long lines early and never ends. And since we were going on a Saturday, a warm but not brutally hot sunny day, we figured the park would be packed. Also, I managed to get lost along the way because Pittsburgh's roads are eighteen layers of spaghetti on top of each other and the satellite navigator can not keep up.
We did do some unusual things. One is rent a locker, because ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
bunnyhugger wanted to bring her good cameras into the park but not risk carrying them onto rides all day or leaving them on ride storage. (We got locker 1054, and I assured bunnyhugger that was an easy number to remember, and she gave me the look that you're giving me right now.) Also we brought drink cups. We'd gotten a souvenir cup last year, and also got one back in 2017 or so, and finally remembered to bring them in for low-cost pop refills. That ... was not so much a savings as we expected, really. I think we came out ahead over buying a souvenir bottle for this year but not by very much, and if the day had been hotter we'd have been better off buying this year's bottle. Maybe there's something we aren't getting about how souvenir bottles work.
Kennywood has made some minor changes from last year, mostly decorative ones. Repainting, repairs, the little things that maybe don't thrill the hardcore parkgoer, but that does make the place look more polished well-kept. The easiest thing to notice here is that the park has new National Historic District signs. The park has always (since we were going there) had black-and-white signs explaining various rides and attractions and this year, they got an upgrade. There's now slick-looking ones that look like laser-cut wood (goodness knows if they are), with small changes. The one at Jack-Rabbit no longer has the part where they clearly changed 1921 to 1920, for example, and the one at Racer, the Möbius-strip coaster, now (correctly) claims it's the only wooden Möbius-strip coaster in North America, but doesn't say anything about how many there are worldwide. (Two, in wood.) There's still the weird assertion that Jack-Rabbit has a rare design feature it calls a ``camelback'' which nobody else would. And ---
So there is a curious food stand called The Lucky. It dates to the 30s, and it's the last of its brethren standing and in use. Nobody knows, then or now, why it's called The Lucky, and I'm not even sure if the name predates its survival. But the National Historic District sign attached to it? Is still the old kind, as far as I can tell the only survivor of the older sort of Historic sign. That's such a clever, subtle joke to play. I love it.
Other new things at the park, besides a good-size welcome and map right up at the front of the park: queue times! At least for some of the rides, they now have a digital wait time estimate, like this was a European park or something. We're not sure how much these can be trusted; The Phantom's Revenge, at one point, claimed an hourlong wait when we could see there was no wait. But its estimates for Jack-Rabbit and for Racer were not bad, and while it may have erred in claiming that Exterminator was a 75-minute wait, the line was sprawling outside the building, so ``at least an hour'' is a safe bet.
Last time we were at the park we had no idea where the Laffin' Sal, a mannequin that jiggles around while a laugh track plays --- trust me, it's more than it sounds like --- had been. It used to be in the back near the train ride and the Auto Ride. Now, it's right up front, near the Old Mill ride, where you can't miss it or the offer to buy line-cutting wristbands.
Also. Thunderbolt. The ride has always (since we were attending) had this mural leading up to the entrance to the roller coaster, originally built in 1924 as Pippin and considerably expanded and changed in 1968 to become Thunderbolt. Over the past year, they repainted it. Now the old was, you know, old, and special for some of that. Also for its composition; it had this nice image of Thunderbolt with park mascot Kenny Kangaroo, and other Kennywood-associated figures like George Washington (who'd started the French and Indian War around here) and Cowboy Joe (a fiberglass statue you can sit by and photograph with) and all. How could the new mural capture any of that?
Well ... it doesn't. But the new mural is not bad. Its centerpiece is again people riding Thunderbolt, with Kenny Kangaroo up front. I don't recognize other faces in it. But surrounding the ride are features like the Kennywood Arrow, Cowboy Joe, and the Potato Patch french fry chef. And the whole thing is done in this late-60s psychedelic style, the whole thing promising that if you liked the Pippin you'll love the Thunderbolt, and it features bth the Pippin's and the Thunderbolt's logos together. Also rainbows, so conservatives can be weird angry freaks about that too. It's ... I can't say I love it. But I don't hate it, and I think it's going to age well. I just would like to see more George Washington in it.
Now to enjoy a little more Wonderland at Bronner's Christmas:
Christmas-y infinity mirrors which give this nice suggestion that they've got portals to other dimensions in the walls here.
You can almost see the starship Discovery falling into this elf!
I'd hoped photographing the tree mirror here would get that three-dimensional effect and sure enough, it does.
Here's Santa, bringing a tree through the wormhole that the Refit Enterprise created with its improperly balanced experimental new warp drive.
I know this is a cardinal wearing boots and a snow cap, but what I see is that Amongus thing.
And now here's some miscellaneous lighting to celebrate other, non-Christmas holidays.
Trivia: The Long Duration Exposure Facility satellite, launchd into orbit in April 1984, weighed 21,300 pounds and carried 57 experiments from two hundred researchers in eight countries. Among the experiment payloads were twelve million tomato seeds. Source: Suddenly, Tomorrow Came ... A History of the Johnson Space Center, Henry C Dethloff. NASA SP-4307.
Currently Reading: Michigan History, July/August 2024, Editor Sarah Hamilton.
