Longtime readers know ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
bunnyhugger and I went to Closing Day of Cedar Point's season. This was not a decision made without sacrifice. bunnyhugger had to skip a women's pinball tournament in Grand Rapids, one that --- if it were big enough --- might have affected her position in women's rankings for the year. I would give up ... well, getting to see the FlopHouse TV streaming show live as it aired. It turned out neither was a great sacrifice. The pinball tournament drew only five people; even if bunnyhugger had been there it couldn't have affected anything. And the streaming show we could watch anytime between now and the end of February, so, okay.
Prompting us was partly the thrill of going to Cedar Point in November. The park usually closes at Halloween, but would stay open if Halloween were any of the weekend operating days. This year, Halloween was a Thursday, which they've expanded Halloweekends to fill, but for some reason they were not open the day. They also skipped being open the Sunday after Halloween, which is why we had to decide how to spend our Saturday. So, we got out there for Saturday. This would be the first time since I got my current job that we went out for a day trip to Cedar Point that closed at midnight, leaving us driving home and flopping into bed wearily at something like 4 am.
Our goal for the day, and it was successful, was to ride the Kiddy Kingdom Carousel a lot. We hadn't found any confirmation --- or refutation --- of the sale rumor and so bunnyhugger wanted to be sure she rode all four rabbits. And indeed, as he was doing the safety check for our first or second ride the operator who'd given us the strange rumor the week before started a chat with us about how it was a great ride and his understanding was they had already sold it to the Ohio State Fairgrounds. We could not figure out whether he recognized us from the week before and was updating his rumor or if this was a rumor he was passing on to anyone who looked like carousel appreciators.
We would not just ride all four rabbits on the Kiddy Kingdom Carousel and photograph it, but we also took documentary-style photographs of the rest of Kiddy Kingdom. We've always wondered when the area --- which hasn't had any major changes in decades --- would be renovated and removing the carousel, if that is happening, would be a compelling time for it. So we've fortified our memories of things.
Despite being the last day of the season it was still a Saturday, and somehow a warm, beautifully clear one as well, so the park was busy. It's hard not to miss the days before 2015, when the old climate was still hanging on, and the first weekend in November would be cold and threatening snow and there'd be more park workers than attendees. (And yet the day before, with no less bad weather, our pinball friend JTK was at the park and it was so deserted that he got in all the riding he wanted and wouldn't bother coming to the park Saturday, a thing bunnyhugger took as if bragging.)
We would not get one of those fantastic-riding days where we get on all the (adult) roller coasters. But we got rides on all the carousels --- the Midway Carousel was still going backwards and I hope this marks a start for Cedar Flags being okay with rides going the ``wrong'' direction --- and towards the end of the night the crowds thinned out and we could get on coasters again. Including, happy to say Iron Dragon, which was operating again. When we had seen it the weekend before, and the chain for the lift hill was off the ride, we assumed it was closed for the season and no, they got it back for two last days of operation.
The Kiddy Kingdom Carousel closed for the night, along with the rest of the Kiddy Kingdom, at 10 pm, so by 9:30 we were heading back there and got on the last couple rides. Here a different operator was doing Kiddy Kingdom Carousel trivia, which bunnyhugger nailed every question for besides the hard-to-answer one about the ride's age. (It's around a century old, but nobody seems to have a definite word about exactly when it was made, and it's plausible that it was carved and sat around the warehouse a couple years before it was first installed; the mid-to-late 20s were when the carousel carvers had such a glut of product that the market would collapse, just in time for the Depression to close a lot of parks.) We did our best to make sure we rejoined the line just after the safety inspection started, so we would always be the first people to pick seats, and so would get two rides in a row on bunnyhugger's favorite rabbits. If it should be that the carousel is gone in Spring, she will at least be the last member of the general public to ride her favorite rabbit.
The operator also told us names for the various rabbits and a couple other animals that we're not sure we believe, but at least her given name for the lion matched what bunnyhugger remembered hearing from before.
There was some pretty good riding to be had those last couple hours, including enough time for me to divert to the Power Tower for a ride on the ascending side, shooting me up several hundred feet and lowering slowly. There was some kind of fuss getting people loaded on one of the drop towers, with several rounds of unlocking and re-checking the constraints. And on top of that, at some point someone jumped the fence and cut across the lawn to get on the ride. The operator repeatedly got on the speaker to warn that the lawn was a restricted area and get off of it, and if you got in line you would be asked to leave the line and re-enter by the queue, appropriately, instead. That she had to repeat this indicates that whoever it was either was paying no attention at all to the announcements (very likely) or figured the operator was bluffing (possible, but I wouldn't want to bet that way). Cutting across the lawn is weird behavior, all the more baffling because there was no line to speak of. Like, there were people waiting but it was for one or two ride cycles and yeah, the drop tower was taking a long time to get its cycle going but it's not like the rider was saving any time cutting across the lawn instead.
We went to the back of the park for the last rides of the night, conscious that we were going to have to walk to the front of the park once the last ride closed. We went to Mine Ride, getting on to find we had the train to ourselves (and the train ahead was empty), and decided we were going to stick to this the rest of the night. Which was only one or two more rides, but we were thrilled by the idea we might have the last Mine Ride of the season to ourselves. We did not: there was one last train, that they were letting everybody get on, after our final ride, the last of the season. But we had a couple trains all to ourselves, including that last one. And since we were on that train when midnight struck --- well, we were on a roller coaster on the 3rd of November, the latest in the year we've ever been on one and the closest we've ever been to bunnyhugger's birthday on a roller coaster.
This also meant we had been to Cedar Point this year both the earliest (Eclipse Day) and the latest days (November 2/3) it was open, a first for us. Felt pretty good, that. And as we were leaving the park for the day, the Midway Carousel's band organ played ``Mysterious Mose'', just as we'd hope to close out the season.
Also we once again got caught up to the present on the Greatest Generation podcast, although since we haven't gone anywhere together since then we're now like two episodes in the hole. We'll catch up.
Speaking of closing, is this the closing of Pinball At The Zoo? No, no it is not. But look on, dear reader, and enjoy, I hope:
And here is the tilt bob for Circus! If the pendulum rod touches the ring outside, it completes a circuit and registers the tilt, ending the game (I expect, given the era). The weight around the bob is just to control how fast the pendulum oscillates and how long it takes to settle down.
There was something wrong with --- I forget what, maybe the credits reel --- and so gradually more and more middle-aged white guys came to examine the mechanism and try and fix it.
You see where the problem is, there's not enough photos of cats in the machinery.
They spent a while trying to fix it by the light of people's phones. Not all of that time was spent in pointing at things.
Oh yeah, pinball tournaments. Here's the plaques and the prizes to be given the top four women finishers. bunnyhugger would not be among them.
Not sure if this is the last moment of play in Women's Finals, but it's got the energy of the last moment of play.
Trivia: 503 wealthy Parisians are recorded as being taxed in 1423. 43 of them are money changers. Of the twenty paying the highest sums of taxes, ten were money changers. Source: Gold and Spices: The Rise of Commerce in the Middle Ages, Jean Favier.
Currently Reading: Lost Popeye Zine, Volume 47: Square Egg Island. Tom Sims, Bela Zaboly. Editor Stephanie Noelle. Sims and Zaboly way overestimating how much this reader wants to see things come back to ``how can the college football team win every game this season again?''. There's also a really weird sequence of looking at pictures from their last several adventures, making me wonder what, did they need to vamp for two weeks before the next story came in? (Author Tom Sims wasn't replaced on the daily strips for three years after this story was published so it's not like he was filling out void space in a contract.)
