After our last visit to Six Flags America --- well, this news just came in. Apparently parkgoers have been grumbling about how many times big rides have been down this season and as you'd expect more of them have been doing as the season wears on. One person claiming to have been at the park the 2nd of July --- same as we were --- said they were able to ride every coaster, though, including Batwing. Which if true means that had we gone to the park sooner --- or stuck around later --- we'd have completed the set. Well, nothing to do now except maybe hope that the ride gets relocated or the park gets saved. (There's no reason it couldn't be sold to some other chain or even to independent buyers, after all. I'd say that kind of thing never happens except this is a world with Gene Staples, the guy who saved Indiana Beach and is trying to save Clementon Park and Fantasy Island/Niagara Amusement Park.)
But our next target was driving north to meet up with my brother. Just him, unfortunately; his wife and kids were visiting her family up in South Jersey. He'd found a Mexican restaurant --- a good bet for something vegetarian --- somewhere in Howard County near enough to his home and not too far from our path up north. It was in some kind of shopping/entertainment complex that apparently the whole of the county was attending, as we went through a huge parking lot to find not a single space open, and saw my brother on a corner where he advised us of a parking garage not too far off. I think we ended up on the fourth floor of that.
Also while orbiting the place we noticed a bar with a row of pinball machines and joked that why didn't he have us meet up there instead. We had thoughts of heading over to it but it was crowded, the night ended up being long, and we didn't have the time. It's also possible we forgot about it by the time we were done with dessert.
I did take a selfie with my brother to send my father, who'd spent much of the previous week texting every fifteen minutes to ask if we had figured out when and where we were meeting up. This soothed his anxiety about our rendezvous so well that he never responded to or acknowledged the picture in any way. And we got some time in talking about him, and the rest of the family, including the revelation of why there's one member I just never hear any word about. Unfortunately, the circumstances of why that is preclude my sharing it here so please know that ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
bunnyhugger, on reading these words, gave me a hard time about presenting something as disproportionately mysterious.
After dinner we all went around to an ice cream parlor around the block and with a line of about six hundred people in it. My brother said it was a good one and it was, and also we hadn't had just a big ol' ice cream cone in ages. (Well, cup, for me, but the spirit was there.) And he's hoping to get on a little trip to Iceland (again) with Dad (again) and I think by the end of the night was proving how reasonable the fares from Detroit were. Also mentioning that if we downloaded some podcasts right there, with advertisers thinking we're in Rich Government People Land, we'd probably get them laced with commercials by weapons makers aimed at weapons-buyers for federal agencies, like, a missile that was faster than a (something)-horsepower motorboat. Credit to the advertising agency for making us realize we always just assumed that any missile was faster than any motorboat, huh?
With the hopes that it won't be an embarrassing number of years before we meet up again, we set back out. An ancient plan of ours, when we thought we might met my brother for a late lunch, was to get up to HersheyPark. Hershey's one of the few amusement parks to offer Starlite admissions, a cut price for the last several hours of the day. And they do something even better, a sneak peek admission . If you have full-day tickets you can use them to get in the last two hours of another day; the thinking is the day before your full-day use but that's not explicitly required. So what we had been thinking was to go to Hershey's the full day of the 4th of July, and --- since we had a partial-day park planned for the 3rd --- get Starlite tickets to go in the last four or so hours that day. And then the 2nd, which this was, we'd get to use the sneak-preview two hours, and maximize our chances of getting on all the major rides given we expected the park to be impossibly busy.
We were hilariously too late for that, though. And it turned out that we spent enough time at the partial-day park on the 3rd that we could only use the sneak-peak admission. Perhaps that would be enough. But as we drove through the Maryland night we couldn't know that.
So to surprise you? We're going back in time! Because I somehow blew right past a couple of pictures, including of our October visit to Marvin's. Please take in a couple views of the Marvelous Mechanical Museum in its old location.
Huh, that's a weird plate! I wonder if it means anything.
So inside the guy who runs the league was working on Ultimate X-Men, which I think was the brand-new game then, and I took a moment when he was away to get some photos from on the playfield. The Sentinel Head there is the thing to bash as much as you can when you start playing.
Ultimate X-Men continues the trend of having fewer pop bumpers; there's only two on the playfield and here's one of them.
And there, on the other side of the playfield, is the other. Although they're separated they do bounce the ball between them some and I like the early-80s-game style of that.
Enough staring close at pinball. Here's our good friend the possibly fake Fake Cardiff Giant.
Another detail photo of Mickey Mouse's Chocolate Factory because my previous one hadn't made clear enough for a friend that yeah, their candy factory is about covering turtles in chocolate and shipping them out. Reflections keep this one from being quite so clear but at least you see the turtles swimming in chocolate there.
Trivia: As many as 170 Cuba-bound ships carrying enslaved people destined for Cuba were organized in New York City between 1859 and 1861. British authorities estimated about eighty thousand enslaved people were brought in during this era. Source: Smuggler Nation: How Illicit Trade Made America, Peter Andreas.
Currently Reading: Threads of Life: A History of the World Through the Eye of a Needle, Clare Hunter.
