Sunday opened with drama. It was snowing, as it had been, but it was snowing more intensely. And it didn't just look likely to keep doing that; it looked likely to intensify. The National Weather Service forecast was putting up new levels of watches, warnings, statements, and other ominous forecasts of how awful it would be. Using last year as a guide to how long this year's finals should take, we could see ourselves getting out just in time to hit the worst of the evening's storm.
We figured it likely we could stay an extra night. The Gerber Guest House had many rooms and it's far from peak tourist season. But we'd have to get in touch with the AirBnB host to arrange this. (It turned out we could also have contacted them through a more direct booking service, but we wouldn't find that out for precious hours.) But Monday was not promising to be any better, except that we could expect to do the driving in a sunlit snowstorm. And it wasn't just us; FAE rode with us and would have to stay an extra day if we didn't drive back that night.
As the person who'd be driving I made the call: whatever we faced would be better driven through in daylight. I offered to FAE to pay their room, trusting we could renew it (and we would), to remove that from being a consideration, and they accepted (to ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
bunnyhugger's surprise; she expected they would thank me for the offer but decline the cash). With that settled we just had to make arrangements through AirBnB with whoever our host was! ... And they weren't answering messages right away. And we had to leave for the tournament soon. We weren't in danger of missing the official start of the tournament, but we were going to cut into the couple hours of practice time before the event began, and also, competitors get nervous when the tournament director isn't around crazy early. We had to save bunnyhugger from messages about how she wasn't at the venue yet.
The question was, do we prepare the room for check-out? And more importantly, do we take our stuff or just leave it in the room trusting they won't change the codes on us? I thought the thing to do was take the most important stuff, the things that would be catastrophic to lose or be separated from (laptops, medicines, the Pinball Box containing all our tournament-running supplies, which would have been going anyway) and quickly realized this list came to everything but our dirty laundry? And even that, I wore some event T-shirts I couldn't expect to replace, so ...
So we ended up packing up everything and taking it out to my car, but also did not pull the bedsheets and toss the towels in a heap like we're supposed to do at check-out. bunnyhugger left a note to the housekeeping service to explain things and we'd just have to hope it all came out sensibly. Which it did; within a couple hours we had our room rentals extended another day, room code unchanged, and we got back to find the room untouched by housekeeping or anyone else so far as we knew. The only harm done there is our laptops got quite chilly.
With Cedar Point visited for June what's next? Amusement parks, that's what, and our extreme summer trip (we spent the entire week in the 90s). Starting off, our smallest and shortest visit, Tuscora Park in New Philadelphia, Ohio:
Establishing shot, one of those tolerably symmetric views of the park. It's both a fountain and a drinking fountain here!
I didn't notice people tossing coins into the small amount of water but it seems like that's got to happen too.
And here's the thing that brought us here, the antique carousel. Less so the pool, which was closed by the time we got there.
While the park has a miniature train, it also has a piece of train-themed playground gear.
This was the first time I'd seen this picture-communication board for overloaded kids to point to what they want or need. (I've since seen them at other parks.) The other side is in Spanish.
And here's a view of the carousel, dead center, with the band organ behind it, so you know we're there for real.
Trivia: The winds from a 1999 storm caused the Eiffel Tower to sway about four inches. Source: Force: What it means to push and pull, slip and grip, start and stop, Henry Petroski. Which which you consider how little surface area the Eiffel Tower presents to the wind is a heck of something.
Currently Reading: A Call to Arms: Mobilizing America for World War II, Maury Klein.
