![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Returning to ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif){kind=small}
bunny_hugger's recent visit, and the Friday of it:
We didn't want Friday to be busy this way. We wanted to drive up to Playland, in Rye, and take in the amusement park, along with bunny_hugger's brother and one or more of his friends. We'd pick them u at the nearest train station and drive into the park.
The crisis was that when we got up, the Internet wasn't working. It was probably due, what with it having been maybe two weeks since the last weekend breakdown. Of course, we weren't around the previous weekend to see if it broke then. I called to complain and really more to just abuse the poor phone guy who couldn't do anything. I wasn't willing to run through the ritual of fiddling with the router settings, since I've done that, and it takes an hour or more and doesn't work anyway. So I kept telling them, there is too a service disruption in my area, and they kept asking me to go through their ritual, and I kept saying no. It's my least attractive side, but at least it did bring out of me the line, ``I assure you, I am not calling out of my puckish sense of whimsy'', which I hope to someday hear John Cleese deliver.
After I had my fill of yelling at people who couldn't yell back, and we got more or less ready, what do you know but the service disruption cleared up. We hurriedly got Google Maps directions to drive to the Rye train station, and from there to Playland, and back again. We didn't vet the instructions adequately; no time. For one, they wanted us to go over the George Washington Bridge, when I'd rather take the Tappan Zee. For another, they lead us into Connecticut but not back out again, at least for the train station. Yeah, Connecticut lunges towards New York City thanks to the existence of Stamford, but that far? bunny_hugger was skeptical, but I was fairly sure I'd heard of a Rye, Connecticut, so that was probably close to that of New York. I expanded the music with a couple albums: her brother's, for one, and Radio Days --- music from or related to the soundtrack of the Woody Allen movie --- and The Who's Quadrophenia, which bunny_hugger charitably described as an odd collection.
Although I managed to screw up following the Turnpike's directions for the Tappan Zee Bridge, we improvised our way around that, going up the Palisades Parkway instead. And although I screwed up with the directions by actually following the stupid instructions into Connecticut, a strange and non-Euclidean world where major highways are as much as fourteen feet across and can go nearly two car lengths without making a major turn, we ... couldn't find anything even remotely like the train station. bunny_hugger was none too sure we were near the right station anyway, but if there were any station at all, or any train evidence at all, where Google Maps took us then it must have been Metro North's famed Invisible Line. We found the roads described, they just never intersected tracks or got near anything more like a train station than a golf course was. bunny_hugger's brother called (mercifully; his lack of contact made us worry he'd forgot his phone and was wandering around some station we couldn't possibly find), and he and the one friend with him would just take the bus to Playland.
Just as well, but now we had to get there. I-95 would lead back past signs saying ``Rye'' that seemed likely to lead to Rye, but I-95 west we could see was packed with every car ever in Connecticut. US Route 1 more or less parallels I-95; might that get close enough? We could improvise. And our improvisation, despite many frustrating moments in traffic where Connecticut drivers showed themselves to be befuddled by such things as straight roads and green lights --- I don't blame them, because there are so few to get experience with --- we drove so directly toward Playland you'd think we had perfect guidance.
I hadn't brought my iPad, since I worried about leaving it in the car all day and also about taking it into an amusement park with me. bunny_hugger hadn't taken her satellite navigator with her when she left home because she was worried about weight and losing it. My phone allegedly has some turn-by-turn navigator feature that I'd never used before but was one of the things drawing me to that particular model. I still haven't used it. But with improvisation like this, which got us all together something like an hour late, who needed it?
Rye Playland was created by Westchester County in the late 1920s to supplant the amusement parks favored by the unsavory public. It's been owned by the county ever since, and while its style is very much Early Space Race, it's in beautiful shape throughout, and delightful in pretty near every direction.
We met bunny_hugger's brother and the friend with him near the Derby Racer, the exceedingly rare model of carousel that proves a carousel can be the most thrilling ride at a park. It's big, yes, and it was designed to have the four horses in a row move forward and back, the way the other surviving Derby Racers at Cedar Point and at Blackpool do, although this part of the mechanism is currently broken. But the most important thing is: it goes fast. Faster than that. Fast enough that the ride attendants warn riders to lean to their left, and then come on before the carousel reaches full speed and makes everyone lean more to the left because they aren't leaning far enough. At top speed the Derby Racer achieves relativistic effects, with traces of the Higgs boson detected in the center, and a twin who rides emerges two years younger than the twin who just watches from outside. Also the audio system does a nice start-of-horserace trumpet call and ``they're off!'' start. It's the sort of ride that makes you realize how most merry-go-rounds aren't trying hard enough.
The park also has ``Superflight'', a flying roller coaster only a couple years old, and this marked my inauguration to flying roller coasters. In these you lay down, more or less, within a cage and get twisted around the path. This included a couple of rolls taken pretty slowly, I'd say, and helping the feeling of being banged around the ride. This also was the first example of something I ran into all day: ride attendants warning me that I had my camera on me, and then letting me bring the camera on the ride anyway. I'd have left it by the entrance/exit gladly, but that wasn't an option for some reason, and it never would be.
You might think it odd that more odd things hadn't happened yet. They would. One peculiar thing to me was being told I couldn't ride the wild mouse because I was too tall. I haven't been exiled from a ride because of height ... well, since I was a kid, at latest. Everyone else got to ride; I just sat looking up at them riding, or over at the backstage for the performance hall at a guy practicing his juggling and music act.
I would also be excluded from the bumper cars on account of height, and that's even more baffling. But I got to play with taking photographs of the park in those moments of twilight just before sunset, and I'm a sucker for photographing complicated scenes in horrible lighting conditions.
Surely the most baffling moment came when we tried to go to the log flume ride and were confronted by the small queue coming back at us the other way. The ride was shut down; apparently, one of the logs sank. We were scratching our heads about that too. The damage was not too horrible; the ride was opened later, and we were riding that when the evening's fireworks got started. If you can watch fireworks, that's great, but if you can watch fireworks while on the way to a satisfyingly large drop, all the better.
Not at all amusing but still baffling, bunny_hugger's friend's phone somehow managed to obliterate all its data and information. She took this as less of a trauma than I would. I don't think we did anything to encourage its data-loss, but who can tell what makes a phone work these days?
Playland has a good number of dark rides or scenic rides, and we enjoyed each of them. The decorations for these are happily done just a little bit overboard, and a little silly; one, for example, doesn't just have lining the roof pictures of monsters, but also animates them, so that the giant's mouth is a pair of geared teeth rotating and even reversing direction, and the witches flying under Freddy Kreuger's gaze rock in their mid-flight pose. Outside the Old Mill ride, which is the similar sorts of scenic dark ride but this in a log flume-style boat (which makes no sharp drops, but does get sprayed, and is itself built underneath a roller coaster) is a Safety Monkey warning how to ride without getting hurt. The Safety Monkey is encased in a plexiglass tube.
It's also got a Whip. Considering I'd never seen a Whip outside black-and-white stock footage until this year I've become a pretty experienced Whip rider all of a sudden. Rye's looks like the least renovated, and it's certainly the roughest and most fun ride. You can see the electromagnets whipping the cars around being pulled to or released from the center and how it throws the riders around. It's murderous and fantastic.
The centerpiece of the park, and what we absolutely had to ride, though, was the 1929 roller coaster, The Dragon. It's easy to think that old roller coasters might be tame compared to the modern ones with 500-foot drops and 10-g barrel rolls, but there's more to a ride than extremes. The Dragon is just wonderful, with a playfully meandering track with a neat surprising turn late on, and a satisfyingly long ride time, bunny hills just when it might be getting slow, and --- one of the elements which lifts it into classic status --- a tunnel dressed up as a dragon, so you plunge into the dragon's mouth and go quite a ways in the dark and echoed screams before emerging. If that's not enough, the dragon's mouth breathes steam, and the light mist chills you just as you enter the dark. We rode this over and over again, front and back and middle and I don't know that we could have ridden it enough.
The park also has one of the Dragon Coaster's old cars, from before such new-fangled safety devices as restraining bars, so people can get photographs of what they looked like in wagons that just don't seem like they'd be safe standing still, never mind going down hills.
We did spend most of the evening there, to comfortably past 10:30 (including time taken at an actual restaurant, where we discovered there were two women's rooms at the patio level where we ate, and which bunny_hugger's brother used on the assumption that since the other room was a women's room this must be the men's; the men's room was actually downstairs, into the underbelly of the restaurant and attached buildings, as if they realized only belatedly that they needed to have a men's room), and overheard much of the live show and singers trying to encourage the singing of ``I Love Rock And Roll'' to kids born a quarter-century after that song was written. We sampled fudge, and I picked up an ``I Tamed The Dragon'' T-shirt from the tiny Dragon Wagon that's the park's lone sale of Playland-branded concessions. Or, well, from the redemption game next to the wagon, since apparently the T-shirts don't demand a full-time sales person. They had trouble finding a small shirt.
We had passed a sign clearly indicating the correct train station, on our approach, so we were certain we could drop off bunny_hugger's brother and friend there. We completely missed the sign this time around, but we found them another train station a little closer to the city. It turned out we hit one of those gaps where the next train was somewhere around fourteen days away; in fact, they're still waiting for their ride back. Also, even though we were just off the Thruway and therefore couldn't have avoided the Tappan Zee Bridge, we completely missed the Tappan Zee Bridge and ended up going over the George Washington.
I am all but certain that we ate. Where and when, I can't place right now. But that's a smaller sort of detail.
Trivia: By 1923, President Warren G Harding had been offered $25,000 a year to write for a newspaper syndicate after he left office, and was expected to be able to charge $750 per speech. Source: The Teapot Dome Scandal: How Big Oil Bought The Harding White House And Tried To Steal The Country, Laton McCartney.
Currently Reading: The Avenger Takes His Place: Andrew Johnson And The 45 Days That Changed The Nation, Howard Means.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Date: 2011-08-31 04:23 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2011-08-31 03:51 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2011-08-31 04:25 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2011-09-01 01:25 am (UTC)That sounds likely enough. I remember reassuring you that there's really very little stuff left in the cupboards that's being saved for anything.
(no subject)
Date: 2011-08-31 04:33 am (UTC)Also, I want to encourage all your readers to visit Playland as soon as they can, because it may not be around too much longer.
(no subject)
Date: 2011-08-31 03:56 pm (UTC)And, yeah, people near New York City should get there, as it's a really great park and needs the support.
(no subject)
Date: 2011-09-01 09:37 pm (UTC)Route 1 to dodge I-95 is a tricky business; the two have.. unique mergings for bridges and crossovers. But it can work. As for phone GPS, mine is the only GPS I have, but i tend to do a lot of looking at Google Maps in advance and occasionally printouts, as my cellphone has proved to crash more frequently than my computer, and GPS eats up the battery.
Dragon Wagon
Hee!
(no subject)
Date: 2011-09-02 03:00 am (UTC)I only vaguely insult out of love for road systems not designed by the Minotaur of Pattaquasset.
We got lucky in the choice to skip I-95 using Route 1; the faulty Google Maps directions we had actually put us on 1, although it wasn't signed as that because, see above Minotaur of Pattaquasset. We worked it out from the Google Map images and really improvised our way through.
It truly is called the Dragon Wagon. If Wikipedia is to be believed they were running the original cars as late as the 1980s, when finding spare parts just got to be too hard. It's a shame they didn't replace them with modern-make replicas of the original, but given the original didn't have, like, restraining bars (never mind seat belts) I can imagine it being impossible to replicate without losing all sense of the original.