austin_dern

Baby fish update: there's at least four of them downstairs. bunnyhugger fed them a dollop of the frozen mealworm food we'd gotten as emergency quarantine rations and we'll see if they can grow into something safe to either put in the pond or have around when it's time to bring everybody in come October.

And to catch you up on the story strips, here's What's Going On In Dick Tracy? Who is Dethany and why does she look like a villain? May - August 2020 in recap.

So now let's get back to Fantasy Island, in our June 2019 visit to the park.

Silver Comet's lift hill, and return leg of the roller coaster. The entry queue goes underneath the coaster so you get some good angles. Note the United States and Canada flags, much like those at the lift hill for Ravine Flyer II at Waldameer, also on a Great Lake. And you see why the park was named Two Flags Over Niagara Fun Park for surprisingly long considering they weren't sued out of existence for it.

A look down at the turnaround for Silver Comet. Silver Comet was one of two coasters inspired by the Crystal Beach (Ontario) Comet, which was moved to Great Escape in Queensbury, New York, after Crystal Beach closed. The original Comet was a (significant) rebuild of the Crystal Beach Cyclone, legendarily the most extreme roller coaster ever, one that had a nurse on duty for the many fainting passengers. Silver Comet is a great ride but nothing that intense.

Waiting for the train. I believe we waited for a front-seat ride for our first experience, trusting that the rain would hold out that long at least. And we succeeded, joking that now, we could leave.

The Mega Disk'o, something bunnyhugger was not going to be up for riding. You can see how breezy it was.

The Rock-N-Roll music-express ride, with a typical enough art package. Fun to see anyway.

Looking down the westernmost end of the park, with a couple of the pavilions and rentable space off to the left. The drop tower, wild mouse, and Ferris wheel are off in the distance.

The Crazy Mouse and the Ferris Wheel, far off. They're pretty close to a spur of the Thruway, that you can see from the top of the rides.

The Crazy Mouse had a warning sign that in the weather they might need to send out groups of four, no matter what, but they didn't need to. It's the same model spinning wild mouse as at DelGrosso's and as the Exterminator at Kennywood, and the Raton Logo at La Feria in Mexico City.

Back to Silver Comet for another ride, though! And here's the maker's plate describing important facts like it's supposed to run forward. (There used to be a fad for setting a train facing backwards, which runs fine but that parks have gotten shy about.)

Another look at the Silver Comet launch station, along with signs warning about stuff you should not have on the coaster, and how you need eyeglass straps and whatnot.

Claw ride in the middle of its swing. Also something that's not really bunnyhugger's sort of thing.

Silver Comet again, but also a look at the bumper car ride, Scooter. This was part of Martin DiPietro's travelling carnival before he bought the park and renamed it Martin's Fantasy Island.

Martin's Galaxy of Games --- Martin's name is still on a couple of pieces --- although the only game I have a particular picture of is one of those ball-rolling horse-racers.

Pond or river, with an island opposite it. It's the sort of thing that looks like a camping area but I don't know that they ever had that.

Looking over the pond back at the Western-themed area; this is a rare chance to see the backs of those buildings.

bunnyhugger about to learn whether the fish would like a handful of Cheerios.

They would! The fish are quite happy with the Cheerios idea.

And, oh, Indian statues that I'm assuming go back a ways at the park. They're off on the island, inaccessible so far as I know.

Trivia: When the flying aircraft carrier USS Akron crashed into the ocean off Barnegat Lighthouse (in April 1933), the Naval blimp J-3 launched, to drop life jackets to the survivors. J-3 also crashed, killing two of its seven-person crew. Source: Fighting To Be Heard: New Jersey In History, Thomas P Farner.

Currently Reading: Promise Denied: NASA's X-34 and the Quest for Cheap, Reusable Access to Space, Bruce I Larrimer. The title and prologue suggest it's going to be a book from someone Very Mad about experimental spacecraft development of the 90s, an admittedly quite frustrating time, and that's the sort of teapot-tempest I feel like these days.

Thanks for hanging around to see another week of my mathematics blog. If you didn't have it on your RSS feed, hey, you've got links to it on your friends page here. Thanks for giving it a try. Recent posts there have included:

• Using my A to Z Archives: Grammar
• Using my A to Z Archives: Gaussian Primes
• How July 2020 Showed People are Getting OK With Less Comics Here
• My All 2020 Mathematics A to Z: Hilbert’s Problems
• Using my A to Z Archives: Hamiltonian

I'm really happy with that Hilbert's Problems one. Meanwhile, in cartoon watching, it's 60s Popeye: Spare Dat Tree and where it lost me. It's a pleasant cartoon. There's just one piece of it I can't buy.

And now, at last, we come to the end of our day at Canada's Wonderland. Please enjoy the close of the night.

I tried my camera's ``waterfall mode'' on the Wonder Mountain waterfall and what do you know but it worked! Key to this: I could set it on a rock and let it sit still for the ten seconds exposure it needed.

Back to Thunder Run. There's plastic sheets separating the exit lanes from the mountain itself and I'm not sure why that.

The Bat, the last of the roller coasters we rode, as bunnyhugger doesn't enjoy the backwards leg of Boomerang-style shuttle coasters.

The Bat's maker's plate causes one to ask further questions.

A Saint George-and-the-Dragon fountain set up outside the Canterbury Theatre, part of the Medieval Times section of the park.

Better look at Saint George, who's just looking like a bully here.

Evening picture of the floral Canada flag and Wonder Mountain past that.

Here's the antique carousel seen at night.

Behemoth's ride sign gets only more impressive by night.

Minebuster had not yet closed! It just looked very much like it wanted to be closed.

One of the redemption game arcades, looking quite splendid by night. I assume this was in the 1890 World's Exposition section of the park.

And one last look at the pool at the main midway, by night.

Trivia: Between 1958 and 1974 the Pentagon paid for about one billion dollars' worth of semiconductor research. Source: The Company: A Short History of a Revolutionary Idea, John Micklethwait, Adrian Wooldridge.

Currently Reading: When Biospheres Collide: A History of NASA's Planetary Protection Programs, Michael Meltzer.

So our pet rabbit started sneezing again. And making a bit of a wheezing noise while eating. So we're trying her out on Children's Benadryl. Just a small bit, twice a day.

Our big question was whether she'd take four milliliters of something delivered orally. She did not like her brief stint on meloxicam, a painkiller that every other rabbit has loved for being sweet and sticky. But this is a different sweet cherry-flavored substance.

She was skeptical of it at first, but after getting a good taste of the stuff, she's decided she has a new favorite thing of all time. By the third dose she was grabbing the syringe and trying to take it away from us. I'm not sure how much it's doing for her sneezing --- these things are hard to measure --- but it bodes well for whenever we need to put her on oral medications again.

Meanwhile she has gotten to enjoy a lot more out-of-cage time. This is the side effect of bunnyhugger's chronotherapy; today is the first time we've had, nominally, both of us asleep at the same time. So she's had as much as eight extra hours of free run time, and while she might not always use it, she has liked having it around. As bunnyhugger's waking hours move away from the dead of the night, our rabbit will lose some time. But she's enjoying it while it lasts.

So now let's see Canada's Wonderland again. And a ride with special links to my old life. Also, conceivably but we think probably not, to moxie_man's family.

Plaque outside the Antique Carrousel, Philadelphia Toboggan Company #84. This ride operated for a while at Orchard Beach, Maine, and then from the late 40s was at Palisades Park in New Jersey. So there's a good chance my parents have ridden it. Interestingly, Taft Broadcasting, which owned Kings Island and Kings Dominion at the time, bought the carousel when Palisades Park was closed in 1971. They didn't place it anywhere for nearly a decade, though, when Canada's Wonderland finally opened. It makes me wonder if they were that sure they'd be opening a third park, and whether that opened later than they figured.

Some kid with a hat for some reason tries to photobomb bunnyhugger's pose atop her horse.

The insides of the horse gear have markings to indicate row and column within the carousel. I assume the order has been totally lost from its original form, but there's still some evidence of it on antique carousels.

The horses in front of the chariot have a yoke to make it look like they're working. It's a rare thing; I think we've only seen it at this carousel and the one at Elitch Gardens.

The chariot and the horses that pull it seen from another angle.

And another look at the horses, many of which have nothing to do with the chariot.

So you say the park used to have the Lara Croft: Tomb Raider license?

Mysterious symbolic mass on a fake manhole cover. I don't know how much of this is recognizably Lara Croft and how much is ``something not actionably Tomb Raider anymore''.

Time Warp is a coaster with this spiral lift hill, akin to Super Flight at Rye Playland. Haven't seen that design at other parks. You spend a lot of the ride resting in a harness on your chest, which is not necessarily comfortable.

One Car Only transfer track, for taking trains off the roller coaster and doing maintenance or whatnot.

The path leading to Flight Deck, the aerospace-themed ride that's yet another instance of Michigan Adventure's Thunderhawk/Every Six Flags Park's Mind Eraser/Blackpool's Infusion/Six Flag Mexico's Batman The Ride/etc.

Oh yeah, Canada! Much of Canada's Wonderland looks basically like any Cedar Fair park, or at least like the ones that used to be Taft/Paramount parks, but the decorations will give it some distinctiveness.

Trivia: Before the building of Central Park, New York (then just the island of Manhattan) had less than 100 acres of parkland, an average of 16 acres for every 100,000 residents. Source: The Epic of New York City, Edward Robb Ellis.

Currently Reading: When Biospheres Collide: A History of NASA's Planetary Protection Programs, Michael Meltzer. So, in reading the Apollo quarantine plans first, it's hard not to share the feeling that NASA management never really believed in the need to quarantine Apollo astronauts, given how many things that really broke quarantine were allowed on the grounds that it was a more pressing safety need. (Like, the astronauts left the Apollo capsule for life rafts, rather than be hauled up inside; the reasoning being that moderately turbulent seas would make it quite likely the capsule would hit the side of the ship, potentially badly injuring them. Which, yeah, but then, what's broken bones against a worldwide plague?) Second, there's a bunch of things that are decisions that seem to need an explanation that isn't given. Like at one point the biofilters standard is set to screen out anything more than 45 microns in diameter. Why 45 microns? It's not, like, 1/500th of an inch or 1/7000th of a foot or any obvious link like that. I've seen some sources say a human hair is 90 microns. ``Half a hair width'' is arbitrary but at least understandable. But there's a lot of variation in hair width too. One line about why this, rather than 50 or 40 or 25, would have helped.

We voted. Absentee, this time. This although since the last time we voted, in the presidential primary back in March --- right before the lockdown --- we've gotten so good at walking that it would be no effort to hike to our polling place. Heck, we might walk there without even realizing we were doing anything.

But the state's offered everyone applications for absentee ballots, and we signed up for them, for the state primary and the general election in November. It's just better to put less burden on the poll workers, and the people who have to vote in-person.

Not that there was much to vote for. In our district the only contested race was for county clerk. Lansing the city has had some embarrassing clerk-related issues, like that time nobody reminded the city council they had to renew the laws. But the county hasn't had anything bad like that except for how they failed to publish an ordinance relating to the animal control board so that went un-done for a couple years. So anyway the incumbent won reelection, 12,393 votes to 6,087. The county millages, for 9-1-1 services and elder care, and the city millage for the parks department, all passed with about 75% of the vote. So that's reassuring.

We will not be missing Halloweekends at Cedar Point this fall. Not because we're planning to go, although if the infection rates in Michigan and Ohio collapse by October we might. They're replacing Halloweekends ``for 2020 only'' with something they call ``Tricks and Treats Fall Fest''. It's supposed to offer ``unique entertainment, food and activities'' that ``enable better social distancing and capacity management''. The park is also not opening Fridays this fall, just Saturdays and Sundays.

It would be neat to see the park in such weird circumstances but there's no way that September and October won't be overwhelmed by the wave set off by colleges trying to do in-person terms. We'll just read the trip reports and play Roller Coaster Tycoon.

Or we'll look at pictures. Here's what we had going on in Canada's Wonderland back in June of 2019, a month that probably seemed exhausting at the time but had things like this to offer;

Here's that Scooby Doo-ish house again, outside Ghoster Coaster. It's still a pretty good house.

A couple more comic gravestones. I assume that one that's fallen over was an accident but it kind of works anyway.

And I saw a groundhog on the way out! Nice.

He saw me.

I don't know why this figure of a chef ordering us to watch our funnel cakes being made amused me so, but it did, and that's that.

Next to the Planet Snoopy kiddie area is ... Kidzville, another kiddie area.

Taxi Jam's a tiny family coaster; as unaccompanied adults we weren't allowed to ride and that, honestly, was a bit of a relief. It probably would have done bad things to our knees.

Live show on the Kidzville stage, with a theme of everybody going to the beach. Here Lucy explains they're going to the beach.

Lucy, Linus, and of course Charlie Brown. You know he was Charlie Brown because he was saying ``good grief'' every eight seconds. I'm exaggerating only a bit; the possibly prerecorded audio was going maybe faster than the performers quite could.

Finally some seriously Canadian stuff in this park. We were thinking of poutine for lunch.

Silver Streak's a junior suspended coaster and it's got a pretty nice logo.

Here's the Silver Streak maker's plate in case you want to know its registration number or anything.

Trivia: Western European water mills had gearing systems in place, so that grain could be ground however fast the river was, by as early as 1169. Source: A History of Mechanical Inventions, Abbott Payson Usher.

Currently Reading: When Biospheres Collide: A History of NASA's Planetary Protection Programs, Michael Meltzer. You know, I might just nope out of this one until after the pandemic. I mean, knowing how the Apollo missions did turn out it's easy to side with the guy saying that of course there'd be no back-contamination from the moon, but when he goes on to say that even if there was we could handle it ... eeesh.

Elitch Gardens has announced they're not opening for 2020, with a statement that includes some complaining about the state not letting them open when plenty of other stuff is allowed to open. Seabreeze Park in Rochester is also not opening, similarly complaining that the state isn't giving them a fair chance or even particularly clear guidance about what they would have to do to open. This is a particular shame since their Jack Rabbit roller coaster turned 100 this year and to not run hurts. Also depending on how you define things this could break their claim to having the oldest continuously-operated roller coaster.

And, per NewsPlusNotes, something weird is going on at Michigan's Adventure. The park was told it has to close, part of the closing of amusement and water parks to contain Covid-19. The park's insisting that they're open and going to stay open, and are staying open and tweeting back at people who question this that yes, of course they're open. I have no explanation for this phenomenon.

Back to Canada's Wonderland and more poking around the day back in June 2019.

One of many curious signs in the park. The Bat is one of the roller coasters and that's fine, but ... like ... why is this a thing someone here would want to know?

Leviathan stands very tall over the Old-Thyme-Englandland themed part of the park.

Leviathan's ride sign is three-dimensional and, you can see, has some nice teeth.

Leviathan ride sign as seen from the back. It's looking good.

Leviathan's lift hill and the final return leg. It's a gigacoaster, sister to Millennium Force at Cedar Point.

Looking from Leviathan's station out on the ride sign, and the attractions around it. Wonder Mountain's in the background.

Another ride, another maker's plate. and a crew of the year poster.

Spinovator, a slightly weirdly out-of-theme name for a Calypso-style ride where the cars are themed to look like wooden tubs. bunnyhugger had strong memories of being at either Kings Island or Canada's Wonderland as a kid, and riding a Friar Tuck's Spinning Tubs ride, and it sure seems like this must have been that ride, except that there's no evidence that it ever had that name. And there's even less reason to think such a ride was ever at Kings Island. But then ... where was it?

Metal sculpture of a dragon outside the Dragon Fyre coaster.

Close-up on the Dragon Fyre dragon's mouth.

bunnyhugger doesn't suspect the dragon sees her at all.

Just a midway carnival game that caught my interest because it seems to be the Peach Basket except that the pricing sign says it's called Muck Buckets.

Trivia: Annual sales by the Westinghouse Electric and Manufacturing Company rose from $16 million in 1901 to $33 million in 1907, with the stock paying a ten-percent dividend. Source: Empires of Light: Edison, Tesla, Westinghouse, and the Race of Electrify the World, Jill Jonnes.

Currently Reading: Coming Home: Reentry and Recovery from Space, Roger D Launius, Dennis R Jenkins.

PS: Using my A to Z Archives: Gaussian Primes, or, what prime numbers look like for complex numbers. Fun!

Last week bunnyhugger set up lights and decorations for Christmas In July. And this inspired our movie choice: the DVD The Nutcracker and the Mouseking, which she had gotten as a door prize at a party. We'd tried watching it once long before, when our DVD player broke. We finally gave it a new try.

It's a 2004-released traditional-animation based loosely on ETA Hoffmann's story of the Nutcracker Prince. It's also really quite bad. Originally in German, I believe, although there's a lot of Russian animators and staff in the credits. But this stands out because the dialogue is done in that Bad Dubbed mode, where way too many words get shoved into each line. The English voice actors are a bunch of respectable enough comedian names, Leslie Neilson, Eric Idle, Fred Willard, Robert Hays ... and they say just way too much. A lot of the dialogue is nervous, fidgety stuff. A character's climbing and it's not enough that he's struggling, he talks about he's got to get to the fitness center. Are there fitness centers in Vaguely 1900 Russian City? Who cares? It's zany, like all those great riffs Robin Williams did at the Genie, so that's why it's all here. Idle and Willard play mice named Bubble and Squeak, so that's the level of joke pitched here. (At one point Bubble, or maybe Squeak, asks the other if he has a match. The answer: ``Yeah, your face and my rear end!'' But ha ha ha he has a match match, too.) Neilson plays the Mouse King, using a voice that makes him sound like Jerry Stiller except when he forgets and turns back to Frank Drebin.

I'm not being snarky when I say the best part is when the movie is quiet. There are fair patches where they try seriously to animate the thing and when that's done there's a commitment to well-crafted designs with full backgrounds in motion. But it sure seems like they run out of money along the way; the great ballroom scene at the end tosses up some basic 3-D computer animation that looks like a test run for a Beauty and the Beast scene. Also there's about twenty seconds that use Tchaikovsky melodies; the rest of the soundtrack is generic music product.

The story is about a little noble(?) girl who's enchanted by Drosselmeyer's toy store (which he pulls out of his hat, an impressive animation and fun idea), and loves a nutcracker toy whose backstory Drosselmeyer gives in a flashback that includes flashbacks, just to baffle the level of story reality. The Nutcracker had been a selfish and bratty Prince who tossed Drosselmeyer's magic nut into the fireplace and went and got him and his whole palace staff turned into dolls and the Mouse King, envious of the Prince's place, wants to get the magic nut that blossoms in the land of imagination only on Christmas Eve and the girl fights the Mouse King's army to ... oh, you know, stuff. It's in that weird bad-movie zone where stuff is happening relentlessly and yet nothing is happening and it's exhausting but also boring. Definitely the movie of 2020, anyway.

There's some nice bits. Drosselmeyer growing his toy shop out of a magic hat, for example. Or as the girl goes through the kingdom(s?) of imagination and journeys through weird, surreal landscapes, that gets good. Each link in the shawl the Mouseking's Aunt/Granny knits turning into a mouse warrior. But at the core, the Nutcracker Prince is shown as this incredible brat, and there's no reason to care for him or about him. There's a scene that feels awfully grafted on where he declares how he cares for his staff --- with bubbly hearts appearing in front of him and sent out to something the something for each of them --- but it's no balance for all we've seen of this central character being a jerk. The girl who's fascinated with the doll never threatens to develop a personality trait besides ``is vaguely scolding them to be nicer''.

I'm glad to have seen it, because a movie that's genuinely bad is always a delight, and for it to be Christmas-in-July-seasonal is great. But wow, was it not worth destroying a DVD player for.

So now we come to June 2019, and our great big road trip for the year: our first trip to Canada's Wonderland, and to upstate New York parks, and an amazing expedition in which we got onto every roller coaster we wanted. So here's our first park, and my first visit to Canada.

First view! Canada's Wonderland is just off the side of the highway and we came to it from the leg of a T intersection. It's not exactly the rear entrance but might as well be; it's not a particularly prominent sign. There's a bigger entrance way off to the right, from here, but we were just following the satellite navigator's suggestions here.

Welcome to Canada's Wonderland! I liked the way the roller coaster loop here framed the safety information sign. I don't know what's taped over either .

And here's the entrance to Canada's Wonderland, which still has more or less the look Cedar Point had earlier in the 2010s.

Main midway to Canada's Wonderland, which was built as sister park to Kings Island and Kings Dominion. Those parks have a replica Eiffel Tower at the end of their great pool; Canada's Wonderland gets Wonder Mountain.

bunnyhugger posing in front of the floral Canadian flag and Wonder Mountain.

Coming up on Wonder Mountain, which has at least two levels of waterfall.

While we didn't ride the bumper cars you have to admit they've got a great name here.

View of the park from the entrance to Thunder Run, an extremely popular roller coaster built into Wonder Mountain.

Warning sign at Thunder Run. The question: what did that sticker with the ampersand replace?

The other side of Wonder Mountain, which has always had bathrooms in it, and the lift hill for Wonder Mountain's Guardian, a hybrid roller coaster and interactive dark ride.

Animal tracks embedded in the Wonder Mountain cement. We debated whether they were legitimate or art-directed.

Queue for Wonder Mountain's Guardian, including a couple fossilized dragons, which is pretty cool.

Trivia: The first balloon ascent in New York City was an ``Aerostatic Ascension'' the 2nd of August, 1819, by Charles Guille, riding a hydrogen balloon and ending the show with a parachute jump. Source: The Bowery: The Strange History of New York's Oldest Street, Stephen Paul DeVillo.

Currently Reading: Coming Home: Reentry and Recovery from Space, Roger D Launius, Dennis R Jenkins.

PS: Using my A to Z Archives: Grammar for those interested in reading older stuff on my mathematics blog.

Besides the Allen Herschell Factory Museum bunny_hugger thought we might spend an evening at Niagara Falls. And this implied getting a hotel room near Niagara Falls. She picked the Moonlite Motel, your classic rectangular-style motel with a pond in the center and a great neon sign and a parking lot you get to underneath an overhang, like you might see in a 1960s postcard about motels. The manager was a pleasantly slightly gruff old guy, telling us about when the continental breakfast would be the next morning and offering eventually coupons for the hotel shuttle down near the bridge.

Despite the coupon we ended up driving into town. We weren't sure how long we'd spend touring things. Instead we drove in to Ontario, giving our passports their third use in the long weekend. bunny_hugger loved past visits to the ``ticky-tacky'' tourist-strip district of Niagara Falls, Ontario. I had ... been to the American side, in a July 2008 trip with my parents and one aunt, but my aunt unaccountably forgot her passport and so we stuck to the New York side of things. This was my first chance to see the spectacle.

It's great, though. It has the feel of a Jersey Shore tourist strip. There's lots of great comic architecture, such as the Ripley's Believe It Or Not building, modeled to look like a toppled Empire State Building. There's a Burger King with a gigantic figure of Frankenstein's Monster eating a Whopper. According to a coupon book they're putting in a roller coaster atop that building. There's haunted houses, mirror mazes, miniature golf, a giant Ferris wheel. And this all besides the Falls.

We looked for dinner ... well, at a bunch of places, including a promising-looking family restaurant that was expecting a huge crowd and couldn't take us. We ate instead at a small place with Mediterranean wraps and sat on the sidewalk, watching the spectacle. Later, they gave us the number code to use their bathrooms, which didn't work, and in making our best guesses about how we heard it wrong the system locked us out entirely. I hope they got that sorted out.

Since we needed a bathroom I had my good idea for the night: that there'd probably be one near the viewing area for the Falls. This was a correct guess. And this gave us the chance to see the Falls, from the Canadian side, in the full glory of late-afternoon light. We saw a rainbow in the American falls. And the always-amazing spectacle of birds in flight but far below our eye level. I got lost in thoughts of Deep Time. Like, there's Luna Island, separating the American Falls from the small Bridal Veil Falls. Was Luna Island ever underneath the waters of the Niagara River? I stared at cliff face, trying to imagine the most recent day that water poured over, carving this edge. Or to imagine the next day. If that wasn't enough I got caught up in smaller thoughts. Like, think of the animals that live near this. Wouldn't they imagine that every animal lives near something like that? There might be, say, a rabbit warren only hundreds of feet from these falls. Do the rabbits have any understanding of what is near there? Do they even know it as anything besides a curious sound and steady vibration in the ground? Do they imagine what it would be to live without that ?

It's too much to watch, for too long. We went back to the frothy silly light stuff. From the many miniature golf courses we went to the outdoor Dinosaur Adventure Golf. bunny_hugger knew she had played a dinosaur-themed miniature golf in Niagara Falls in the past, and kept feeling torn between things she thought she recognized and things she did not. She did see some dinosaur sculptures that she recognized, and yet was frustrated that they didn't look right, such as, were laid down instead of standing up. I won the course, by two strokes, although it must be said that there were two holes on which I putted inadequately fast, and my ball rolled back, stopping when it hit my foot. Since it didn't go out of bounds, I didn't take a stroke penalty for that, but if I had gotten out of the way sooner, it would've gone out of bounds both times.

One of our destinations was the Great Canadian Midway, which had an interactive dark ride that was fun to play. bunny_hugger even hit things; I may have rung up a score of zero. We had hopes that we'd find pinball here, and indeed, in this large arcade we did. One table. The Stern Star Trek. We didn't have any tokens. The game did have one credit, and bunny_hugger played it and did tolerably well for a table she was touching for the first time. (She knows the rules well, but every table plays different.)

We got ice cream, and ate it in the warm evening twilight, listening to the karaoke bar across the street. And then heard fireworks going on, down at the Falls. We walked back down that way, arriving just too late to see any of the fireworks. But we could see the smoke lingering from them, illuminated by the colored lights that shine on the Falls at night. We watched that a good while, until the smoke cleared, and then watched the light on the Falls.

We poked around some of the gift shops, never quite finding something appealing. We did go back near the place we'd eaten, because there was an appealing-looking mirror maze. Really we were there for the animatronics, which included a vulture and a digging rat outside. Our experience with mirror mazes has been that they're pretty easily navigated by the technique of looking where you're going.

These Crystal Caves worked differently. Notably, they had us put plastic gloves on first. This meant there were almost no smudges on any of the mirrors. The lights are lower, too, and the maze much bigger than any we'd been at before. We also had the maze to ourselves. So we got lot, like, around eighty times before we got down to some serious progress. Have to say, this was a great mirror maze. Well-designed, easy to get lost in, and so clean that we kept losing track of the correct path to each other. Very much worth the cost of admission.

Meanwhile I had repented of my decision not to play the Star Trek pinball earlier, and suggested we go back to the Midway. Mostly I realized, you know, I've only played pinball in three different countries (the United States, Singapore, and France); why was I turning down a fourth? We'd probably need credits, and I stopped at a change machine that was just there in the street that gave me Canadian quarters for a US dollar, the only act of currency exchange we did on this trip. The pinball machine didn't take quarters. I bought, inside the arcade, tokens with another of my US dollars.

And for my first game on this table I had ... uh ... a riotously good game. Like, pinball players sometimes have the experience of a game where you just can't lose the ball. This was one of them. I got to the first wizard mode, the Kobayashi Maru scenario, in one ball. I've been to that mode, like, twice before in the five years this game has been out. To have it this fast was ridiculous. I even had flukes that worked out for me; at one point the game tossed an extra ball into play and I kept that going a good while, without losing control of things. Meanwhile bunny_hugger fumed and demanded to know why I was so good.

I ended up putting up 172 million points, which I think is the second-highest I've ever done on a 2013 Star Trek. I did not get on the high score table. bunny_hugger regards this as an injustice.

It was near enough midnight. We decided it was time to get to bed. We would have missed the last shuttle bus, had we taken that. The customs officer asked how long we had been in Canada and I at least was amused to say it was about six hours. Were we bringing anything into the United States? ... And we realized, huh. No, we hadn't bought any souvenirs of a place designed to sell souvenirs. Weird.

By the time we got back to our Moonlite Motel, the neon lights were off. Check-in was only allowed until midnight. We suppose they had turned the sign off when there was nobody at the front desk any longer. That's a shame. It was probably a fantastic view.

Trivia: The first operating losses of the Panama Canal Company, after its opening, were recorded in 1973. 1974 saw the first toll hike for the canal, from 90 cents per cargo ton to $1.08. Source: The Path Between The Seas: The Creation of the Panama Canal, 1870 - 1914, David McCullough.

Currently Reading: Whatever Happened To The World Of Tomorrow?, Brian Fies.

PS: Reading the Comics, July 26, 2019: Children With Mathematics Edition, some more of last week's comic strips.

PS: OK, now that's enough of some of these roller coasters.

A view from the exit of Cascabel 2.0. And say, what's that big cylindrical thing in the center there?

Yeah, that. What's that thing? Also, hey, notice that Meeting Point over in front of the Pepsi stand. That's a nice thing to have and be so visible from that far off.

Walking down from Cascabel 2.0, a nicely twisty path, with a view of the Kiddie Whip beside the roller coaster.

Even leaving the Darien Lake amusement park slowly, though, it wasn't 5:30 yet. The weather was great, the day was for us still young, and we had plenty of energy. So we went to that pinball place bunny_hugger had found. It was near Buffalo, maybe 45 minutes away.

It's called The Pocketeer Billiards and Sports Bar. It doesn't look like much, from the strip mall outside. Inside, it's got a good dozen pool tables. And something like 75 pinball games. The place hosts a pinball league, too. Also, free pinball on Tuesdays. We were there on a Monday. We'd be occupied Tuesday. The free pinball turns out to be of limited delight anyway: it's just four games that are set on free play, while the rest are the usual charge, from 25 cents to a dollar a play. Their mascot is a cartoon raccoon who, honestly, looks like someone's Sonic the Hedgehog OC from about 1999. It's in the off-centered smirk. I do not know the character's name but if it isn't ``Pocket Raccoon'' they're missing a bet.

So what would we do, but join their pinball league? It's a Selfie league. In this format, you play a slate of games, and take a picture of yourself with your score to establish that you put up that score. To be accepted by the International Flipper Pinball Association, scores put up like this can only be used for seeding for some tournament that has head-to-head play supervised by someone who can make rulings about whether someone's cheating. You may ask what stops a person from just lying about their score. The answer is, you know? If you really want to cheat to get a better seeding than you could earn in a tournament? That's the world you choose to live in. Good luck, pal.

There were six selfie-league games, including two from boutique makers. One was Heighway Pinball's Full Throttle, a racing-themed game that bunny_hugger understood 8.7 times better than I did, based on our scores in the one game we played. We only put up the one game on that, and the other tables, including moderately familiar ones like Pirates of the Caribbean (Stern's version), Centaur II, or the always baffling Jurassic Park: Lost World. (We've seen Lost World at several venues, and never met anyone who understood what you were supposed to do.) They had the new Black Knight: Sword of Rage, and we put in a couple games on that --- I broke 100 million points for the first time on it --- and they set the table next to Black Knight 2000 and the original Black Knight. Somehow, foolishly, I failed to take a picture of the three games side-by-side.

One of the other selfie-league games was Heighway Pinball's Alien, themed to the Alien and Aliens movies (you can pick, at the start of the game, which movie you're playing the game for). Here bunny_hugger would feel tragedy. We played a game and I had what sure seemed like a good game, as best we could tell for an unfamiliar table with cryptic rules. But before I could take pictures of the scores, she brushed against the start button and wiped the game out. She felt awful about this, of course, and probably still does. But since it's not like I thought we were going to get to the playoffs anyway, it didn't much matter if we just played again. ... And, it happens, I did better on the second time, in defiance of a lot of pinball tradition.

Finals would be played the 1st of July, well after we got home. It turns out only eleven people put up scores. The eight people who showed up to finals, necessarily, got ranked above us. So that's how I got to be the 448th-highest ranked pinball player in New York State, and bunny_hugger the 462nd. We never met any of our league-mates and so far as I know, never set eyes on any of them.

Pocketeer had very many pinball games, most of them modern ones. Even in, like, five hours to play we couldn't touch them all. We looked for the oddities. The Pabst Can Crusher, for example. This is a reskin of Whoa Nellie, the breast-themed game. We like the game in principle because it's a modern version of a late-50s electromechanical. Like, the same logic, but the elements rearranged. But, Whoa Nellie is just so gratuitously sexist in its art and its sound effects. Pabst Can Crusher we'd played, once, at the 1up arcade in Denver last year and liked it. But we couldn't hear the sound effects. Here, in the nearly empty Pocketeer, we could. Pabst Can Crusher uses the same layout as Whoa Nellie, but re-themes it to be a bunch of young adults having a beer party in the woods. It is so much more pleasant. If you have the chance to play the table, this is the version to play. (Maybe. There's yet another re-skin, that one themed to the band Primus, which I have never seen and so cannot judge.)

Another rarity they have: the Thunderbirds pinball. This is a new table from the boutique manufacturer Homepin, and it's barely a year old, and I didn't actually know it was in production anywhere. Strangely, I never really watched Thunderbirds (or any Gerry Anderson show) as a kid. I know, you'd think I would love them all. I think I just didn't know when they were on, if they were, when I was a kid. So, I didn't know except in the most vague terms what anything being referred to was. If the game called out a character I had no hope of finding where that character's shot on the playfield was. The game is ... uh ... a bit of a mess, honestly. This is a common problem with a new manufacturer's first games. It's hard to get a shot that feels good. And interesting rules are even harder. You need to think of combinations of shots that feel good and that are doable often enough without ever getting boring. And you need to provide cues, on-screen and in audio clips, that tell people what they should be doing. We played a bunch of games, since the table kept giving us free credits, and never felt like we were getting closer to understanding what we were doing or why. We did work out there was a ramp shot that seemed quite important; we never figured out how to shoot it reliably, though.

Another rarity that we did understand slightly better was Pistol Poker. This is a mid-90s game from Alvin G and Company, the company formed out of the remains of the venerable Gottleib company. (Guess the relationship of Alvin G to pinball icon David Gottleib.) They only made a few tables, in short production runs, before collapsing themselves. It's one of the estimated 800 million billion trillion card-themed games, although this one crosses it with an Old West theme. Possibly they were figuring, hey, there's a Maverick movie coming out around this time, we don't need to license comedy-western-cards. And we had some good fun with this. The rules are a bit obscure and none of the modes have quite the right balance of good shots to make and time to make them in, but, that could be said about every 1990s Gottleib table. We played this while having a dinner of a bunch of fried vegetables from the bar.

While we were there the Pocketeer staff rolled out a game, Last Action Hero. This is a mid-90s game, licensed to the movie, and I've always heard positive things about it. We've played it, like, once ever, at an AJR tournament years ago. I didn't want to leave before playing it. And while doing this we had about the only time we talked with someone besides one of the bartenders. It was a guy very eager to mansplain pinball to bunny_hugger, at least until I was done with my ball and he could switch to telling me about pinball. His enthusiasm was infectious, at least, but he wasn't actually, you know, right about what he was saying. I was playing a game while he explained to bunny_hugger that Stern Pinball made the Houdini: Master of Mystery game. Houdini was made by the boutique/small manufacturer American Pinball. It's one of those errors that is inconsequential but lethal to someone's sense of being an authority. So I could not see her face, but I know what she looked like while he said this, and also how he went on talking without realizing that bunny_hugger was not there for me, but because she knows and appreciates pinball in her own right. When his attention switched from her to me, I kept thinking, I need to point out that bunny_hugger has played in the Women's World Championships. I couldn't find a way, and I should have. I have trouble wedging my own topics into a conversation, especially against someone with a faster line than I have.

That guy eventually left to ... something. And we were getting late enough that we should get back to the hotel. We went back to the Black Knight games to close out the night, where I had that great Black Knight: Sword of Rage game. And then on Black Knight 2000, which bunny_hugger has played only a few times without ever having a really good game on? She had a really good game. Well, a really good third ball, that took her from demoralizingly far back to soundly beating what was one of my best recorded scores on the game. I'm sorry that Explainer Guy wasn't there to see it.

We drove back from the Buffalo area to our last night in a Bavaria, New York hotel. The next day, we'd be going to ... a Buffalo-area hotel.

Trivia: The Royal Philatelic Collection's set of stamps issued during King George V's reign are kept in 328 red albums. Those of George VI's reign are kept in more than a hundred blue boxes. Source: The One-Cent Magenta: Inside the Quest to Own the Most Valuable Stamp in the World, James Barron.

Currently Reading: Walt Kelly's Pogo: The Complete Dell Comics: Volume Six, Walt Kelly. Book editor Thomas Andrae.

PS: let's see that grand carousel some omre.

Getting onto the carousel at La Feria, and showing off the rocking chariot it has.

Looking up at scenery panels on the carousel. These always seem to be custom to the location.

Horse number 10 in a pose that's great except for the shadow of one of the lights.

After a bit of celebration and overhearing other people talk about how they liked Tantrum, and our own talking about whether the name was any good, we walked toward the Mind Eraser. This took us past more water, which we studied to see what kind of fish there were, if any. I don't remember that we spotted any. There were a lot of plants in the water, though. It'd be strange if no fish were supported.

Mind Eraser's station had this nice brick cladding, so that it looked better, to me at least, than its twin Thunderhawk at Michigan's Adventure. There was no queue; we got on the next train they dispatched. We went to the back seat. Experience suggests that this ride is less head-bangy if you watch the rows up front and tilt your head to match the ride movement. I also tried, for a change, pressing my head as hard as possible against the padding behind. Between the two, this wasn't too bad a ride. That it was so close to a pond, like Thunderhawk, made it feel eerily more like the Michigan's Adventure experience.

Tantrum and Mind Eraser are off on this little cul-de-sac from the main body of the park. We returned to the main area, spotting a couple interesting things. Like, they have a Fascination Parlor! And it was closed. We would bring the news to MWS, who's missed the game ever since it left Cedar Point. They also have the Giant Wheel, a Ferris wheel, which has a sign declaring ``1982 Worlds [sic] Fair `Worlds [sic] Largest Ferris Wheel','' which is all the explanation you get. But yeah, they brought the Ferris Wheel from the Simpsons World Fair and moved it here. We didn't ride it. bunny_hugger is not fond of large, slow Ferris wheels and I'm not positive it was actually running anyway. Also the French fries stands where we had a poutine lunch, the first time we actually had poutine on this trip that took us through Canada.

We took a ride on the park's Grande Carousel. It's not an antique. It opened in 1981 and according to the maker's plate comes from International Amusement Devices of Sandusky, Ohio. We have never heard of this organization before. This turns out to be the name that National Amusement Devices, of Dayton, took on in the 70s. As National Amusement Devices they designed and built a lot of miniature train rides, as well as roller coasters. Montaña Rusa is one of theirs. So are Big Dipper and Li'l Dipper at Camden Park, West Virginia, which we hope to get to soon. So was Magic Mountain's Colossus, which you know of as the roller coaster from National Lampoon's Vacation. The carousel, meanwhile, is an average sort of ride, although it's got a cute chariot featuring an image of a woman sitting with a dog. Someone with sidewalk chalk drew a cute picture of a flower underneath a sunny arc by one of the exits. I have no explanation for this phenomenon.

Now, finding the crowds ... not nearly so bad as we feared ... we went to the Ride of Steel. This was, in the park's first Six Flags incarnation, known as Superman: Ride Of Steel, a name they've used at other parks too. When Six Flags sold the park, Darien Lake dropped the trademarked piece from the name and that was apparently it. The ride's off on the end of the park. It's got a couple of lovely Art Deco-style buildings that look like stuff from the Fleischer or DC Animated Universe cartoons. On the side of the gift shop --- Steel City novelties --- you can see the Superman and Batman logos from the building's original theming. And that they were painted over. They haven't been unpainted yet. For a decade plus, this was enough to satisfy Warner Brothers trademark lawyers. It's great. No idea if or when they're going to paint them back into visibility.

Ride of Steel is a hypercoaster. It reaches just over 200 feet high. It's essentially an out-and-back coaster, going off into the undeveloped portions of the park and back again. What stands out, and makes it a lot of fun, is that it goes out along more lakefront property. And it does mostly take nice long stretches with hills. It feels like flying. It would be one of the roller coasters we re-rode.

And that was my 249th roller coaster. There were three roller coasters left in the park. One, Hoot 'N' Holler, is a kiddie coaster, not open to unaccompanied adults. One, Boomerang Coast to Coaster, is another of those shuttle coasters that always leave bunny_hugger nauseous. And the last was Predator, their lone wooden coaster. So you know my pick for my milestone ride.

Predator opened in 1990. It's gotten some love. The station shows off a plaque from from when Inside Track magazine readers named it the world's ninth-best roller coaster. This was in 1991, but still. When you think how many roller coasters there were, even in 1991, that's an impressive record. The park returns the love: the station also has a plaque saluting Roller Coaster enthusiasts ``for keeping the tradition of great wooden roller coasters alive''. The trains are slightly distant friends: they were bought from Holiday World in 2010. At Holiday World they'd been used on The Voyage. Holiday World replaced the cars --- four years old at that point --- because The Voyage was riding rough. I at least did not know this when we rode.

So. Predator is fun. It's a double-out-and-back design, the track doing just what you'd imagine from that name. It's got a surprisingly small footprint. It's the longest wooden roller coaster in New York. It, too, runs along the edge of the lake and I'm not positive that there aren't footers in the water. It's a bit rough. I'm still happy with it.

And now we had ridden six of the seven available roller coasters at Darien Lake. We had been at the park three and a half hours.

We could take some time to enjoy the rest of the park. For example, we noticed this Paratrooper-type ride. Paratrooper is a ride where your seat hangs from the spokes of a wheel which rotates and inclines. The ride, Haymaker, looked ... different. Bigger, was the obvious difference. It seemed like it went higher than ordinary Paratroopers, but that might reflect the ride's general size. Hard to say. We had to ride it. This was a good use of our time. Apparently, this is the only known installation of this model ride, from Heintz Fahtze. There's also the Silver Bullet, an Enterprise, that appears to be the only model of that ride made by Heintz Fahtze still running. We didn't ride that one, though; maybe if we realized its rarity we would have.

As a kid I didn't play many midway games. Just didn't have the spare cash. This habit's stuck with me into adulthood, when I have the spare cash. bunny_hugger did grow up playing midway games, and she wanted to join some of the ones going on. So we did. We joined a group of kids playing a Whac-a-Mole game, turning their group from one playing for the small prize to one playing for a medium prize. I hope you don't think worse of me that I beat them all to win a prize. This we chose to be what the game operator described as ``a duck that thinks it's a pineapple''. It is a plush duck, yes, with patterning like a pineapple skin. bunny_hugger has been intermittently singing ``pineapple duck'' since.

bunny_hugger and I, on our own, played one of those racing games, rolling balls into holes to move a moose(?) forward. This one she won, taking a small prize of a cute little Darien Lake throw pillow. It's what I would have picked myself.

Part of why we played these games was we figured we would go to the main gift shop and look for souvenirs. Then return them to the car. This was more intersting than it deserved to be, partly because so many of the souvenirs hadn't yet been taken over by Six Flags branding. I also grabbed a penny stamp for The Predator and I'm fairly sure I could locate it if asked just now. They also had a build-a-bear-style booth to make your own plush souvenirs, themed to making them superheroes. One of the suggested superhero designs was for raccoons, which you don't often see. Cute.

We took our souvenirs --- bunny_hugger got a nice light hoodie that's already been great for handling slightly cool temperatures, such as at places with too much air conditioning --- back to my car and marvelled that actually, yeah. The park had gotten every high school student in Western New York arriving at the start of the day, but then only about twelve other people in the park, counting us. This was below the park's capacity. We were having a great day for riding stuff.

We went back in for the last two hours of the park's operating day.

Trivia: On the 25th of July, 1969, a photo technician picked up a film magazine which Aldrin had dropped on the lunar surface and found his hand covered in black lunar dust, the most direct human skin contact with lunar dust. The technician was already in quarantine, but needed to decontaminate by showering for five minutes. Source: Where No Man Has Gone Before: A History of NASA's Apollo Lunar Expeditions, William David Compton.

Currently Reading: The Astronaut Maker: How One Mysterious Engineer Ran Human Spaceflight For A Generation, Michael Cassutt. Wait wait wait wait wait. George Abbey's sister Phyllis died from breast cancer caused by a toxic chemical used in early-70s hair dye? And that it wasn't a surprise, some chemical regarded as safe until women turned up dead. It was something that at the time ``some women were known to react [to] badly'', and the hair salon should have but failed to test it with her before using? What? What is it with this country anyway?

PS: Reading the Comics, July 20, 2019: What Are The Chances Edition, the comic strips I didn't talk about on Tuesday that I should have.

PPS: A roller coaster at La Feria that isn't Montaña Rusa! They have three of those.

Some of the ample (at least when we visited) queue space for Quimera, which has operated on three continents: as Triple Loop Coaster in a park in Selangor, Malaysia; as Magnum Force in Flamingo Land, England; and here in Mexico City, where it's also been named Montaña Infinitum and Montaña Triple Loop.

Park employee (we trust) wheeling a bottle of water through the Quimera infield.

And a look at Quimera, which has three, count 'em, vertical loops and is a model ride --- Dreier Looping --- intended for the travelling fair circuit, if you can imagine that.

So here's another thing about Darien Lake that encouraged us not to go out Sunday night after all. Their operating hours. That Monday, it turned out, they would open at 11 ... and close at 5 pm. This is so shockingly early that we literally did not believe it at first. But that's what the web site insisted. The next week they would move to full ordinary summer hours. ... Really, if I had taken bunny_hugger up on her offer, the Thursday we drove into Canada, to postpone everything a week we would have had many more night hours available at every park. And better weather, although there was no reason to suppose that would be so. But the hours meant that we could not, say, sleep in until noon, get to the park at 1 pm, and have eight hours (or whatever) until it opened. We would have to get there near 11 am to be confident we'd see it all. We were about an hour's drive away, and we need about an hour to get going in a typical morning.

Darien Lake is not a small park. Not, like, Seabreeze or Fantasy Island small. It's not Canada's Wonderland big, though. It's around the size of Michigan's Adventure. A bit bigger: it has eight roller coasters, and some facilities which Michigan's Adventure lacks, such as theaters for shows. But, still, Michigan's Adventure we can visit and explore fully, if there aren't crowds, in two or three hours. Six hours would probably be plenty if the park were not packed. We just had to get up early enough for it. And, the park projecting a six-hour day implies they didn't expect crowds either. If they expected the place to be packed, they'd be open through 8 pm, or 10 pm.

Also we would get into the park cheap. The American Coaster Enthusiasts have a nice deal with Six Flags parks in which, through mid-season, we get free tickets. bunny_hugger printed out the coupon from ACE's web site and then, out of a cynical suspicion brought on by nothing ever working sensibly, printed out a second one. This just in case for some reason the ticket-taker refused to let me and bunny_hugger, who are two separate people with separate ACE cards and all that, use the same single sheet of paper for something distributed on ACE's web site. But what would be the chance of some daft circumstance like that happening?

Oh, also, Darien Lake is a Six Flags park. It wasn't, last year. Six Flags just took over the place. This eleven years after Six Flags sold the place. That was part of Six Flags's bankruptcy-driven retrenchment. The park was owned by, oh, a confusing string of those real-estate-investment companies that do so much to destroy everything ever. For a while the park was managed by Premier Parks, owners of Clementon in New Jersey and Elitch Gardens in Denver. But starting in 2018 Six Flags began operating the park, and Wikipedia suggests that they're just managing it for EPR Properties. This is confusing, like I said. But they've started branding the place Six Flags Darien Lake again, and they accept ACE's deal with the Six Flags parks. It did mean that while key signs had the Six Flags logo, much of the park merchandise did not yet, so we could experience the park almost as if it were still an indie.

And more excitement. Darien Lake has eight roller coasters. If they were all operating, and we were able to get to them? I would ride my 250th sometime this Monday. This not even a year and a half after my 200th, on Medusa Steel Coaster at Six Flags Mexico. And if we were able to get on only a couple, bunny_hugger would ride her 275th. We briefly considered arranging our rides so that we would hit our milestones together, but that seemed like far too much effort. And far too contingent on the crowd and the park rides cooperating. I hadn't realized I might reach 250 or I'd have printed out a sign for my picture. bunny_hugger didn't expect to reach 275 on this trip and also thought that too minor a milestone to send to the ACE newsletter. But we thought we would use the hotel business center to print out a 250 sign, and then forgot.

Monday would be a nice, bright, clear day, the first truly nice weather of the trip. The first good weather in, like, four weeks. Because it was a Monday, the hotel's continental breakfast would end earlier than we wanted. But we had to get up just early enough that if I went straight to the breakfast area, before even showering, I could grab some more fruits and make some more egg bagel sandwiches and the like. This I did.

We got to Darien Lake under brilliant, beautiful skies and a parking lot remarkably empty. There was a wait at the customer-service desk, people with will-call tickets and the like, and the line was slow-moving. We chatted some with a couple ahead of us, also roller coaster enthusiasts who were doing a breathtaking tour of their own. I think they had been to Hersheypark just before, and were heading for Canada's Wonderland and Kings Island, and had been thinking about Michigan's Adventure but thought that park --- at the far end of the lower peninsula --- just too far out of the way for a trip I would estimate covered 86,400 miles of driving already.

The woman working the will-call desk viewed our claim of ACE membership and free tickets with suspicion, but slowly came to accept that. She asked which one of us was getting the free ticket and whether we wanted to use the 50% off that the other coupon on the page offered. We tried to explain that the deal was one free ticket for every ACE member and we were both ACE members, a matter that just seemed to confuse things. My recollection is foggy but I think at one point she was asking about codes, which is never a good sign. bunny_hugger asked if it would help that she had a second copy of the coupon. This was also viewed with suspicion, but on our word that it was a discount given to every ACE member and that as far as we knew it was not tied to any account number, she slowly accepted it. We got our complimentary tickets --- nothing stylish, just an inch-long piece of receipt tape and a bar code --- and looked at the entrance queue.

Which I have not yet mentioned. The line for this was ... enormous. Some might say terrifying, and still understate it. Because there were few cars in the parking lot. What was there was school buses. Lots of school buses. A new school bus every two minutes, disgorging another phalanx of teenagers. All the while we waited at the will-call desk, bunny_hugger glared at the army coming in to make the park crowded and, if past experience with teens is a guide, unruly. I can't attest that she grabbed my arm in alarm at a decent day being torn away from us, but it would be in character. I tried, as ever, to make the best of it, proposing that what we were seeing, besides every school in Western New York having its Class Field Trip Day at once, was the entire day's population of the park crowding in in one fifteen-minute stretch, instead of over the four hours it normally would. Still, a park crowded with teens, who generically have pretty bad habits about stuff like orderly queues and following the rules about how to ride roller coasters? And who would surely be at the park until closing, or at lastest maybe 90 minutes before closing? This could flood the park out from us. bunny_hugger would almost surely reach her 275th coaster. I would reach my 250th if all went well.

We went in.

Trivia: Apollo crews dubbed a sheet of aluminum foil, set out at the start of a moonwalk to collect solar wind particles, the ``Swiss Flag'', as it was designed by Dr Johannes Geiss of the University of Berne and was unfurled along with the United States flag. Source: Where No Man Has Gone Before: A History of NASA's Apollo Lunar Expeditions, William David Compton.

Currently Reading: The Astronaut Maker: How One Mysterious Engineer Ran Human Spaceflight For A Generation, Michael Cassutt.

PS: More of the roller coaster! At least approaching the other side. From our La Feria trip, January 2018.

Revisiting Montaña Rusa to ride on the other side: a frustratingly obscured picture of the roller coaster model, but a nice view of the other roller coaster coming into the station.

Oh ... yes, there was this thing in the way. Let's not worry about it, though.

There we go! A decent view of the roller coaster model, plus the other train that hasn't been run for, by some reports, years now. It must be some serious maintenance issue: we found that at an American Coaster Enthusiasts event a couple years ago they didn't run both trains, and if there would be any time that they'd bring out the staff to run both sides at once (the trouble with racing coasters is they need the staffing of two roller coasters, after all) that would have been it. No hypotheses about what the issue is.