After riding Jack Rabbit we went immediately to the gift shop. We somehow discussed whether we should a little. But after the disappointment at Fantasy Island the day before, getting a souvenir early seemed worth doing. Better, we found they had some pretty good stylish t-shirts for the Jack Rabbit. We both got t-shirts (they turned out even to have a fitting room to try them out) and went to my car to stow things. The cheery, chatty guy working the gate seemed a little surprised we were leaving already and we assured him no, we were just dropping stuff off. He was glad for that, and no less chatty as we got back. We'd see him again later in the day, operating the swinging ship ride. When we got on that he joked to us that ``I look better than I did out front, right?'' I needed a moment to parse that and I'm still not sure he looked any different working a ride than overseeing people reentering the park. bunny_hugger thought he was making some crack about the ride looking better in person than it did from the midway. Anyway he was more outgoing in three casual encounters than I've been all year, combined. Fun to see but I couldn't keep up with that kind of energy.

Seabreeze has two other adult-friendly roller coasters, both huddled at the south end of the park. The next one we rode was Bobsleds. It's a junior roller coaster, with a great big wooden structure. But metal tracks of thin tubes which bunny_hugger identified as being like Disneyworld's Matterhorn. The cars are styled to look like bobsleds, and even have country names painted on them, including, yes, Jamaica. But they have separate front and back seats. It hugs the terrain, a fair bit, taking advantage of the hill it's on to start with a drop and only using a lift hill later on in the ride. It's mostly small drops and hills, although there's a couple of big drops for pretty good thrills. It's not as good as Jack Rabbit. But it is a really sweet ride. I'd call it the happiest surprise of our trip.

So to this coaster's mysteries. The ride opened in 1952 as Junior Coaster. In the early 60s Seabreeze's owner, George Long, visited Disneyland and concluded the Matterhorn's tubular steel track would be a good way to spruce up this ride. And so in 1962 they rebuilt it, with a new name, new track, and a third level of the roller coaster. This is why it's such a weird design; it, rather like Kennywood's Thunderbolt, is a roller coaster expanded upon, as well as somewhat changed in type.

The other roller coaster is Whirlwind. It's the park's newest roller coaster, joining their lineup in 2004. It's a spinning coaster, the twin to Steel Dragon at Waldameer. Also to Laff Trakk at Hersheypark, but we haven't been to Hershey since that was installed. It's nice ride, bright and fun. Each ride we were able to take by ourselves, so that we were able to choose to go up the lift hill backwards. This isn't bunny_hugger's favorite, but this and Steel Dragon are the only chances I get for that. The cars seat four people, and on Steel Dragon usually people rush for the back seat and we get what's left. The ride's perfectly fine, of course, and a couple times we rode we got some pretty good spinning going. It's just that compared to Jack Rabbit and to Bobsleds it's kind of mundane.

We thought if we would find pinball at any amusement park our trip, this would be the one. Seabreeze has got an atmosphere very like Rye Playland (which has pinball in two arcades). In the Seabreeze arcade we found ... nothing, which felt out of character. There were some fun games there, though. bunny_hugger was intrigued by a Killer T-Rex game, the objective of which is to toss softballs into a dinosaur mouth. She played a couple games of this, getting enough tickets to ... not really get any interesting prizes. But the playing was fun.

The other thing we had to do at Seabreeze was get to the carousel. Seabreeze lost its antique carousel, and its Wurlitzer, in a terrible fire in 1994. They had bought a replacement, the frame and mechanism of Philadelphia Toboggan Company #31, and restored it, commissioning hand-carved horses to join the four that survived the fire, in a process of historical care that long impressed rapidtrabbit. And we understand now why. It is a lovely carousel, handsome and well-cared-for. The process is described some in this essay by a local historian. I don't know how to find Rapid's reports on the carousel.

And it's accompanied by a restored Wurlitzer band organ, an enormous thing playing at full volume. And for a wonder we could tell you what they played. Seabreeze claims to have the world's largest collection of the music rolls for the Wurlitzer Style 165 Band Organ. They say it's a complete set of the scrolls. There's a small shelf beside the band organ that shows the boxes for today's music scrolls, and even which of the tracks they're playing. So while we were there we'd hear songs like Vaugh de Leath's Hawaiian nightingale or John Boulton's Yankee Tars. Repeatedly, because we kept coming back to the carousel and its building. I think that for as much as Jack Rabbit and the Bobsleds were the roller coaster high points of this trip, the carousel and its building dominate my thinking about where we were and why we were there.

But part of the carousel building's charms, besides the carousel, is the park's history. There are historical bits all over the park. But they're concentrated tightly here. There are plaques about the carousel, of course, and describing the 1994 fire and renovation. There's even a flyer, photocopied on both sides and set out for you to take, about the Wurlitzer. There's old carousel figures, the``Leopold Lion'' and its relations, part of the park's family history. The park's owned by the Long family. Edward F Long started building carousels in 1876, and they had on display a lion which had been at Bushkill Park in Easton, Pennsylvania, until about 1950. Edward Long made a series of carousels, one of which was a ride at Seabreeze park, and one thing grew into another and what do you know but the family bought the park and has kept it since. That's great.

They have a good pile of historical interest stuff. Wooden mounts from old kids rides. The backglass of a Hit-A-Homer coin-drop game. Souvenir plates and mugs. Pennants from the decades the park was known as Dreamland. (The park was originally named Seabreeze to match the nearby hotel. The name seems to have changed around when George Long bought the park in 1946. It changed back in the 1970s.) Framed vintage newspapers advertising Rochester's Million Dollar Playground and showing that the name was not always consistently Sea Breeze or Seabreeze. (They seem to have mostly settled on Seabreeze today.) Tiles from their Natatorium, which the advertisements claimed was the largest salt water pool in the world. (Remember, if people wanted fresh water, Lake Ontario was right there.) Ads for the Tumble Bug (``A ride you'll want to try and try again and again'') or The Wild Cat roller coaster (``Fills the Old Ravine - Gives More Than a Thrill - You'll Ride It Once and Then Come Back For more'') or the Virginia Reel roller coaster (``The Old Favorite - The Ride They All Take at Sea Breeze Park - Join the Crowd of Merrymakers Opening Day and Tell Your Friends to Meet You at the Virginia Reel''). The opening-day promotion for 1926 was, ``Free! A Gaily Colored Bathing Cap for every woman bathing in the pool (Today)''.

And ... signs. For the Fairyland zoo attraction, circa 1950. Like many parks, Seabreeze used to have a petting zoo. They had a sign listing birds in that enclosure, including the white zebra finch, cordon blue finch, saffron finch, cutthroat finch, silver bill finch, lavender finch, steelfinch, firefinch, and even some birds which were not finches. Like, the common waxbill, the golden breasted waxbill, and the orange cheeched (sic) waxbill. Also according to the modern interpretative sign they'd had ``ducks & geese, rabbits, Henrietta the Tapir, goldfish pond, bird house, a coatimundi, and of course Spitzy the Llama!'' Well. That fills me with ambivalence. I can imagine a coati being a fascinating petting-zoo animal, since coatis are big and unusual and about as intelligent and dextrous and sociable as raccoons --- and they also had a sign for the Raccoon that they must have had there. But ... jeez, what kind of care was an exotic raccoon-like animal, 1500 miles away from anyone who had ever seen one in the wild, getting at a small, family-owned amusement park in Rochester, New York, in 1950?

That the sign said ``a coatimundi'' is also alarming, since coatis are social animals. Maybe he hung out with the raccoon. Coatis and raccoons seem to interact in that way where you're not positive they realize that they're different species, or care. But still. Yes, Hersheypark has coatis in its ZooAmerica section, but that's a zoo, proper, that at least meets Association of Zoo and Aquariums standards. Six Flags Great Aventure allegedly had some within its park around the time the Kingda Ka roller coaster opened but, again, that's a regional park owned by a multinational corporation and that by then already had a quarter-century experience taking care of exotic animals.

I saw the sign before bunny_hugger did, and thought about whether to warn her, and if so about what. She discovered it and said, oh, so that's what I was looking so stunned at. I didn't realize that I was, but maybe my poker face is also my shocked face.

But, well, for all we love amusement parks, and their history, there's nasty stuff in that history. The use of animals is part of that. Some of the historical photos include a 1961 ``Visit Dreamland Park'' fire truck, with a chimpanzee hanging out as part of the promotion. It's hard to imagine the chimpanzee had a great life (it was ``on loan from one of the free acts performing at the park'') and there's nothing to do but acknowledge that and cherish the good parts. By this I mean I wonder how welcome black men felt at the Natatorium. (It closed early on in the Great Depression and was covered over, eventually becoming a bingo hall. Many amusement parks had their great swimming pools through the 1960s or 1970s, when they were obliged to integrate, and so instead closed.)

And I guess maybe that shows more of why when I think of this trip I think of Seabreeze, and when I think of Seabreeze I think of this building.

Trivia: Apollo 10's photographs of the Sea of Tranquility landing site, as photomosaics, were delivered to Cape Kennedy to use in training for Apollo 11 on the 9th of June, 1969. 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: Reading the Comics, July 13, 2019: Marginal Supplemental Edition, some comic strips not worth talking about.

PPS: We continue to try and find the entrance for the biggest roller coaster in La Feria. January 2018.

Yeah, see, we're right the roller ... wait, huh? ... Well, the Space Train is a ride for kids and you can see, it's got a rocket figure and ... someone's grandparents taking their kid to the moon? ... I like it. I truly like it.

And hey! We finally found the entrance for Montaña Rusa! The bridge leading to this is pretty near the front of the park and we charged right past it in our race to the lift hill. Did we ever mention the park doesn't have any maps that we could find and has precious few signs directing where attractions are?

And here, now, we view from the bridge leading to the entrance of Montaña Rusa, showing the lift hill and the turnaround and oh, hey, the miniature train ride running beside the roller coaster.

We were getting near 6 pm, around the last hour of the park, and getting a bit hungry. So what would be a good snack? We were right by a funnel cake stand. Sounds good. They asked if we wanted the regular or the deluxe funnel cake. I decided, sure, why not?

So this would be the single dumbest thing I said over this trip.

Not that this was stupid in principle. But in practice ... well, they made a funnel cake. And then ... nothing happened. I waited. They waited. bunny_hugger waited. People came in to the funnel cake stand. People left. Other customers came up, ordered ice cream, got it, and left. There was a ... something ... holding things up and while they apologized I also never got clear what the problem was. We heard in the distance the Wild West gunshow going on, the 6 pm repeat that would've been instructive to see. Finally I said to the guy working the counter, look, it's okay if I just get the plain. And he asked if I was sure, and I was, and he gave it to me. He didn't refund the dollar difference between the regular and the deluxe, nor offer to. I decided I did not have enough time in my life to raise the issue.

While we sat and ate and thought about the bizarreness of all this we noticed the midway games starting to close up. It was a heck of a thought that the park was so empty even leaving open booths where someone just has to supervise while people come up and give them money wasn't worth it. When we were finished with the funnel cake we started walking back to the wild mouse. And there we got stopped: park employees warned us, they were closing the park down, starting with the far western end and moving east. It was not quite an hour to the park's closing anyway, but they were saving that hour of staffing.

Oh, something I failed to slot into the time when it did happen. We were looking at the map at one point and an employee came over to ask what help we needed. And we didn't really, we were just getting a sense of the layout. But he knew we were amusement park fans, mentioning bunny_hugger's Indiana Beach t-shirt. At that moment I didn't know that Indiana Beach and Fantasy Island had the same owner; I just thought, wow, he's aware of this small and quirky amusement park several states over. That's great. (I was also wearing a park t-shirt, but for some other small park that I couldn't blame him for not recognizing.) Great moment, though, nevertheless.

So with the Crazy Mouse closed off instead we went to one of the rides which hadn't gotten the news, the Silver Comet. The sweater was still hanging on the fence and we decided that we should let that rest there. Either the person it belonged to, or park lost and found, would recover it soon enough. There was a short queue and that gave me time to notice another rabbit hopping around the supports for the roller coaster. It was too far, and moved too soon into the tall grass, for me to photograph or to point out to bunny_hugger. Another good ride, though. And ... we noticed coming off that the ride queue had not yet closed. We could dash around and get one last ride in. And that's what we did, securing a front-seat ride for the next-to-last ride of the day.

But this did impose a tradeoff. As bunny_hugger silently feared, the gift shops closed before the few straggler patrons left the park. Possibly they closed as early as the midway games did. Possibly if we had dashed for the gift shop rather than a second final Silver Comet ride we'd have been able to get something. An ornament, perhaps. A t-shirt, likely. They had some nice designs, and for some reason amusement parks won't sell merchandise online. bunny_hugger would curse herself for not buying something when we went out to the car mid-day. It would have been the logical time to buy something and we really ought to have. She was worried we'd end up with no good souvenirs of the whole trip. I couldn't argue that this was impossible; our next park was going to, similarly, be a small independent park and who knows what they might have.

And now there was more rain. And cold. We drove, going off to a Red Roof Inn in Batavia, New York. bunny_hugger had picked it out as being near enough to all the amusement parks we'd want to go to --- including Fantasy Island --- even though it wasn't beside any of them. It was a weird model, clearly something that was rebranded as a Red Roof Inn rather than built as one. And the rooms were subtly old-fashioned, like, the door handles were knobs rather than the much more accessible bent-lever handles of today. The sink was inside the bathroom, rather than outside, the way the current Red Roof Inn fashion has ... at least on our side of the hotel. During our stay I'd see the doors to other rooms open, for housekeeping, and see that some of them had the sink outside the bathroom. Something strange is going on there.

Also it was noisy. We heard a lot of whatever was going on in rooms on both sides of our floor. bunny_hugger was sure she couldn't sleep in such a noisy room. So, I went to the front desk to ask. They said there weren't any available rooms, other than smokers' rooms, if we wanted those. We didn't want a quieter room that badly. Also: there are still smoking rooms in New York state hotels? Wow. Possibly the clerk was brushing us off.

Where to eat? In or near Batavia, a town that is not one of your big cities like Cooperstown? ... There wasn't much that seemed interesting. One prospect came to us through a several-years-old report on a pinball maps web site, a pizza place which allegedly had a Gottleib Tee'd Off. It's an early-90s comic golf game, one of a couple of ``oh yeah, we don't have to license comedy golf from Caddyshack'' games made in the 90s. We don't have particular affection for the game, but it is rare to see (even rarer than Williams's No Good Gofers, their entry in this genre). And it was on location, and we like supporting places that have pinball on location.

Great, but ... what location? The restaurant's name was not in my satellite navigator, which got new maps just a month or two before. Neither was the street address. We drove along the part of the town that seemed like the address should have been in, and never saw it. We drove into the next town, supposing that there might have been some confusion between, like, the Town of Batavia versus the Township of Batavia. I don't know that there was any, but this sort of thing happens in Michigan and especially New Jersey all the time.

So with that failed we went to a family restaurant that had going for it that we could say with certainty it existed. And this was a pretty solid choice. They had several good vegetarian options, very cheese-based ones, including a plate of macaroni and cheese which was enormous enough bunny_hugger was not able to finish it unaided. (I have been unable to finish a restaurant meal maybe twice in my life.) Also a four(?)-cheese grilled cheese sandwich which was not as fantastic as its equivalent in Rennes, France, but which was a great thing to discover in Batavia, New York.

When we got back to our hotel room the place was basically quiet enough, apart from some dogs barking in the early morning hours. Nothing bad enough that moving would have really helped.

Trivia: In 1953 Pandit Nehru estimated that India had over thirty different calendar schemes simultaneously in use. Source: Ideas: A History from Fire to Freud, Peter Watson.

Currently Reading: Draft No. 4: On The Writing Process, John McPhee.

PS: Of course I'm not just done with the day, technically.

On the way back to the hotel from the Pyramid Cuicuilco there was a good-sized, fairly upscale shopping mall. I thought that would be a good spot to get something to drink and someplace air conditioned to rest, especially as I faced a long walk uphill. So here's some of what an upscale Mexico City shopping mall had to offer: frozen yoghurt and Starbucks.

Also the local Apple store licensee, the iShop. Yes, I stopped in and doodled some quick casual nothing on the iPad and the picture came out with a fresh liveliness I can never do when I'm trying to draw on purpose.

I mean, this place was fancy enough it still supported a RadioShack, see? ... Also, the Cafebrería in the upper right corner was the dedicated bookstore, in a tiny space yet still able to support a small, overcrowded cafe.

We heard something going on in the Old West section of the park. It was their 3 pm gunslinging show. Or, at that point actually, the pre-show. This involved several of the park performers, including the guy who'd play the hapless sheriff in the show, doing small bits of clowning around. Like the guy who'd play sheriff holding out a collapsible chess board, to have it collapse, and need help tidying things up. That sort of silly comedy.

The show, when it started, presented itself as the deputy (the lone woman performing) grumbling, out in the street, about the sheriff. And trying to coax him out of his office. Here we got to wondering just how much of this was scripted. It was comic, of course. But parts of it sounded improvised. The sheriff started talking about how he couldn't come out because he was having trouble putting on his pants. He said something about how he needed the help of two horses to put his pants on. The deputy asked him exactly how. He started saying how they would stand him on his head, and the deputy asked for more details and you could hear where the sheriff didn't know where he was going with this. It was fascinating to listen to. Later, after the sheriff came out for a few moments, he said he had to go across the street (from the Sheriff's office to the Golden Nugget, a restaurant) to put on some pants. ``Why do you need to change your pants?'' asked the deputy. ``Didn't say I was changing my pants. I'm just putting another pair on.'' With this weird, possibly improvised line, the performance made bunny_hugger burst out laughing and she never stopped liking it. She's still, weeks later, occasionally grinning about the line.

Pants would become a bit of a recurring theme for the show. The premise leading up to the gunfight was that a trio of bank robbers were coming into town, figuring they could easily take things over considering the deputy was a woman and the sheriff was, well, the guy with the collapsing chess board. Catch is near the end of the first at, one of the bank robbers squatted down and ripped his pants in what did not seem to be a scripted wardrobe problem. Can't blame the performers coming to the brink of cracking up there.

So, I noticed before the show that there was a heap of mattresses near one of the buildings, with a 'PLEASE KEEP OFF THE MAT!' sign that one of the performers removed from the top just before the show started. But when the first act reached its conclusion, with surprisingly loud caps being fired --- very near in our direction, because of where bunny_hugger and I stood compared to the actors --- I forgot about that and took the bank robbers' retreat to be the conclusion of the show.

So after a few minutes, many of which seemed to be spent with the robbers working out whether the torn pants needed particular action, they went to the second half. Here the robbers beat up the hapless sheriff. The deputy tries to bring them in. The sheriff comes back in costume as a grizzled old miner or something. And they get to the dramatic shootout. This includes --- just like you see in old books about amusement parks with Wild West shootouts --- one of the robbers climbing up to the roof of the Golden Nugget, and, as the final robber shot, twisting and falling off the roof, onto the mattress. Good stunt, and a fun show all around.

While the many amused kids gathered around to take an oath of behaving like good kids from the sheriff we walked through, over to the kiddieland area. The park had a bunch of props with fairytale or fairytale-adjacent themes. The Yellow Brick Road, mentioned earlier. A Jack and the Beanstalk figure. An Alice in Wonderland prop where Alice is outgrowing the house she's in. A whale's head that we thought at first was another weird amusement park appearance of Moby Dick (as seen at Storybook Land in New Jersey). No; this was Pinocchio, with the wooden man, Geppetto, and the cat inside the whale's mouth, behind a plexiglass screen so the photographs are lousy.

And we got to see the park's newest roller coaster, Dragon's Flight. So new a coaster that it's not even installed yet. It's on the park's maps and their brochures as the new ride for 2019, but they didn't have any of the track or the loading station installed. That's all right. It's a small roller coaster, a Dragon Wagon such as you see at many carnivals and small amusement parks. It's designed to be set up in, like, twenty minutes. They just hadn't finished installing yet. This is two years in a row that we've been to a park with a roller coaster too new to have installed. (Lakeside Park in Denver last year had a Pinfari Zyklon assembled but not ready to ride when we visited. That ride, remarkably, still isn't running, or apparently even named, so we don't have to feel bad about not waiting two weeks last year to visit when the roller coaster would be open.)

The Roller Coaster Database, citing some promotional video, thinks this ride is the Dragon Wagon which had been at Indiana Beach, which we had seen and wasn't running last time we were at that park. This is possible. Plausible, even, since Indiana Beach and Fantasy Island are both owned by Apex Park Group. What has me skeptical is that we could see the train at Fantasy Island. It's a dragon with red scales, and the back of the ride says 'Beauce Carnaval'. The Roller Coaster Database's pictures of the Indiana Beach Dragon Wagon show it having green scales. And while it's possible the Dragon Wagon was at Indiana Beach for years without its former owner's name being taken off the back --- especially as Indiana Beach was for years owned by people who had no interest in or ability to run an amusement park --- it seems ... weird. (On the other hand, Casino Pier in Seaside Heights, New Jersey, had a ride with the Cypress Gardens logo on it for years.) So what is the truth? There is no way to know. I suppose we have to pop in to Indiana Beach and check if they still have their Dragon Wagon.

Oh, and there was one more roller coaster. A kiddie coaster, a Wacky Worm-style little one designed to batter the knees of adult riders. This one's called Max's Doggy Dog Coaster, and the front car has a Dalmation's head on it rather than a worm. We were a bit hesitant to ride, unaccompanied by kids as we were. But the ride operator didn't mind. The ride operator might have been a little bored waiting through the slender crowd and occasional rain. We got two circuits, enough to appreciate things like the flower-bell-shaped ride lights and how close the ride comes to the trees in some parts. And the giant daisy props outside the ride's enclosure. It's a fun ride, and it didn't smash our knees too badly.

And of course it was raining again. Not enough to close the park, but enough to make us feel cold and a bit lousy, after not quite two hours there. So we figured to go out to the car and get our rain jackets. Well, my rain jacket and bunny_hugger's poncho. bunny_hugger asked if maybe we should stop in the gift shop first, before we go out, and buy any souvenirs we wanted. I said nah, there'd be time for that near the end of our day.

Bonus fun activity: see if you can spot the single dumbest thing that I said during our parks trip.

Trivia: The now-standard telephone number keypad, named ``right-reading 3-by-3 plus one'' during tests in the 1950s, was neither the fastest nor the most preferred of touch-tone dial arrangements Bell Labs experimented with. (It was the layout that best fit available space and electric circuits in the phone case.) Source: Small Things Considered: Why There Is No Perfect Design, Henry Petroski.

Currently Reading: Space Shuttle Challenger: Ten Journeys Into The Unknown, Ben Evans.

PS: Reading the Comics, July 2, 2019: Back On Schedule Edition, wrapping up a slow week's worth of comic strips.

PPS: more looking around the pyramid. I still find it all gorgeous to look back on.

The channel cut in the top of the pyramid as it leads to the altar area. The sun angle really helps make it look like the place is filled with void. I don't know what those white mountain-peak structures in the middle background on the right are.

Looking again at the altar area, this time from an angle that showcases how there's several levels to that.

A longer view of the channel, including the spots that look like they're insets to make it possible for people to scrunch against the all and let someone pass? Hard to say. The channel is maybe four feet wide most of its length.

Our Toronto-area hotel had a check-out time of noon, and in view of the weather we were looking to go to a small park near Buffalo, maybe an hour and a half away, that shouldn't need a full day. We went to sleep confident that we could sleep in through 10:30, maybe 11 am, and still have plenty of time to WHAT IS THAT GOING OFF AT 7:30 IN THE MORNING?

So you maybe remember that when we checked in we saw the wedding rehearsal and all for an Indian family. As we left for Canada's Wonderland we passed people dressed in wedding-class garb, looking dazzling and in that mood of happy-but-stressed-out. Well, I infer that the wedding itself was on Saturday, and that they planned on an outdoor reception, and that the DJ decided he had to test his sound equipment and that's why he started blazing music at top volume at 7:30 am on a Saturday. I stumbled out toward the elevator trying to figure what kind of complaint I could make to the front desk, or if it would be enough to just show up looking like I'd been rattled out of bed at 7:30. The elevator wasn't responding, though, and the one time an elevator did open at my floor it was already full of people dressed for the wedding. And by that time the music had dropped down to a sane level, or cut out altogether, so I went back to our room. I accomplished nothing but the important thing is that I had a plan and acted on it.

When we woke up again, only this time meaning it, and more tired and cranky than we wanted, we had the breakfast question. Tim Horton's it was, then, for a fresh round of the BeyondMeat sandwiches. It turned out these had only just been rolled out from test market to nationwide that week. Also that by ``nationwide'' they mean ``the nation of Canada, of course''. There's no telling whether it will come to the mid-Michigan Tim Horton's world. We have a similar frustration with A&W Canada, which apparently has Impossible Burgers that we haven't seen here. Still, it's good to have at all and we did our best to encourage Tim Horton's in doing more of this.

And so we drove mostly south, driving for the western border between Ontario and New York. US Customs asked what we were bringing into the country and we realized ... gosh, we hadn't really picked up anything. Oh, this stuffed doll, and I pointed to the Behemoth plush that was our big Canada's Wonderland souvenir. It seemed odd that we hadn't had more. Still, this brought us on another toll road, a spur of the New York Thruway. This was another toll road that ... didn't ... have any toll booths. Just a warning that we needed to text some number to arrange payment which, yeah, good luck. I've never successfully sent a text message to a strange number with my phone. I'm not much better at sending text messages to people I know. I think all my exchanges have been with people who texted me first and I just hit reply. Granting, my cell phone is about 840 years old --- its company logo is Mergenthaler --- but still. Anyway I haven't been called into Toll Road Jail so that's that.

Our goal was a park on Grand Island, which is a good-sized island in the Niagara River, basically just across the river from the cities of Niagara Falls and of North Tonawanda.

Fantasy Island was, until 2017, known as Martin's Fantasy Island, for its then-owner Martin DiPietro. There's still one or two things that say Martin's on it, but now, the park's owned by Apex Parks Group, the company that saved Indiana Beach. Before 1994 the park was known as Two Flags Over Niagara Fun Park. It was only known as this for two years. And apparently, they changed the name because of Martin DiPietro's buyout. It seems to have come before Six Flags could file a writ of srsly in trademark court. Before 1993 it was called Fantasy Island and that's as much intrigue as there is in the park's name history. Wikipedia mentions some of the slight cryptic weirdness in ownership you expect from a small park, like that it went bankrupt in 1982, was bought by Charles Wood, sold to International Broadcasting Corporation, and then re-bought by Wood after IBM went bankrupt. There's mysteries here. I refer to the Wikipedia site claim that the kiddie ride Bugs ``was in storage behind the wave pool [ from its 2011 removal ] until end of 2016 season when Martin DiPietro took it with him as he departed from the park''. Let that sentence roll on your head a while.

But this we expected to be a half-day park, something we could explore fully in like four hours. The park was scheduled to close at 7 pm. It has three roller coasters, only one of which was of particular interest. The weather was cool and rainy, and threatening worse rains. Which is why we chose to go to Fantasy Island on Saturday. Sunday looked likely to be better. Monday better still. So if we had to lose time in a park because of rain, Fantasy Island looked like the one we'd least regret having rained out.

And it was threatening to be rained out. We got to the park about 1:30, to overcast skies that kept looking ready to be rainy overcast skies. I put some sunscreen on my face and neck, and that was all I'd need. I had a t-shirt, regular shirt, and my Blackpool Pleasure Beach hoodie, plus the GateKeeper rain jacket I always keep in the car. bunny_hugger similarly had several layers ready plus the d'Efteling rain poncho. The day might be short. That's all right. Few people were there. We might be able to ride everything in two hours, weather permitting.

Trivia: The first Bose-Einstein Condensate made, in 1995, was made with two thousand atoms of rubidium. Source: Nature's Building Blocks: An A-Z Guide To The Elements, John Emsley.

Currently Reading: Space Shuttle Challenger: Ten Journeys Into The Unknown, Ben Evans.

PS: Finally! Cuicuilco Pyramid, climbed! A tiny little bit.

Looking back down the first stretch of the ramp's slope. They're volcanic rocks gathered to make most of this base and it felt weird and a little unsettling walking up this after seeing that portrait of the area enveloped by a volcanic flow.

A close-up of something that's been in the background of many of the north-facing pictures: Six Flags Mexico is very visible from the pyramid. The roller coaster is Superman: El Último Escape, and the other tall structures are drop towers or reverse bungee rides or the like.

Part of the first tier of the pyramid, roped off just enough to ensure that you only go there if you're really confident in your footing. I had the sense this was a new and maybe temporary restriction.

We felt we had time to ride the Antique Carrousel, as Canada's Wonderland spells it. (While I prefer carousel, there's not a unique spelling of the word.) This is in a handsome circular building with, as mentioned, three angels as heralds on the top. Inside turns out to be ... not quite an old friend. The carousel, Philadelphia Toboggan Company carousel #84, built 1928, had previously been at Palisades Park in New Jersey. While Palisades Park closed before I was born, it's quite plausible that my parents, or my grandparents, rode this. And before Palisades Park it had been at Palace Playland in Old Orchard Beach, Maine, so some of moxie_man's ancestors might have ridden it too.

Taft Broadcasting, which built the park, bought the carousel in 1972 when Palisades Park closed. They put it in storage, and left it there nine years, ready for a park to put it in. It seems amazing to think they were buying carousels that far ahead of need, but I suppose Kings Island had worked out quite well so they figured they'd need more. (If all else failed they could have put the carousel in Kings Island or Kings Dominion. At the time, Cedar Point, a similar class of park, had four carousels.)

The carousel's looking good, as you might expect. Delightful to us is that not only do they have the chariot on it, but they also have a yoke to the two horses in front of it, so that the vehicle is sensibly ``pulled'' by something. There's no riding the chariot's horses, and the park prevents that by the elegant solution of having a bit of wrought-iron decoration on the pole that blocks the spot someone would need to sit. And it doesn't look like an obstruction; it looks like decoration. It's an elegant bit of human-interface design. Also they had the little row-and-column number badges on the insides of the horses, a touch of how things are made that we discovered first at our last trip to Kings Island. So we're all happy with this.

And now we could get back to roller coasters, including rides we weren't perfectly positive we wanted to ride. This would be Time Warp, which you could only guess used to be a Tomb Raider-themed ride by looking at it. Well, by looking at the queue or the ride logo or whatnot. The ride itsel is a flying coaster. This sounds like an exciting model. It's ... not. The ride has you stand up in a cage, and rotates the cage around. It does make a pretty good feeling of flying, when your cage is leveled out and you soar in a line. But then all your weight is pressed into your chest. And the ride insists on doing foolish things like making a turn, at a speed where you feel like laundry being tumbled. So it's not that fun a ride. Still, flying coasters like this have become rare --- the only other one I'm sure I've ridden is Super Flight at Rye Playland --- and we didn't want a weird ride to go unloved. Not that it was in danger of this: it had a surprisingly long queue, considering the ride combines ``going upside-down'' with ``being slow and a bit painful'' and doesn't even have a coherent theme. Something about the package appeals to a Canadian audience is all, I guess.

Beside that is Flight Deck, which again we had ridden long before we rode it. It's the same model roller coaster as Thunderhawk at Michigan's Adventure, and Batman The Ride at Six Flags Mexico, and Mind Eraser at Elitch Gardens, and for that matter many more parks. In fact, Six Flags put in at least three of these rides, all named Mind Eraser, at different parks, as if they forgot they'd used that name already. So this was a ride to get on once we felt confident we were going to ride everything we really wanted, although I don't think we had yet expressed that aloud. Still, we'd gotten on more than half the roller coasters and had nearly half the day to go. The mathematics of it were looking good. Flight Deck was, in Paramount days, known as Top Gun. The exact same ride names, and shift in ride names, happened at Kings Island, but their Flight Deck is a completely different kind of ride and has since been renamed The Bat. There's also a The Bat at Canada's Wonderland, but that's a different kind of ride too.

We were getting a bit hungry, and thought of this doughnut stand we'd seen beside the macaroni-and-cheese place. The direct path to that took us through ... a couple of Arabian Nights-styled buildings hosting a photo booth and some kind of show that wasn't running that day. Then past a large globe on a neat pedestal with friezes of the four elements, and a passageway lined with flags of the world. With, in some cases, obsolete flags of the world, such as ones for Siam or Imperial China or one that's definitely an obsolete British Colony flag that I couldn't identify. The area has a plaque identifying The Grande World Exposition of 1890, a thing which did not take place in reality. But it was one of the park's original themed areas, meant to be a World's Fair-themed area. Much of it had been chopped off and re-themed for other attractions, including Action Zone. But it's recently made a comeback, as the park tries to get a bit better balanced again. The Antique Carrousel is considered to be part of the Grande World Exposition area, and fair enough. So is the Swing of the Century giant swing ride. So is the Flight Deck roller coaster, because ? ??? ??? ?? ???? ??? ?. Also Time Warp, because ?? ???? ?? ? ????? ???.

The doughnuts were from a stand called Tiny Tom Donuts, ``Celebrating 25 Years at Canada's Wonderland'', and they invited everyone to watch them being made. They're made by this cute automatic machine that pours out dough, circulates things, and puts them on a conveyor belt to cool enough to be put in a bag along with some cinnamon or confectioner's sugar or whatever. They're tiny, so we didn't feel bad about having a dozen doughnuts each. Really hit the spot, too. Apparently Tiny Tom has locations in town, too, and the bags included coupons for their newest in-town store. On the outside of the Tiny Tom Donuts is a cartoon figure of a slightly pudgy grandpa type saying, ``Hey dude! Watch your donuts being made!'' It seems gleefully silly.

The next-most-interesting coaster of the handful left to us, now, would be the Vortex. This is a suspended coaster, the cars dangling on a long rigid pole underneath the track. (Inverted coasters don't dangle so far below; suspended coasters can swing side to side in greater arcs.) This is a ride very like Iron Dragon, at Cedar Point, and for that matter Top Gun Flight Deck The Bat at Kings Island. We always like a suspended coaster. This one offered the extra thrill that it goes up and over some parts of Wonder Mountain, the park's central feature. Not over much of it, but still, enough for a dramatic view. And it is a surprisingly intense ride, for a suspended coaster. Iron Dragon and The Bat are good, swoopy, pleasant rides that get a real feeling of flight to them. This one was thrilling in a way we didn't expect. Going over the mountain, and seeing what used to be observation platforms, added to that.

We were having an extremely good day for getting on the roller coasters and other high-priority rides. And we still had several hours to go.

Trivia: In a 1957 interview with the New York Herald Tribune, James Thurber mentioned how the early drafts of The Secret Life Of Walter Mitty included a scene where Mitty beat Ernest Hemmingway in a brawl at the Stork Club. It was removed when Thurber was convinced the story should not have anything so topical. Source: America's Humor: From Poor Richard to Doonesbury, Walter Blair, Hamlin Hill.

Currently Reading: DC Comics Before Superman: Major Malcolm Wheeler-Nicholson's Pulp Comics, Nicky Wheeler-Nicholson. The author's thesis that Superman didn't make so much of a difference in the kinds of comics DC was publishing seems all right. The choice to reprint extensively from some stories of the era is defensible, sure, but dozens of pages of Our Hero and the Yellow Peril Chinese Villain shuffling back and forth not actually accomplishing anything is tiring. But the bizarrest thing is the decision --- more than once --- to not print the end of some of these stories, citing the rarity of the original books. If they mean to say they couldn't find the comic books where these stories ended, all right, but the wording makes it sound like this book didn't want to spoil the advantage collectors who own these 1936 DC comics have in knowing just how the cliffhanger ending of White Guy Versus Chinese Stereotype Man came out. Also, I know I comma splice a lot, so trust me when I say Nicky Wheeler-Nicholson comma splices a lot.

PPS: revealing more mysteries of the Cuicuilco Pyramid!

Here's a better view down the dry moat around the Cuicuilco Pyramid's base.

And from the main land another look up at the pyramid, which maybe gives some idea the scale of the thing.

Another view of the whole pyramid's height, in which it's harder to make out the scale but there is a lovely tree posed dramatically in front of thigns.

The next-priority roller coaster was in the kiddieland area, Planet Snoopy. Which you get to by crossing a bridge and walking under a rainbow arch. Which makes no thematics sense for Snoopy. It kind of made sense for the park's original incarnation, when this was a Hanna-Barbera-themed area. Not that, like, Yogi Bear did much with rainbows, but it makes sense as a frame for walking in to a cartoon setting. Along the way we passed a pond with a good number of geese. Also puttering along by the geese: swan boats. Not floating freely, like we're used to. They were on an under-water track. Like I thought only happened in Roller Coaster Tycoon.

Planet Snoopy has the Peanuts Character Carousel, the kiddie carousel which originally had, well, Hanna-Barbera figures. Now that you can't ride Snagglepuss's back anymore, what is there to ride? Such beloved Peanuts characters as: nobody. It's all horses and similar normal carousel figures. I don't know why they call it Peanuts Character Carousel except maybe as a spasm of misplaced marketing. On top of the Peanuts Character Carousel's house is a sculpture of three cherubs, a cute thematic resonance with the antique carousel's three angels.

Our target was the Peanuts Ghoster Coaster. Originally this ride was Scooby's Gasping Ghoster Coaster. That's the name bunny_hugger's brother knew it as when he rode it. It's got a haunted-house theme, with a spoooooky old manor house you walk through to get to the launch station, plus a comic-headstones graveyard out front and all. So you see how the original name fit together enough you wouldn't ask ``what's a 'ghoster coaster' s'poseter be?'' Besides a powerful assonance it'd be a fool to reject? Anyway, when Cedar Fair bought the park and they lost the Hanna-Barbera theming, Canada's Wonderland renamed the place Peanuts Ghoster Coaster and put up a sign showing Snoopy dressed as a vampire on top. What does Peanuts have to do with vampires? What do vampires have to do with ghosts? Look, just get on the ride, all right?

Peanuts Ghoster Coaster is a junior roller coaster, designed for two kids or for one adult and a kid in one seat. bunny_hugger and I thought, briefly, that we would be able to both fit in the same car. No, we are not even close to it. An adult and a kid could fit. We needed to ride separately but by the time we worked this out all the other rows were taken. I wanted to wait for the next car, but the ride operators didn't understand me and thought I wanted to just walk through and leave the station. I insisted on going back into the queue --- the gates hadn't closed --- and they let me, and I didn't inconvenience anyone because they were keeping people from entering the queue area until a train was ready to load. All right.

So, I waited for the next train --- they were running two trains --- and everything seemed like it should be okay. But behind me a father had two kids to ride with, and they wouldn't all fit in one car, a thing unforeseeable unless you read any of the signs warning only two people to a seat. That's all right. While I fumbled a surprisingly long time with my seat belt he concluded he could set both kids in one row and then come join me in my row. I ... had to tell him, that's just not possible, and he finally accepted this and went back behind the queue gates to ride next train. Meanwhile bunny_hugger's train had already finished its circuit and was waiting for us to go. So this was the time for a fresh hold-up. Someone came up the exit door asking about a lost hat. The operators gave him some time to look through the storage bins, but he couldn't find them, and was getting worried about this. Finally someone remembered: oh, yeah, they'd taken that hat out of the storage bins and put it in the operator's shed. So after a moment's delay for that, finally, our train could be dispatched. The Ghoster Coaster was another of the rides at Canada's Wonderland the day it opened --- they had three wooden roller coasters, which is great by any standard --- and it's a good junior coaster ride. It reminded me of Zach's Zoomer, at Michigan's Adventure, but they're not really that similar besides being small wooden roller coasters.

On the way out I was delayed even more by noticing another groundhog, and stopping to photograph this too. I tried to explain to bunny_hugger what all had happened and even I wasn't convinced it did.

We walked out of Planet Snoopy to the adjacent Kidzville, to what seem like older-but-not-yet-teen-grade rides. There we passed the performance pavilion where they had the Peanuts Gang Beach Adventure show going on. This was one of the handful of live shows running that day. It's people in Peanuts character costumes moving along to a recorded program about what a swell day they're going to have at the beach. You know, like you saw in Charles Schulz's comic strip all the time. We also passed Taxi Jam, née Top Cat's Taxi Jam, a kiddie coaster. A tiny kiddie coaster, the kind that takes your knees behind a taxi and whacks them with a cab. Should we ride it? Just for the credit of saying we had ridden it? But the line was short. But it would probably be painful. Fortunately the ride sign said no unaccompanied adults may ride it. So we could skip it, the way we both really wanted to, without feeling like we were choosing to pass up on something we could easily do.

And we stopped at a park Tim Horton's, for coffee and tea before thinking about what next to do.

Trivia: At the beginning of 1917 Daimler demanded a 50% price hike in vehicles made for the German war effort. The year before the company had paid a 35% divided to stockholders, and written off the entire book value of its production plant. Source: The First World War, Hew Strachan.

Currently Reading: DC Comics Before Superman: Major Malcolm Wheeler-Nicholson's Pulp Comics, Nicky Wheeler-Nicholson.

PS: And I continue to tromp around the Cuicuilco Pyramid.

This tree, tagged as number 8, is waiting for its order from the cafe and hopes to be served soon.

Gentrification. Another look at the Cuicuilco Pyramid, showing off the sloped path you can walk up, with modern construction visible in the far background.

And some discussion of the pyramid, giving useful stuff like its size and that it was built in several stages and out of volcanic stone. We'll come back to the volcano part there.

It happens we nearly followed the young woman who'd needed our map-reading skills. We figured to go next to the wooden roller coasters. Canada's Wonderland has several, including three that were part of the park's original set. The Mighty Canadian Minebuster is one of those. It's in the Frontier Canada-themed park area, just next to their brand-new Yukon Striker. The Frontier Canada themed section of the park is also new, oddly. Wikipedia says a Canadian-history-themed section was always part of the park's original design, but it took from the opening in 1981 to this year for the section to be organized. I don't know what theme the area had before 2019.

There was only a short line. A slightly tricky one to get to: the entrance queue starts the same path for regular and Fast Pass line-cutters, and bunny_hugger doubted we, who refuse Fast Pass, should be going down there. The queue splits into the regular and the line-cutter paths later on. The queue looked longer because of the loading station. The station had ample room and railing queues for each of the rows on the train, but they were being kept empty. The gate attendant only let through one trainload of people through, and only when a train was coming to the station. Not sure why, but sometimes Magnum XL-200 at Cedar Point runs the same way. Minebuster is a fun ride, a wooden out-and-back roller coaster. It goes off a good distance, past much of the waterpark and back again, and even gets into some remote areas. It's no long, remote wilderness coaster like The Beast at Kings Island, although our night ride on it --- after the water park closed --- had some of that feel of rambling off into the darkness.

We noticed a ride information plaque, something we'd come to realize was on every ride at the park. This gave the park and ride name, but also things like the manufactured name and the year of manufacture and recommended speed and all. The recommended speed for this was 'Gravity', something common to several but not all of the roller coasters. What struck bunny_hugger was the manufactured name of this was 'Shooting Star', and there was some mention on another plaque that it was inspired by the ride at Coney Island.

So ... Coney Island, New York? Because so far as we knew offhand there was no Shooting Star at any Coney Island amusement park. There was a Shooting Star roller coaster at Coney Island, Cincinnati. And Canada's Wonderland was built as a sister park to Kings Island, the park made by rebuilding the parts of Coney Island Cincinnati that weren't still underwater. So it would make perfect sense for Kings Island to build a roller coaster replicating the old Shooting Star. It would make some sense for Canada's Wonderland to make that, since the company building the park had the rights to the old roller coaster. But why put forth a claim about Coney Island Cincinnati, a park that any Toronto-area resident would identify as ``probably something you just made up''? I guess by saying it's from Coney Island they were putting forth a claim that was true but that any reasonable reader would think was about Coney Island, New York City, the more prestigious park. It's all a weird adventure in signage.

So as I make it out, that was the 225th roller coaster that I've logged. It's a minor milestone. We didn't take a picture of it to send to the American Coaster Enthusiasts, though.

Yeah, I'm not finishing this trip report before, like, Pinburgh.

We were ready for lunch. One interesting-looking stand offered macaroni and cheese. A more interesting-looking stand offered poutine, but the line for that was out the door. So macaroni and cheese it was, and the line for that was less bad, but still long. We made the planning error of having lunch between noon and 1 pm and by the way Pinburgh this year is the 1st through 3rd of August so you can plan when you want to start reading me again.

But I mention this mostly because we also got cups, for pop, only to discover there weren't any fountain drink machines at the macaroni-and-cheese place. The cashier --- the lone person working the lunch rush by the way --- told me we should just use the fountain drink machine at the poutine place. Which was at the end of the queue there. Like, you could get at it without waiting through the line, but you did have to open up the exit gate and hope someone would give you space to work. This probably is no trouble away from peak meal times, but it left us feeling like pushy jerks. We'd find a nice shaded spot to eat lunch, and afterwards went back to the poutine place to refill our pop. This felt illicit, but we had the all-season drinks pass, and they had told us to just go up to the machine and refill, so what could they expect us to do?

Our next ride was another wooden roller coaster, one of the park's original rides. This would be ... well, we visited it as Wilde Beast. Before this year, it was known as Wild Beast, and that's how the manufacturer's plate identified it. Before 1996, it was known as Wilde Beaste, which is what the Manufactured Name on the manufacturer's plate identified it as. Why all the renaming for a cute little ride like this? That's a fine question, and to get right to the heart of the matter, ? ??? ?? ???? ? ?? ??? ??? ? ?? ??????. It's a figure-eight roller coaster, so now you know what path it follows. Its design is based on another Coney Island Cincinnati roller coaster, Wildcat, which had closed in 1964 (before the near-extinction of Coney Island). Wikipedia says it also appeared in a Fraggle Rock episode, which is neat.

I get the idea of using ``Wild Beast'' as a name, especially in 1981 when Kings Island had just opened their impossibly popular The Beast. Mixing that with memories of Wildcat and you get Wild Beast. This would be great if anyone in Toronto could possibly have remembered a roller coaster that closed seventeen years before, in Cincinnati. Why the semi-competent old-timey fake spelling? Goodness knows. The ride is in the Medieval Fair themed area of the park --- a strongly themed area, with everything looking ready to be a Disney Fairy Tale movie --- but still. ``Wilde Beaste''? I don't know why the spelling changes. On their web site you can get a ride movie, and see the obsolete Wild Beast logo, and in the URL see the current Wilde Beast spelling.

In front of the ride is a metal sculpture, of a large wild boar carved of iron. There's long thin strips of metal to suggest a shaggy mane, even, and the result looks great. It's a good, well, wild beast. There were just enough of these kinds of sculpture in the park --- such as a dragon in front of the Dragon Fyre roller coaster --- to make it mysterious that there were any, and that there weren't more.

Another little mystery? Many of the operator stations had plaques commemorating a ride crew getting recognition for something. Crew of the Year, particularly. So why did the Wild[e] Beast[e] station have two Crew of the Year plaques, 2009 and 2011, for the Drop Tower ride? That's a fine question, and to get right to the heart of the matter, ??? ??? ????? ?? ??? ? ?????? ?? ? ??.

Also decorating the park in odd places: signs on tall poles that made us aware of things like the distance to the second loop of The Bat roller coaster, which was 34 meters. Why would we wish to know this? I don't know. I get signs saying how far one is from the entrance queue, but distance to, like, the highest point of a ride or the end of the track of something? I would like someone to get right to the heart of the matter regarding this.

Trivia: Asian elephants were apparently first tamed by about 2000 BCE. Source: Prime Mover: A Natural History of Muscle, Steven Vogel.

Currently Reading: Classic Album Covers of the 60s, Storm Thorgerson.

PS: More of the Cuicuilco Pyramid.

Part of the plantlife, and volcanic rocks, with a corporate(?) high-rise in the background, past the edge of the archeological site.

Which is more adorable: that picture of the opossum carrying her babies, or the way they spell ``cacomixtle''? Because, not gonna like, ``cacomixtle'' delights me.

And a first view of the Cuicuilco pyramid. It's not a very tall one, but it's pretty substantial in size and, it turns out, you can just walk up the side like that as if that were a normal thing anybody could do?

After we got into Canada we had mostly highway 402 to drive. And we had one of those nagging doubts: had bunny_hugger brought her laptop? I had moved most of our luggage into my car that morning, but her laptop had been one of the things I didn't touch, in part because she had the checklist on that. She couldn't remember putting it in the car, though. We had the backseat down, but she couldn't see it in the back, and she didn't remember seeing it when we had been out getting that first letterbox. So we took a detour off 402 to check the backseat and, yes, her laptop was there. It was just behind stuff.

There was a letterbox in a rest stop east of Woodstock. Finding the rest stop was taxing because we saw a billboard announcing it was just ahead, and then ... nothing. We couldn't figure how we'd missed a rest are, but we drove for a dozen miles without any hint of it. Finally we saw another billboard saying it was ten kilometers (or something) ahead and we could rationalize the first sign as having warned us so early about the rest area as to have been confusing and a bit alarming.

The letterbox was a new one, planted in January and not yet found. It was set off of a side parking lot, one roughly near a picnic area rather than the main rest area. We pulled up to the side parking lot, a few spaces away from another car, and a person who looked quizzically at us. But the person left pretty soon, and we could go about looking for the letterbox without being observed by any curious outsiders. The box was hidden in the line of evergreen trees along a fenced area of the property, easy to spot once you worked out which was the line of trees.

And we got there and opened the box and ... we were not the first finders. This box, which had rested nearly six months without being picked up, had a stamp in it. And a date. That day.

It's absurd to think that the other car in the lot we arrived was that letterboxer, right? And that we missed being the first-finders by minutes? On the other hand, why would someone bother parking off on the side lot where there was nothing, not even an open bathroom? Did they size up what we must have been there for?

The letterbox was themed to, according to my log, the Whitehern Window, a stained-glass window for a local building of historic interest. (Somehow I'm not able to find the letterboxing clue so I don't know how bunny_hugger learned about it.) The stamp was made of this interesting clear rubber material that's a new one on us. It printed well, though, and better: when you had the stamp inked and pressed on the book, you could see through to the page being inked. This gave it a great impression of being a window, fitting the theme nicely. It also means it's sightly possible to check that you have pressed down on the whole stamp. Have to wonder whether this carving material is going to work its way into other letterboxes. There's obvious advantages to it.

(We think it's the same material used for a hitchhiker we'd picked up last year. It felt very similar at least.)

Inside the rest area we had our first stop in a Canadian Tim Horton's. bunny_hugger had been mildly obsessed with the place her last Canada visit, a decade-plus ago, but since then they've colonized mid-Michigan. So we figured we'd only stop at a Tim Horton's when, like now, it was just the only place there to really get coffee. We would be hilariously wrong about this. ... Also our eyes were drawn to a New York Fries stand, with its promise of poutine. We figured we'd try that out sometime later. We would be merely ordinarily wrong about that.

That was it for major interesting diversions on our drive. We pulled up to our hotel. It was a pretty nice one for the standard of our usual amusement-park-visit hotels. As we entered the lobby a flock of people, there as part of an (Asian) Indian wedding party, were streaming out and in a rush and apparently determined to run into at least one of us. I dodged several times only to have someone swerve right for me, and bunny_hugger had the same experience. The front desk had a sign welcoming people who were there for the wedding and I infer that this was a big crowd that was anxious and running late, although how anyone thought it would speed things up to collide with a couple people trying to check in is anyone's guess. bunny_hugger thought the last person in the bunch looked horrified at the rudeness of all this, but clearly, there was a mission and we were just in the way.

Our mission, after settling in, was to find somewhere to eat. The challenge was finding someplace that wasn't in danger of closing on us, as it was already past 8:30. bunny_hugger found an Indian restaurant that was open until 10 pm, and good. I tried putting forth that, of course, 10 pm Canadian was only like 7 pm American time, and she would not have that joke at all, wisely and correctly cutting off a long string of potential merry conversion nonsense right at the start of our trip.

We were the only people sitting at the restaurant, although a couple people came in for take-away meals. It was a pleasant spot, with an entirely vegetarian menu, something that made it easier to order with confidence. The menu didn't list what the ingredients of any meals were, and it did list shahi paneer twice, like four lines apart. The price was the same for both shahi paneers, though. It was really good Indian food, too. And the music --- well, that was odd. It sounded mostly like Indian pop music, but the songs kept cutting out and restarting, as if someone's iPod were skipping. Still, it was a great place for dinner and we figured we would certainly come back, if we had the chance, which we would not.

Trivia: On the 21st of February, 1862, Nathaniel ``Nat'' Gordon was hanged for illicit slave trading; the first and only American hanged for that federal crime, declared equivalent to piracy four decades earlier. Source: Smuggler Nation: How Illicit Trade Made America, Peter Andreas.

Currently Reading: Masters of Empire: Great Lakes Indians and the Making of America, Michael A McDonnell.

PS: I'm almost out of Six Flags Mexico a this point in my photograph review. Do I make it? Look on!

Water pouring out the mouth of an Aztec-styled dragon head and into the basin below. I hadn't noticed it earlier in the day (maybe it wasn't on?) but by night it was exactly the kind of challenging play of lights and shapes I can't resist photographing.

In the front gift shop were these odd cubical plush figures. And I don't know what to make of the cube plushes of that kitten from the cartoon where the bulldog is horrified that the kitten got chomped up and flattened by the industrial machinery. You know?

Hey, it's the cast of a really really really awful Looney Tunes cartoon from the 60s!