austin_dern

By now the sun was setting, reminding us of sunsets past, and also nagging us that we were staying out too late. The shoreline is beautiful at night, though, especially as the lights of the rides and of the redemption games and the arcade spill into the muggy evening air. We cheated ourselves out of better rest for the drive to the airport so that we could have more time then.

One of the rides sunk with the partial collapse of Casino Pier was the Musik Express. They have a replacement, one that's put in about the same spot relative to the end of the pier, and this was one of our nighttime rides. It was a lesser ride this time, though; this one didn't have a cloud of soap bubbles released when the rides reached its top speed and the siren went off. Worse its operator wasn't chatty, didn't tease the riders and the onlookers to scream if they wanted to go faster, or backwards, or whatnot. The ride was all right, yes, but it was short of the little extra bits that make a ride great. Maybe we just had better ride operators in past years. Maybe they just weren't putting in their fullest effort for a Monday night crowd. Maybe joy is falling out of the world.

We were getting hungry, not hungry enough for a full meal, but aware also there wasn't quite the time to stop somewhere for a meal either. The pier had some stalls selling roasted corn, though, which I still haven't got used to places selling. (I also can't quite believe in amusement parks like Kings Island selling roast turkey legs.) Still, that was about the right amount of food and despite the ocean breeze we didn't actually get any clouds of chili powder flying directly into our eyes.

But we had to, eventually, have our last ride at the carousel, and we accepted the sad fact. We found the mounts that share our middle names --- the ones we rode that first day --- and climbed on them for the last time we would expect to see the Floyd L Moreland carousel, certainly at this location, possibly forever more. I don't know how I kept myself together.

We walked around it, and said our goodbyes, and cast on our hopes that something wonderful would happen, and left.

After this we walked down to the Berkeley Sweet Shop's little temporary facilities, to buy the salt water taffy bunny_hugger wanted for the plane flight. We had decided to buy it after the last carousel ride, so we could walk away from that to do something that wasn't dismal. This also brought us to the rides from Big Mark's Action Park, and we saw them running, despite their ridiculously tiny size and the way they looked like they weren't even set up yet. We didn't ride any.

Our car hadn't been towed, so I suppose we were legally parked after all. On the main exit Seaside Heights has signs urging the visitor to come back; for the first time, we didn't know whether we ever wanted to. With the deal to save the carousel in place, perhaps we will, but it's hard to say when, or in what circumstances. The world rarely feels quite so suspended.

Trivia: The Fairlane Town Center shopping mall, opened in Dearborn, Michigan, in 1976, draws the name from that of Henry Ford's old mansion, parts of the garden of which were needed for its construction. Source: Ford: The Men and the Machine, Robert Lacey.

Currently Reading: The Complete Fairy Tales Of The Brothers Grimm, Translator Jack Zipes.

The one thing we could not avoid overhearing in Seaside Heights as we walked up to Casino Pier was people annoyed by the Casino Pier owners' decision to sell the carousel (remember, the visit was before the tentative deal to swap land and the carousel and keep the antique in town). Normally a decision like this you expect to hear at least some people saying, ``well, you know, they must have reasons that make sense to them'', since there are always contrarian people and there are always people ready to assume that whatever a business does must be for the best; they weren't in evidence on the boardwalk, though. Admittedly this was a setting that would self-select for people who disapproved of the sale, or weren't willing to get into arguments with everybody at the Shore that day about it.

Anyway. We did get up to Casino Pier, what's left of it and what's been rebuilt. It turned out there was a wristband deal for unlimited rides up to 6 pm, but we'd gotten up so late and spent enough time eating and at the Freehold Raceway Mall that it wouldn't make any sense for us to buy them; we were already too near 6 pm --- and this when we had to get to bed, ideally, before 9 pm for bunny_hugger's flight home, at the hotel nearly an hour away. We bought a book of tickets and hoped for the best.

A fair number of the pier's rides did survive, though many were relocated and I imagine all of them were taken apart and inspected and whatnot after Sandy. This was really our first visit since the pier had gotten back to something like normal operations, which made it strange as an expected farewell visit. But of the rides that were present and key to our first, perfect, day there, other than the carousel, there was only one still there and operating, the Pirate's Hideaway. This is a small roller coaster, set in a small building decorated with pirate castle decor at least on the outside, and it's even got a ride photograph. We got one that first day.

The ride is still there and most of the facade still is too, although there isn't a roof anymore. I don't know whether it was destroyed in the storm or just never replaced after the ride was, I assume, taken apart for inspection and repair. I don't know if it's ever going to be replaced either. It seems like a small thing but the ride feels lessened by being in so much direct sunlight, and not going back into the dark hidden interior. There wasn't much in that interior, admittedly, but the spirit of going into the shadowy interior was important. We didn't buy the ride photograph; it wasn't a very good one anyway. On the other hand, I also didn't cut my foot on the ride this time.

One of the attractions, not a ride proper, is a rooftop miniature golf, that's held on a chain of building tops. We'd been there before, including, if I have this right, the last visit bunny_hugger and I made to Casino Pier together before the storm. Between that and its own strange charms we couldn't resist taking another go around on it. The miniature golf course doesn't seem to have been substantially changed by the storm and the renovations which is fairly amazing considering it was right there on the rooftops, and that a lot of what gives it that strange, borderline-creepy weirdness that makes a great attraction is that it's decorated with animal statues. Some of them are fairly straightforward to understand, like the elephant figure that's just this side of being a Dumbo ripoff, or the rabbit that's clearly imitating the Preston Blair imitation of the Hare from Tortoise and the Hare, by way of someone who did a repainting job not realizing this wasn't a ripoff of Bugs Bunny. Some are smaller animals that might equally well be bears, chipmunks, squirrels, or skunks, painted to match whatever caught the fancy of the miniature golf painter that day. It's not hard to understand how a two-foot bear-skunk-chipmunk-thing might escape the ravages of a major disastrous storm, but how did the giraffe standing on the edge of a building high above the ground get through intact?

We're slow players, naturally, because first we take the golfing seriously and so we want to think out our shots and get them as right as possible, and because the setting is wonderful, strange figures looking over the golf course on top of a Subway or a ring toss house, looking out over the sea. So we had the chance to let groups of people pass ahead of us, and caused us to realize some people weren't playing all the holes. Apparently the bridges to other rooftops aren't clear enough, and folks were missing out on some of the holes. This bothered our sense of order and of just value; after all, they paid for eighteen holes of miniature golf and shouldn't be missing out on three or four of them.

From the rooftops we could see some of the still-disassembled components of rides. We also could see where the old letters announcing the Casino building had been replaced with new ones. Also, some of the redemption games had not just Tom and Jerry dolls but also Woody Woodpecker ones; when did he become a popular character again?

We got some frozen custard, as a snack.

Trivia: Benjamin Franklin, as subcontractor to Samuel Keimer's Philadelphia print shop, manufactured New Jersey's 1727 issue of paper money. To make high-quality bills Franklin completed the first copper-plate press in North America. Source: The First American: The Life and Times of Benjamin Franklin, H W Brands.

Currently Reading: The Complete Fairy Tales Of The Brothers Grimm, Translator Jack Zipes.

The past two years have been rough ones for the traditions bunny_hugger and I had when together in New Jersey. Part of the motivation of this particular trip was the saying farewell to one of those traditions, that of going to Seaside Heights and riding the antique carousel at Casino Pier. But especially with my parents moving out of state we were losing others.

For example: we'd always eaten at least once at Jersey Mike's, which has expanded into Ohio and even into Ann Arbor, but not gotten much closer to Lansing. Small thing, naturally, but a missed thing. I did, though, find one that wasn't too far from our hotel, and we could have lunch there on this last full day together. So we had a nice full-size vegetarian sub together, while overhearing state workers talk about the conferences they'd been at. I realize that it may be practical to toss your tie over your shoulder so as not to stain it while eating, but that has always, always looked goofy to me. Just saying. (And when you consider how much I'm willing to do because it's practical even though it looks silly, you know how silly it looks.)

bunny_hugger mentioned how we hadn't had the time to get to the Freehold Raceway Mall and ride the carousel there, either. But we were not too badly positioned for that either. We had meant to get to Casino Pier, but that required going east across the width of the state, and getting to the Freehold Raceway Mall would just mean taking Route 33 east instead of I-195. It wouldn't be much of a diversion.

This didn't mean we had unlimited time to hang around the mall, mind you. We had got up in the late morning, to start, recuperating from the week of doing stuff often late at night, and we would have to get to sleep fairly early because bunny_hugger had a dreadful morning flight ahead. We just went to the carousel (though we passed through the L L Bean, that used to be the Borders, and I wondered if they had swapped the direction of the elevator --- I could swear it used to run the other way, going up as one went eastward, rather than westward, but why would someone renovate that?) and waited a surprisingly long time to get tickets and to get the ride loaded up. There were a fair number of kids floating around, and only one person doing the ticket-selling, ticket-taking, and ride safety checking, but still, well, maybe it was a bad day. We would take two rides, one on the upper level, which offers a better view but a slower turn, and one on the lower level that's got a bit more speed to it.

And then we'd hurry out, because the afternoon was already creeping past us, and we hadn't been to the most important part of the trip.

Trivia: The Philadelphia and Atlantic City Railway, a narrow-gauge railroad founded by renegade directors from the Camden and Atlantic Railway, was constructed in about ninety days in early 1877, and ran its inaugural train on the 7th of July, 1877. Source: Railroads of New Jersey: Fragments of the Past in the Garden State Landscape, Lorett Treese.

Currently Reading: The Complete Fairy Tales Of The Brothers Grimm, Translator Jack Zipes. Wait, ``Little Red Riding Hood'' had an in-tale sequel? The heck? It was weird when it was Grendel's Mother, it's no less weird for a second Big Bad Wolf to show up.

PS: Reading The Comics, September 24, 2014: Explained In Class Edition, some more mathematics-themed comics. There've also been two reblogged items since my last roundup post, so this is the fourth thing since the last roundup.

bunny_hugger and I could, most likely, have a great time in an old-fashioned amusement park whether they had any roller coasters or not. (We kind of have, as Coney Island Cincinnati has just the one, modest, roller coaster, though its age is more a bit of decoration than anything that shows much in its attractions.) But Rye Playland has got a grand old wooden coaster from the original golden age of such, and several other roller coasters that adults can ride, even if they all date to the past fifteen years.

The grand old roller coaster is the Dragon Coaster, of course, the most obvious ride in the park and the one that provides the park with as much of a mascot and central theme as it's got. We got our first ride on it surprisingly late in the day --- about 6:30, if my photo information is not misleading --- which I believe was our attempt to go when there wasn't too bad a crowd. It was a tolerably busy day for the park and good for them, but it did for a while have the queue spilling out past the ride's not too deep queue.

Dragon Coaster has your classic late-20s style launch platform, with no ride gates on the platform itself, and no waiting to pick a choice seat. When the train comes up to the loading area they just open the gate and let people in until the ride is full and if you don't get the seat you want, too bad. They've still got old-fashioned hand brakes, painted red over a layer of painted white, and if you look at the right spot you can still make out the manufacturer's plate (``Dragon Coaster. Model 1. MFC Frank Church. Max Passengers 28. Max Speed 40 MPH''). Part of the feature of the ride is a tunnel, which has been decorated like a dragon so that you go soaring right into the dragon's mouth. The exit from the tunnel is not decorated, probably owing to the challenge in making something both on-theme and tasteful.

We would come several times to the Super Flight roller coaster, Playland's newest roller coaster (it dates to 2004). This is a ``flying'' type coaster, in which you lay down in a cage that can sweep around and flip over during the ride, though it's neither a very tall ride (about 50 feet at maximum; Dragon Coaster, dating to 1929, is 80 feet) nor a very long one (a 48-second ride, says the Roller Coaster Database). Yet we only rode it once. The problem is that the ride kept going down. We're not sure just what was happening, but we kept seeing it not running.

At one point we got nearly through the entire line, which was pretty substantial though decorated by signs talking about the history of flight, from legends of Icarus up to the Space Race, when suddenly everything stopped and people started walking away, just as they do in Roller Coaster Tycoon when you close a ride. Some people on the ride when it stopped got the excitement of being stuck on the ride and needing to wait for rescue, which would be a kind of thrill, although not really one I'd care for. Lying down on my chest for the time it takes to get a ladder out seems too uncomfortable for the excitement of being there when something goes really awry.

Though disappointed we did go off to do other things; I believe we went over to the Wild Mouse. When we got off the ride was going again and we jumped on for the Super Flight, in what proved to be a maybe 20-minute stretch of the ride operating again that evening. There was no telling from our perspective what was going wrong with it. I hope it was just a bad day. I admit not thinking much of the ride, but it'd be a shame to lose this different type of ride.

When bunny_hugger and I visited several years ago, with her brother and a friend of his, I wasn't able to ride one of the roller coasters, the Crazy Mouse. It's (you won't see this coming) a wild mouse, tucked just behind the Dragon Coaster on the north end of the park, near the gate where we'd got our tickets. They had a maximum height on it, though, and I am among other things a tall person. bunny_hugger wanted to ride it, and I figured to go along too on the assumption that if I was tall enough for the ride to be somehow dangerous they wouldn't let me on, and I would accept that. All I'd lose would be the time spent waiting in line, which would be better done with bunny_hugger than separated from her. I admit I was slouching, though.

But they didn't kick me out. There was no warning about maximum heights, and they weren't measuring for anything but the normal minimum heights. The ride was a perfectly normal wild mouse, not so tight that any person of plausible height would be threatened by anything. My best guess to the problem is that the launch station has got a metal roof that I think was a couple inches lower last time, so that the whole restriction might have been one less of safely riding and more about safely getting on the ride, but I'm just not sure.

Besides these, and besides the Kiddie Coaster in the kiddieland section, they've also got the Family Flyer, a tiny little thing that's really another kids coaster. It's got a train with a dragon head growing out the front, and it loops around another dragon head in the center of the track, and climbs to the altitude of thirteen feet as part of its journey. Well, we saw some adults with kids riding it, and we had some time, and why not? My fitting in required a bit of human origami, but, I learned how to position my legs and my carry-on bags so as to be able to fly to Singapore in economy class; in comparison, fitting into a kiddie coaster seat is not so hard, even if it banged my knees more. If I ever can't ride roller coasters anymore it's probably going to be due to knee-based injuries.

Towards the end of the night we figured we probably had time to get on just one more ride; what should we go for? The Carousel? The Derby Racer? We picked Dragon Coaster, and managed to get in shortly before they closed off the queue, though a couple people joined the line after us. We figured to be in either the last or the next-to-last ride of the night; it'd be close. As we estimated the queue size we figured we'd be among the last people to ride our group and so we'd surely have to get whatever seats were left over, rather than the choice seats of front car or back car, which is your classic Amusement Park World Problem, I guess.

And yet we got lucky. There were just enough people on line when we were allowed to board to fill the last train, so we got to ride the last train of the night. We aimed for as far back as we could get, and what do you know but the very last car was strangely unclaimed by people.

So we were able to close the day by riding in the last car of the last train, in the nighttime glow of a classic old amusement park.

Trivia: In 1782 Josiah Wedgewood began making clay-based pyrometers, to measure the temperature of an oven by how much they shrank. He set one degree of heat to be a contraction of the material by 1/600th the width of the piece, an amount he acknowledged was ``unavoidably arbitrary'', but hopefully, repeatable and comparable. Source: Inventing Temperature: Measurement and Scientific Progress, Hasok Chang.

Currently Reading: I Gotta Go: The Commentary Of Ian Shoales, Merle Kessler.

Well of course we got in, and we did some walking about to take in the scenery first because it's a lovely old-fashioned park. When we visited last time we were also with bunny_hugger's brother and a friend of his, so we felt a little constrained against the kind of lingering and staring and wandering about we might otherwise have done; this time, it was just us and if we wanted to poke into the kiddieland and see what was there, we were perfectly free to. They have a quite small wooden roller coaster there, which dates to either 1927 or 1928 (sources conflict) and therefore is even older than the Dragon Coaster. It's sadly too small for us to ride, but it feels good just being around something that old. The Roller Coaster Database says the original construction cost was a mere $2,537, which seems inexpensive even for being 1927 or 28 and not intimidatingly high. It makes those occasional projects where a madman builds a roller coaster in his backyard seem the more reasonable and attractive, doesn't it?

The kiddieland's got some other rides, of course, little versions of a Himalaya for example, or a kid's model Caterpillar that apparently had been removed for a couple years and returned just this season. It's got also a handful of nursery rhyme dioramas, though it seems to me too few of them. They don't seem to move but I can't rule out that they might have at one point. Maybe they're the survivors of decades of life eating away older attractions.

There are a couple of arcades at Playland and for the first time we went looking specifically to see if they had pinball machines. At one that's beside their antique carousel they had three machines: a Twilight Zone that was turned off, a World Cup Soccer, and a Bugs Bunny's Birthday Bash that someone was playing four games of, rather intently. We played a bit of World Cup Soccer, doing worse than we do on our home machine, and then went to the carousel when the guy playing Bugs Bunny was nowhere near done.

Theirs is a good-looking carousel, certainly. Particularly catching my eye this time was one of those things that tends to be overlooked when people talk about carousels: the chariots. You know, the fixed seats where people who don't feel up to mounting a horse, or don't want that excitement of going up and down some, or can't get on one of the mounts goes. Theirs was decorated as a rather long Chinese-style dragon, with front and back wings, and several secondary figures like serpents coiled around a tree branch beside it. It made an attractive figure.

After the ride Bugs Bunny was free. I hadn't played this since I was an undergraduate, when one of the student centers on another campus had it, so I never quite got the hang of the game and thought of it as well-meant but kind of mediocre and certainly not worth the bother of going to another campus to see, which is also the opinion I formed about Deep Space Nine back in the day. Having played it anew, with generally better skills, yeah, it's still kind of mediocre but I get the flow of the game better. I also learned why it's a game unsuitable for serious tournament play, though: among the generally well-integrated bits of cartoon theme, on your last ball, Bugs offers you a prize, that you can keep or pass to a competitor. The prize might be something great, like, an extra ball or big points. Or it might be something mischievous, like, an explosion. Or it might be potentially value-neutral, like, swapping your score with your opponent's, which is what I ended up with the first game we played. You can see where that's fun when clowning around with your friends, but also where it would really screw up pinball as a skill game.

There's another arcade on the far end of the midway, and that turned out to have The Flintstones, a mediocre game based on the awful live-action movie of the 90s. This caused me to dimly remember things about the movie's plot, which I think centered on Fred discovering concrete. At least ``Concrete'' is used in some way to start multiball. The arcade also had Cyclone, the carnival/amusement-park-themed game they used to have at your pizza place, and it was just too perfect to not play that while at an amusement park. Even better, I had a great game on that, managing to snag the Cyclone Jackpot for four million plus points, and so got to put my name in on the high score table at number three.

If there's more pinball at Playland than that we didn't find it; it's hard to figure where it might be. But it's been a good summer for finding pinball machines at amusement parks.

Trivia: In 1947 the HMS Vanguard suffered a power failure, losing its gyrocompasses. As it lacked magnetic compasses (due to an Admiralty decision the previous year) the ship had to resort to steering by the stars. King George VI happened to be aboard. Source: Compass: A Story of Exploration and Innovation, Alan Gurney.

Currently Reading: Mathematics And The Unexpected, Ivar Ekeland.

For dinner we figured to drive across the state. New Jersey's only about forty miles wide at that point. But on the other side of I-195 is Belmar, with Kaya's Kitchen, a vegetarian-and-vegan restaurant that's become part of our tradition. We got into town just as the pirate parade was busy going the other way, because apparently Belmar just has parades of people dressed as pirates these days. We also had to go several blocks away from the restaurant to park, which would add a bit of extra exhausting fun at the end of dinner when we realized we'd lost a marker pen we needed, and we had to retrace our steps.

Given the mass of pirates we worried the restaurant might be full, or closed, or something, but there weren't any problems. They could seat us right away. Surprisingly to me they didn't have anyone performing; we've seen small groups playing in a corner in the past. Maybe Saturday nights are too busy to give up the floor space. Kaya's has been getting a bit more successful and moving ever-so-slightly upscale with each visit; they'd dropped a while ago the simulated drumsticks that even included edible ``bones'', and they don't seem to have their vegetarian equivalent to pork roll anymore either. It's good they're doing well, and we'd love to have a place like this near home, but they did change a little bit away from what was probably our favorite. Or the chef got bored and might come back to pork roll when her spirits pick up again.

Belmar is on the Jersey Shore, just a little bit south of Asbury Park, which was of course our next spot, because on the boardwalk there is the Silverball Museum and its splendidly successful set of pay-one-price pinball machines. Between getting up late, spending time at Dorney, lounging about the hotel and not rushing dinner (why would we rush dinner?) we were getting there late, something like 10 pm, possibly the latest I've ever been at the Silverball Museum. But, heck, the place was open till 2 am, so how would we not have plenty of time?

This is also the first time bunny_hugger had been to the Silverball Museum since getting seriously into pinball. She'd been there at New Year's, yes, after a couple months playing in our league, but that was before she felt like the master of her pinball skills. It was also well before she got into Wii's Pinball Hall of Fame and fell in love with FunHouse, which of course they had and which she's wanted so much to play in person. (They have it at the Arcade, location of our other pinball league, and at Marvin's, but still, that's not enough access.) The game is harder to play in person than electronically --- the Pinball Arcade engine is fantastic, but it doesn't capture the grittiness and imperfection and variation of actual tables --- but it's still great reconnecting her to a game she quite loves playing. I could also point out some of the other games, like Road Show, that did their best to duplicate the FunHouse magic, not so successfully.

I managed to have a pretty respectable game of Doctor Who, which is gratifying since it's always been a table I admired more than mastered. Speaking of which, someone had taped to the backglass --- with its spreading array of the Classic Seven Doctors (the only ones to exist back when the game was made) --- a picture of Peter Capaldi doing his cape-billowing, finger-pointing pose.

The Silverball Museum has a Challenger table. This is one of those well-meant attempts to produce a two-player version of pinball, this one with a double-length table that tilts toward one player or the other. As with our attempt on the Joust two-player table, back in May, bunny_hugger handily beat me, managing something like triple my score.

Sometime after midnight the museum got really empty, opening up table to play and to hear, clearly. Around 1 am, one woman there did come up and start chatting with us. She explained she was the Gina B whose name appeared often on the boards listing people's high scores. She got into pinball through her boyfriend, who lives a few blocks away from the museum, and what with hanging out there she's gotten to be pretty competitively good with every game. I have to admit the conversation kind of went on past the point I could think of anything to say, and I suspect it went on past the point she knew what to say either, so we had that terrible bit of smiling and acknowledging that things in general exist to conclude our chat.

She also mentioned that the museum really closed at 1 am, although they weren't going to push people out too harshly. Still, they were turning off the radio and TVs and turning down the lights and turning off unattended machines and we were rather shocked to lose the hour of pinball we thought we might have. So, ah, oops. But that did give us the chance to make our apologies and get in a last game before heading out. They did turn off the last machines and most of the lights as we left, and that's the first time we've closed out this particular arcade.

We must've got back to our hotel somewhere around 2:30 am, and to bed right away.

Trivia: The term ``ball'' for a baseball pitched outside the strike zone (and not swung at) is an abbreviation for ``ball to the bat'', a warning umpires were to give to pitchers (to throw fair, hittable pitches) and for the batter (to swing at fair, hittable pitches) after concluding either the pitcher or batter was deliberately stalling. Source: A Game Of Inches: The Story Behind The Innovations That Shaped Baseball, Peter Morris.

Currently Reading: The Future Is Japanese, Editors Nick Mamatas, Masumi Washington, Haikasoru.

She wasn't the only one, by the way. Cedar Point attendees might have got jaded to the falling experience, but Dorney Park was still full of people who, five seasons after the ride moved in, could hardly wait for anything else. Maybe it's the fun of a few seconds of truly free fall; most rides of this kind drop you a little slower than free fall, so you have the reassurance of the seat under you, or a little faster, so you have the shoulder restraints. Demon Drop and its sisters do neither; you drop and you are simply floating between seat and restraint, an unnerving experience not quite like anything else at the park.

Also not quite like anything else at the park, so far as we know: the ride has its own music. The ride's safety spiel is given not by the operators but a continuously looped ``Demon Drop Rap'', which welcomes riders and explains how the harnesses work and do not take them off and listen to the attendants. You know, the eternal themes of rap music everywhere. It's kind of an odd experience and I wonder about every step of the process that created and implemented the ``Demon Drop Rap''.

Our gondola was shared with another couple; I believe he'd been on the ride before, while she was having her first experience. I imagine as long as you don't ride it too much you get an intense thrill from the most suspenseful part of the ride, waiting 130 feet above the ground for what moment when the ride does drop, because there's really not much obvious hint how long that's going to be or when it will start to fall.

Freefall rides also offer a curious definition challenge, to wit: are they roller coasters? They're not marketed as such and people don't think of them as such, but, it's hard to give a specific reason why not. They're gravity-driven rides, operating on closed-circuit tracks, on which wheeled cars run. It's a bit peculiar to use an elevator to gain the needed initial height, but it's not unknown either. Vertical drops are unusual, but not excluded by roller coasters either; some (e.g., Hershey Park's Fahrenheit or Cedar Point's Maverick) even have drops steeper than 90 degrees (and Fahrenheit even has a vertical lift hill, making the parallel more direct). And looking at the hardware up close makes obvious how much of it is really roller coaster technology, especially the brakes. Probably it's a marketing thing; Intamin or the first parks to put them in thought people would be more attracted to a ride like this if it weren't called a roller coaster, but, is that enough reason to let the decision stand? Or is there something essentially roller coaster-y that isn't satisfied by a Freefall? I feel like there is, but I'm also aware that I was taught from an early age that these were different things from roller coasters, so I'd like a stronger reason to believe that feeling.

These were the kinds of things we talked about --- along with how it looked like the Demon Drop building had been plucked right out of Cedar Point and put down in Dorney Park --- while sitting and watching the ride and also getting asked the time by a woman who communicated by sign with the rest of her party.

After the fire that destroyed Dorney Park's carousel in 1983, the park did get a new one, a Chance-manufactured carousel put in a couple years later. Since that was there we couldn't resist, of course, and we went to that. It's attractive enough for a modern fiberglass sort of thing, but what really interested us is that lining the outside of an adjacent gift shop are vintage signs and photos and memorabilia from the old days of Dorney Park, which we couldn't get enough of.

It's an anniversary year for Dorney, which opened originally in 1884, and they had posters and such up suggesting there was a bit of a museum of park history within the main gift shop. It isn't much of a museum, sad to say, although there's a nice long string of photographs going back over a century and that's always great to see. Cedar Fair's ownership has done some rather good things for Dorney Park, in things like finding an antique carousel for it and moving or building a number of roller coasters to a small park, but it's also washed away nearly everything that might suggest the park ever existed before 1992 or was ever anything but the iOS version of Cedar Point. The acknowledgement that there was something was a welcome touch.

At the gift shop bunny_hugger noticed some stuffed dolls for the Hydra, one of the steel roller coasters and one we didn't ride, given the time constraint. Sadly the Hydra isn't a racing coaster, but the doll is two-headed and pretty dragon-ish, so we picked one up.

By now we had been at the park several hours, when we really should have just popped in and looked around. Despite the crowds we hadn't really had to wait for much, but we had gone around to do more than just stop in to the antique carousel. And since we were leaving the park, we were passing by the carousel again. It'd be absurd not to give it one last ride, and we took that chance. As we rode one of the live-action shows started behind it, one of that kind where Peanuts characters are all happy and dancing and talk about singing together, then sing, the way the characters normally interact in the comic strip.

So we said goodbye to the former Frontier Carousel, and Dorney Park in general, and desperately hoped we could remember where to find the car. I suppose the crowd had more or less stabilized, as many people entering as leaving, though that did mean there wasn't the great sweeping mass of people flowing towards the front gate as we'd seen in entering just a few hours earlier. It felt like the grass lots and our car, at the end of the grass lots, was so much farther away than it even felt when we entered. But we got on the road and were pretty soon going back to New Jersey.

Trivia: Some 335,000 miles of iron and copper wire were drawn and spun for the construction of the 1858 trans-Atlantic telegraph cable; 300,000 miles of tarred hemp was used to cover it. Source: How The World Was One: Beyond The Global Village, Arthur C Clarke.

Currently Reading: Where No Man Has Gone Before: A History of Apollo Lunar Exploration Missions, William David Compton. NASA SP-4214.

PS: Without Machines That Think About Logarithms, what do you compute? Sixth of these, not counting a reblogged item, since the last roundup.

We did sleep in, about as late as consistent with check-out time, and the leftover cheese made for a surprisingly slimy breakfast. The ice we'd packed it with caused condensation to form on the cheese cubes, you see, and there wasn't anything we could really do to wipe that off, and while we had some crackers that would soak up some of the wet it was really not our most elegant meal. Anyway, we had to drive back to New Jersey, to reach our last hotel for the trip (and the one I'd use to stay for a week of in-the-office work after that), but first ... well, actually, first we had the mystery that my satellite navigator had absolutely no trouble getting signal through the Lehigh Valley Tunnel, with like a hundred feet of mountain above us, even though it routinely loses its signal in parking decks. The heck, Garmin Corporation, anyway?

Anyway. Any sensible path back to New Jersey took us to within inches of Dorney Park, one of the Cedar Fair amusement parks and so one we had season passes for. Since it'd cost us nothing but time to go there, and since we hadn't been there in several years --- and since it had the former Frontier Carousel that was dear to bunny_hugger's youth when that was at Cedar Point --- why not stop in? If that would actually be possible, since a bit of the road we needed to get from the Turnpike to the park was closed off for some reason and we were guided into a twisty maze of Allentown's back roads.

So, you know that Saturday that everybody in the Mid-Atlantic States was seized by a wild desire to visit Dorney Park? Yeah, that was the day we went too. The traffic going in looked like a perfectly reasonable early-afternoon Saturday stream, but then, the parking ... the paid parking lot was, as far as we could tell, completely full. They were directing people over to the side, the free parking lots, which were farther from the entrance and, for that matter, were just grassy fields. And not just one overflow-parking field. Not just two overflow-parking fields. They had field after field full of cars. Traffic cops guided us to what seemed to be the last little bit of grass available, a patch good for a half-dozen rows of cars, near the fence marking the Lehigh County Agricultural Center, and we, like many people, just got out of the cars to watch this fill up too. Surely, at some point, they must declare the park Just Plain Full?

They might, although there was a bit more open grass that they opened up, and started guiding cars onto, and while it certainly looked like they would fill that too we didn't want to wait the extra twenty minutes or so that might take. We had been to Cedar Point during Columbus Day Weekend 2011, when the park got a rumored seventy thousand visitors and was packed to the point there were 45-minute waits for closed rides (only a modest exaggeration; there were lines formed for closed rides, presumably in the hopes that they would open). This promised to be a fascinating spectacle in the same vein. We might not ride much --- we figured if we got on the carousel that would be triumph enough --- but we could be there for this.

Or would we? Because we had the same problem at the gate as we had the second time we went to Kings Island, in which the gate attendant scanned our passes and then frowned at the computer screen and didn't know what to make of the error message. A higher-level gate attendant came over and looked at it and thought she understood it. Remember we had that problem going back into Kings Island, where our season pass was for some reason represented in their database as a single ticket, and we'd used it to go in before, and now it didn't know what to make of us? The same thing happened here. The higher-order attendant took our passes to run off to the main office, leaving us standing there awkwardly, afraid to move lest we never see any park official, or our passes, again, but also kind of in the way of the gate on the busiest day Dorney Park had ever known in all of time. This was a great way to make an anxiety-producing operation out of existing.

Mercifully, the higher-level attendant came back, and had worked out whatever was necessary to let us in, and we could join the promised chaos. Past the gates that looked like perfect replicas of Cedar Point's old, pre-GateKeeper gates, was their carousel.

Trivia: Around 100 AD, Rome's aqueducts were able to deliver about 220 million gallons of water daily, something around 110 to 120 gallons per capita per day. Source: Engineering In History, Richard Stelton Kirby, Sidney Withington, Arthur Burr Darling, Frederick Gridley Kilgour.

Currently Reading: Where No Man Has Gone Before: A History of Apollo Lunar Exploration Missions, William David Compton. NASA SP-4214.

[ Sorry to be late. Pinball league ran very, very long, because the machines kept breaking out from under us. I only broke the first machine, but was in the group playing when the second broke. I was nowhere near the third when it broke. ]

Beside the Stein and Goldstein Carousel is the Ole Smokey Railroad, a narrow-gauge railway that putters along one edge of the park, the edge that's pretty well shaded by trees but also can see the main entrance road. There's another on the opposite side which we haven't been on yet. The ride also took us past the kiddieland and its many little rides, and we had the lovely moment of seeing the boats in a canal ride and the Kozmo's Kurves of the kids' railroad passing us in the other direction.

We wandered back over toward the kiddieland, noticing among other things what's got to be the coolest kiddie merry-go-round on hand, at least by some definitions of merry-go-round. It's a large flat ride, with the riders going in circles, but the mounts are --- well, some are animals, like elephants or lions or hippopotamuses; but others are cars or trucks or tanks; and some are 50s-style spaceships. The vehicles have steering wheels, mostly, but none of the animals or vehicles go up and down. There's a traffic light hanging above the center. Is it a merry-go-round? It seems close, but it's also so near one of those kiddieland rides where you sit in a spaceship and play at steering while going in an endless circle.

After going past an open-air stage with a group playing 50s and 60s songs I thought I saw the arcade where we'd played pinball the previous night. It was an arcade, but a second and new one, with a mere pair of pinball machines. We played a couple rounds of Theater of Magic, the official pinball of devilbunnies. A kid beside us was playing Pirates of the Caribbean despite not understanding some of how the machine worked --- I had to explain how to launch the ball --- and had a fairly good game despite a sibling coming up and screwing around with a flipper, and her father (?) dragging her off because they had other stuff to go to. We felt the injustice of all that.

We also went past one of the kid theatrical shows, this one a story that gives average parkgoing kids the chance to dress up in costume and move, embarrassed, around the stage as part of some kind of story. I'm not sure what was going on when we visited but there were a half-dozen kids dressed in red tunics and holding sword and shield going up to a princess. I really like most everything about Knoebels, but the variety of activities is definitely an important part of what makes it great; this is at least three shows we passed without really aiming for them and I'm sure at least the puppet show and this would keep a kid usefully entertained, and pretty cheaply considering there's neither a charge for parking or for entering the park.

We took another ride on the Black Diamond Mining Company dark ride, still great and worth it, and then popped in on the Knoebels Museum that's next to it. On previous trips in I'd thought that looked interesting and maybe we'd get to it sometime; today, particularly given that it was a crowded day, why not take the time? The front is a gift shop, which is normal enough, with the kinds of mining-attraction feature that parks get in their Old West section. Around the partial walls, though, there's the first of the museums, introduced by a Tyrannosaurus rex.

This first part of the amusement park's museum is about the coal industry: where coal comes from (thus the dinosaur, part of a setting of Life on Earth Long Ago) and going into what coal mining was like, which was horrible. They're pretty straightforward about this; besides the exhibits showing the tools used in the mining and railroad trades there's equally big exhibits about accidents and accident records, including a computer with which one can look up people whose names you happen to know, and some accounts of daring cave-in rescues and the equipment used for that.

It's past another partition and door, beyond the coal mining museum, that you get to the park's museum. The door into it asks ``Why has Knoebels Succeeded While Other Local Amusement Parks Have Failed'' and offers as one reason that they never throw things away --- listing, for example, the history of an aluminum umbrella bought in 1950 for a shed wrecked in the Flood of 1972 (a particularly high one; the high-water mark's noted in park signs with pictures of Kozmo under water up to his nose) and sold for scrap in 1980 (which seems to defy the door's thesis) and then used to cover the center of the roof over the Italian Trapeze ``until summer 2001'', leaving its fate since then unmentioned. The door also lists some closed local (with 35 miles) parks, some of them pretty generic --- Lakeside Park, Lakewood Park, Pleasure Park --- and some intriguingly named --- Rolling Green, Angela Park, Doodle Bug Park.

Inside it properly is a neat collection of bits of removed rides and attractions, such as from the high-diving board formerly above the swimming pool (explained that it was only twenty feet high, or whatever, and didn't it seem taller?) or the Country Bear Jubilee (``A Roaring Visit To The Rockin' 50's''), or the sign clock used at the roller skating rink (``We Believe This Dial Was Used To Tell Skaters What The Next program Would Be'', and I'm delighted that they're not sure about that), or the full-scale model of Explorer 1 used as a prop beside the Space Ship Ride. They've also got the ``Old Lady'', a fortune-telling machine introduced to the park in 1950; it was, according to the sign, in service until 1985 when the supply of horoscopes from the long-gone supplier finally gave out. They also have one of the earliest deeds for the land on which the park would be built, and a timeline listing historic dates of the park, which goes back the hundreds of millions of years to when the coal fields began to form. (It skips a couple dates.) The timeline also mentions for 1941, ``Purchased Grand Carousel \\ 10 Days Later WWII Begins'', which I think gives an unwanted implication regarding United States involvement in the war.

The timeline doesn't explain everything, unfortunately (``1978: Billy Penn Became Official Mascot'', raising questions among which are ``so what's with Kozmo, then?'') and it seems like they've got only a couple years left before they run out of wall space. I suppose they'll work something out.

It's a pity we don't get to Knoebels more because it's just full of this sort of side attraction: no kind of big-ticket attraction but endlessly fascinating to people like us. If it were a day trip away we'd probably easily spend weekends just being there.

Trivia: Ty Cobb skipped out on five Detroit Tigers games in August of 1908 to get married. The Tigers won four of the games he missed. Source: Crazy `08: How a Cast of Cranks, Rogues, Boneheads and Magnates Created the Greatest Year in Baseball History, Cait Murphy.

Currently Reading: Smuggler Nation: How Illicit Trade Made America, Peter Andreas.

Back to the trip report, and Friday: we returned to Knoebels as early as we could, although we didn't quite get there for the opening. I forget why; I think we had to stop in at the Weis store for something or other but can't think what. It was a crowded-looking day, though, and we decided to have dinner and hope the line for wristbands would subside. We had, I believe, eggplant parmigiana fries, which by the way are a thing you can get at an amusement park, if it's Knoebels, and sat beside the river that floods the park near the Grand Carousel, and saw numerous fish hanging around and swans gliding about.

We also got to overhear a rather deranged-sounding puppet show going on in this puppet-theater lighthouse stage. I could swear at one point the story was going on about journeying to another planet, but there was also something about a mischievous chicken moving a buzzard's can of whipped cream, and at some point they were doing a princess-and-the-frog story (the princess was that of Liechtenstein, which I remember because it struck me as of course they'd insist on that funny name) and the vulture was trying to do up her hair but every time he looked away the chicken would swap his hair spray for the whipped cream and I realize this all sounds like a fever dream, but, the kids were having a great time with it so who could argue that? We were delighted to just keep noticing more of this weirdness going on, and compared it to the live puppet shows that go on at furry cons. (Mostly, we figured, shows like this have more time to write and to rehearse and rewrite, helping them turn out rather better.)

The line for wristbands wasn't showing any signs of getting smaller and we would worry that maybe, given the crowds, the number of rides we'd get in would make it more economical to buy tickets rather than the wristband. Never mind. Someone from park staff came around and pointed out another booth where you could buy wristbands, and the line got short enough to actually wait through.

After we'd been to Knoebels last year we ran across a mention that they had one of the last Fascination parlors left in existence. We'd discovered the game in Wildwood and were disappointed to have missed it, but also, surprised that we could have missed it. The parlor turns out to be actually pretty hard to miss, as it's in a building right by the food stand where we had fries and also beside one of the major booths for buying tickets and wristbands and getting the hand stamp (a disappointingly routine ``FRI'' that day) for roller coasters. As ever, go figure. We sat down to play some; the parlor wasn't crowded but had enough people for the game to be pretty competitive. bunny_hugger even won several games, rolling balls into the Bingo-board-like holes to fill out lines and, I think, even an X one time. We failed badly on the complete-the-whole-board challenge, but that's one with a big prize for a reason.

Besides the usual sorts of odd prizes you can win with tickets --- toys, coolers, Crock-Pots, toasters, jar openers, plastic tubs --- they also have a kind of rental library: for ten coupons you can take one of the used books from their (small) shelf, and even bring them back for coupons ``as long as they are in gently used condition''. So if you're ever in northeastern Pennsylvania and want to play a game so you can borrow an Ed McBain or Janet Evanovich novel or maybe catch The Cat Who Said Cheese, you know where to go.

Flying Turns, though, was a wonderful ride and we enjoyed it so; still, we went from there to the Knoebels roller coaster we'd missed the day Before. That's the Twister, a recreation of Mister Twister, demolished when Denver's Elitch Gardens moved to a new location, because of course they'd re-create a roller coaster beloved to people 1600 miles away. This had a much more normal line, something like a quarter-hour wait, although while we were waiting for it (one of the times that day; we got a couple rides in on it) somebody had the bad luck to drop his cell phone from an elevated part of the ride queue and the poor thing smashed apart.

After that we noticed the Twister gift shop had quite a large number of ride T-shirts, and resolved to come back and get one (we did, bunny_hugger picking one that's surely got to glow under black light, or at least looks like it does). They have, and I am not exaggerating in any way, something around sixty different T-shirts and several dozen sweatshirts or hoodies for this one ride alone. I'm not positive they haven't got more Twister T-shirts than they have different shirts for the entire park. Why Twister has this abundance of wearable merchandise, when, for example, we couldn't find anything for Phoenix, is one of those many, many mysteries of the strange and wonderful park.

Trivia: Mowry's Tavern, constructed by 1655 by Goodman Mowry in Providence, Rhode Island, was one of the few buildings in the city not destroyed by fire in King Philip's War, and it survived, the oldest building in the city, until being torn down in 1900. Source: The Old Post Road: The Story Of The Boston Post Road, Stewart H Holbrook.

Currently Reading: It's An Old New England Custom, Edwin Valentine Mitchell. Included chapter titles: ``To Have Pie For Breakfast'', ``To Talk About The Weather'', ``To Have Haunted Houses'', ``To Adopt Peculiar Place Names'', and ``To Eat Cheese''.

PS: Machines That Give You Logarithms, or, an algorithm at last! Fourth of these since the last roundup.