Sunday morning we got up and checked out of the Breakers. We assume. We were at the end of our reservation, sure (the hotel would be open Sunday night, but we would be home Monday morning). But there wasn't a bill slipped under the door, nor an e-mail to ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
bunnyhugger with the particulars. When she dialed the phone to auto-checkout she got that tone that telephone systems give you when they're stumped. The checkout button on her phone wasn't working, possibly because her phone is smaller than they designed around, possibly because web sites aren't tested before deployment. And by the time we had got everything cleaned up and moved to the car, and some last-minute lost item found (I think it was just the hotel key card), and all, it was far enough past the checkout time that it would have been embarrassing to go to the desk and hand in the keys. We left our key cards on the dresser, as we would have done had we got the paper bill or the phone checkout worked, and left, figuring they would work it out. Cedar Point hasn't come to put us in debtors prison yet so we're probably okay?
Part of the delay, besides our desiring more sleep, was figuring how to go into the park. We wanted to go in costume again, but we also wanted to be able to not drive home in kigurumi. Once again I went in as Angel and bunnyhugger as Stitch, and I wore my regular pants and t-shirt and even another shirt underneath, so I wouldn't be too cold during the day even without wearing my hoodie. bunnyhugger wore long underwear and figured we would have somewhere to change before setting out for home. We would: since the Hotel Breakers was open Sunday night into Monday, we could use its bathrooms, and did.
Our Angel-and-Stitch pairing was better-received Sunday than Saturday. We got a healthy number of compliments, and we even ran across several other people doing the same sort of couples costume. One we even got to do some clowning around with, exaggeratedly pointing and ooohing at our twins, to the mild confusion of anyone overseeing it. I felt good anyway.
(There was a family with someone asking how I, the male, was not Stitch. I answered truthfully but with a little irritation: I look great as Angel.)
The weather, you may have inferred, was a little colder than Saturday but still so good that the park was busy. We took the chance to get on some of the flat rides and other smaller rides, which we often neglect, while waiting for crowds to subside on the roller coasters. This led me to realize, toward the end of the day, that if we played our cards right we could get onto all the adult-carrying flat rides in the park. We'd miss some of the thrill rides, like MaxAir and the Wave Swinger, but all the things that you could, basically, bring to a carnival and set up? We got 'em. It wasn't until maybe 7 pm, an hour before the park's closure, that we got the last one in, but we did it.
While looking for one of these --- the tilt-a-whirl that's placed in Camp Snoopy and themed to Linus's well-known Beetle Bugs hobby for some reason --- we also discovered an outright easter egg. We don't want to spoil it because of the joy in finding this thing we never heard anyone talk about, but, there is an unexpected reference to A Charlie Brown Christmas in the back half of the park somewhere.
This season I made good on my resolve to ride WindSeeker, three times over. I also wanted to get to another ride bunnyhugger would refuse, and that's the Sky Ride. It's your basic cars-on-a-cable ride, running between the Main Midway and Slightly Farther Down The Main Midway. The length is a relic from when the park spread out over less territory, and used to feed to the Frontier Lift that was the only way to get to the back half of the park. (The Frontier Lift cars are the ones on the Sky Ride now.) I'm not sure it's faster than walking the same distance, especially not if there's a line, but I'd never been on it and this time I was going to take it, both directions.
When I was getting into the car --- they let me ride alone, unlike the Ferris Wheel ride I took on Eclipse Day --- the operator approved my sitting down and then said ``don't forget your seat belt''. I couldn't find it. ``It's on the ceiling,'' she said. I couldn't imagine how that worked but looked. ``Made ya look,'' she said, and yeah, I like that energy brought to the park.
I really enjoyed the ride. It's not as tall as WindSeeker or Power Tower or the taller roller coasters, but it's the closest Cedar Point has to an observation platform (somehow!). And the park looks gorgeous from above, with all these familiar buildings and walkways and crowd movements a miniature sprawl. I'm happy to have ridden and might take it at night sometime too.
(Coincidentally, at the end of this season Great Adventure, the regional amusement park of my youth, tore out their equivalent ride, the Skyway, a ride originally built for the 1964 World's Fair and that was always one of my childhood favorites.)
Among the things we did Sunday was take in a show. It was the first one we'd done all Halloweekends. It was packed, too; bunnyhugger told me it was popular but I didn't imagine. We got in about ten minutes before the start of the show and still could only get a couple obstructed seats in the balcony. The show was some music, like you expect, but structured around a murder mystery: which of these four people murdered the central figure. The twist here is that the murderer was determined by audience vote, after everyone made their case for why someone might suspect them of murder. And they went with the audience vote to resolve the show, making me very curious to know what happens when a different cast-member gets picked as the guilty one. If we'd had time we might have gone in for another show which might be why it's so popular.
We stopped in one of the gift shops we usually overlook, for reasons I forget. Probably to see if they had a pin-trading board, and they did indeed. More, though, they had park maps! Not the free ones like they used to give away, but a big one, for sale for a couple bucks, the sort of souvenir map we always say they ought to sell. Having talked about that for so long we had to put our money where my mouth was, and I bought it. I don't know where we'll hang it, but it's big and clear and just the sort of souvenir we really want. (And, unless I missed something, it was not in the Main Gift Shop where we would have expected, so we're going to remember that come next year.)
We took the map and a couple other things back to my car, re-entering the park for the final hour of the day. I was a little worried they might have closed the re-entrance gates for so late in the weekend. No, although the security guards did wave bunnyhugger with her bigger camera through the metal detector because, they said, they recognized us. It's nice to be known and regarded favorably by security but this does offend our sense that the rules should serve a useful purpose and be impartially administered.
Anyway our last rides of the day were on the Kiddy Kingdom Carousel --- where the operator dropped that shocking rumor that the park might be selling the 100-or-so-year-old ride (a rumor still unconfirmed, but also not explicitly denied, by the way). And after that, and telling ourselves it couldn't be true, we went to the Midway Carousel to close out the night. We stuck around long enough to hear the band organ play ``Mysterious Mose'', a tune bunnyhugger couldn't have named a month ago and that, thanks to a really good animation by Screen Novelties, she now couldn't get enough of. Made for a great close for our big four-day Halloweekends vacation.
Here's some more Pinball At The Zoo stuff you might like to see. I did.
Oh hey, someone's playing Weird Al's game and has got the Wesel Stomping Day mode going on the screen there.
The Four Horsemen, an electromechanical game, which of course is themed to college football. (It made sense at the time.)
Rare appearance of TimmyBigHands's father as the referee, too!
Another non-pinball game that got sold: Monte Carlo, a game of tilting the playfield so the ball doesn't roll into the inappropriate holes. Looks fun.
More fine woodrail games, this one with a circus theme, this one by the Exhibit Supply Company, from 1948. They were around from the early 30s to about 1950, in making pinballs; after that they made a couple gun or bat games or the like.
As you can see, 1948 is from before they really wanted to have flippers on playfields, which is why the flippers are backwards and way too far away to be of any use.
Trivia: By 1939, NBC Orchestral performances from 30 Rockefeller Plaza's Studio 8-H ameliorated the resonance-free acoustics --- particularly harsh on trombones and other brass instruments --- by feeding the pickup through an echo chamber in the control room. Source: The Mighty Music Box: The Golden Age of Musical Radio, Thomas A DeLong. A half-decade later the studio would be renovated to have a better sound. (Studio 8-H is where Saturday Night Live has broadcast almost every episode.)
Currently Reading: Lost Popeye Zine, Volume 47: Square Egg Island. Tom Sims, Bela Zaboly. Editor Stephanie Noelle.
