austin_dern

bunnyhugger called down to ask if I'd heard the news about Clementon Park. Clementon, in South Jersey, was shuttered without warning near the end of the 2019 season --- on Customer Appreciation Day! --- and never reopened. It got put up for auction this month. I knew of at least one group that wanted to buy it and run it as an amusement park, but that was a slim hope, especially as it was a group of investors who'd only recently come together and who hadn't run parks before.

She said the park was bought and by someone crazy. Guess who?

My thinking: Well, she's not despairing, so that suggests someone who'd run it as a park. Obviously not Six Flags, since they already have Great Adventure in the area. Also likely not Cedar Fair, since they have Dorney Park, a couple hours' hike but still right in the area. Parques Reunidos, who owns Kennywood, Idlewild, and Dutch Wonderland? ... That would be a bit wild but not crazy. Clementon's the sort of small and ill-used park --- with a history; it opened in 1907 and is one of the dozen or so trolley parks still extant --- that they could take over and maybe revive, the way they'd rescued Story Land in New Hampshire. So I thought of who might be crazy and guessed, ``Knoebels?''

The answer was Indiana Beach. Gene Staples, who'd put together the salvage of Indiana Beach from a sudden unexpected closure at the end of 2019, apparently learned of Clementon in February. So put in the high bid, for about US$2.6 million. The plan apparently is to get the water park at least open by Memorial Day and the rest of the park open as practical.

It's awfully hard to not see this as good news. The group at Indiana Beach has only had one season of running a distressed park, but they managed it, and in (I hope) the worst possible conditions to have an amusement park open. This year won't be easy, but it won't be impossible either. And that they're looking to expand already is ... well, this is probably the cheapest you'll be able to buy any amusement park this decade (and I sorely hope that's true). It's got to be very good news for Clementon. It's hard to think of a better buyer without getting into fantasies.

So now I am again more than six months behind real-time in my photographs, although I think that's still closer to current than I have ever been before. From the Potter Park Zoo at the end of September 2020:

Donkey wondering if this was the best use of their time.

And here we see a chicken got into the rabbit enclosure. We did see the chicken going back home across the fence.

Oh, this rabbit's so dainty; look at how elegantly she holds her forepaw while eating.

Oh, also there's other rabbits. Did you see? ... And that's a lot of foot, by the way, on the red-eyed white rabbit.

Grey Flemish Giant (I'm assuming) deciding to rouse herself a little.

That is a lot of dewlap.

(Person blocking off the turtle statue kids could sit on before they get bored with sitting) ``I'm helping!''

Slightly misaligned old sign that would explain something about the name of the African Spurred tortoise if only the bottom slat were nailed in two inches lower down.

A local black squirrel figured out the red panda enclosure's a cozy place to reside too.

And here's a red panda yawning at us all.

Another red panda trying to remember an appointment on the other side of the pen.

Red panda wondering how it's all come to this, though.

Trivia: England's King Charles II said of Thomas Hobbes --- who had taught him --- coming to court, ``Here comes the beare to be bayted!''. Source: Infinitesimal: How a Dangerous Mathematical Theory Shapes the Modern World, Amir Alexander. If I'm parsing Alexander's writing and reference correctly this seems to have happened just the once. It's still ... well, funny, but you kind of see why Hobbes was like that, then.

Currently Reading: The Disordered Cosmos: A Journey Into Dark Matter, Spacetime, and Dreams Deferred, Chanda Prescod-Weinstein. Um. So, yeah, did not realize there were people who referred to Quantum Chromodynamics, developed in the late 50s through the 60s, as ``colored physics'' and that this was a name picked by people who never imagined talking to a Black person.

And then more shocking news. This I got from e-mail from bunny_hugger while she was at work Tuesday. This is only about amusement parks, nothing as serious or intimate as pets or anything.

But Apex Parks Group announced the closing of two parks, this after the search to find a buyer failed. The parks are ones that I've been to once each: Indiana Beach, in Monticello, Indiana, and Fantasy Island, in Grand Island, New York. All of the rides the parks have are listed up for sale; in fact, that news item was the first bit of alarming news to come up about them.

There's a lot of surprise to the bad news there. First that the parks were up for sale. Second that Apex was feeling insecure enough in its finances to not just keep the parks up and running. Third that nobody wanted to buy either park. Indiana Beach had been run almost into the ground by its previous owners but, by every report, had seen a great comeback under Apex. Certainly when we went it seemed healthy enough, as far as you can tell in one visit. Fantasy Island, similarly, looked in great shape even for a day limited by rain. It's a relief we got to both at least once, but it especially hurts that Indiana Beach closed on us. It's just enough farther away than Cedar Point that we never felt like it was a good day trip, but it was doable, and maybe if we had visited more we'd have seen it as a day trip.

I imagine it's possible something will happen, and the parks find a way to open again. I don't see a logical reason why they would, but it's not like anything's been torn down --- yet --- that I know of. But if the parks weren't making enough money as places planned to open in 2020, how much more can we expect from places planned to be closed? And yet apparently the Facebook page of Fun Spot America, which runs three parks in Florida and Georgia, happened to get a comment from someone saying, you guys should buy Indiana Beach and Fantasy Island. And they happened to have a response saying someone there had a flight to Indianapolis that day. Maybe it'll be something. Maybe it'll just let roller coaster fans know Fun Spot America exists and runs these three little parks, two of which have wooden coasters.

This is not the only park closing news of the season. Clementon Park, in New Jersey, abruptly closed in late September, refusing to let patrons in for a customer appreciation day and cancelling all sales for 2020 season passes. I haven't heard of any information about what's going on and whether there's any hope of the park reopening.

And even worse, since it involved actual deaths: La Feria Chapultepec in Mexico City has been closed since October. This after something that never happens, happened: the roller coaster Quimera derailed. It killed two people and injured two more. In the accident investigation it transpired that none of the rides had been properly maintained, and the local government revoked the operation permits. Allegedly they're looking for a new operator, but I haven't heard anything to say that one's been found, or what it might take to get the park up to code. It's possible this will lose Montaña Rusa, their wooden Möbius-strip roller coaster and one of only three like it in the world.

So. I don't know just what's going on here. But this seems abnormally grim a year for amusement parks. I don't think it's just that these were four parks I knew in person; the concentration of closing news seems like a lot. I suppose the La Feria news could have hit anytime, but all the other park closings feel to me like the leading edge of a serious crisis. May it only be one of amusement parks.

As for us? Well, this makes a much higher priority of our getting to Camden Park, in West Virginia. This has been a place we've wanted to get to for each of the last several years, and we've been trying to find some way to piggyback it with any other parks to be less of a long ride for one roller coaster. (Well, one marquee roller coaster; the park has others, plus, of course, a whole park.) Now, we're probably going to just accept we're going to have to drive the long way there and experience the park while it's still with us, even if the ride can't do further duty. Also, Conneaut Lake Park, which has somehow been doing all right without us, becomes a high-priority visit. I'm also considering whether, if work summons me back to New Jersey during the season, going to any small parks available even if I can't go with bunny_hugger. It seems urgent.

Trivia: Ranger 6, which crashed into the Moon (as designed) without the television camera ever turning on, was the twelfth successive American lunar flight failure. Source: Lunar Impact: The NASA History of Project Ranger, R Cargil Hall. SP-4210.

Currently Reading: Fontaine Fox's Toonerville Trolley, Editors Herb Galewitz, Don Winslow. So now that I've finally read the whole book, do I like it? ... And yes, I do, and found it mostly funny, although I'm not sure I can say why. It's all panel jokes, few of them forming stories (although the strips are presented out of chronological order, bunching together instead by who the star of the day's strip is, and only the occasional reference lets you guess when anything came out), each built around here's the featured character and his or her One Big Thing. Like, having a short temper. Or being incredibly fat. Or having quite long arms. But the jokes are reliably tied into everyone's big named trait, and often fairly ingeniously, and that way, they land. It's a weird experience, really.

Beside the flying scooters ride is the queue for the Sleigh Ride, a zipline ride that we did not get on. Note that the sign implies this queue would have been the better part of an hour for the ride and we're not that delighted by the idea of a zipline ride anyway.

A treat from the 80s: a Space Shuttle-themed rocking ship ride; they used to have one much like this in Great Adventure, although it wasn't painted in Air Force livery like that. It's so weird that a space-themed ride in a park near Colorado Springs would go so Air Force crazy like this, isn't it?

Looking up at the Space Shuttle ride in its flight.

When we got to Clementon Park the first thing we went for was the Hellcat roller coaster. This might threaten to make the rest of the park anticlimactic, particularly as they haven't got another roller coaster, but bunny_hugger had heard tell of the roller coaster suffering a lot of downtime, and it was running right then, and it would be unspeakable to wait for the ride to break down before going over.

Hellcat's got a nice homegrown-style logo, showing a cat-faced plane made of fire, suggesting the fighter plane that gave it the name. bunny_hugger noted the name is probably a better one for this roller coaster than its original J2 for Jackrabbit 2: the coaster has a lot of swoopy, banked, curving paths, suggestive of the way a fighter plane might fly, rather than the quick leaps that suggest rabbits. We were able to walk on the ride, and went for the back seat, to notice that everyone else was gathering around the front. ``Do they know something we don't about this ride?'' bunny_hugger asked. The ride is a bit rougher in the backseat than the front, but I don't think it's dramatically so. The front seat offers a better view, it's to be admitted, especially since the coaster dives very close to the edge of the lake and that's always a beautiful sight. We'd take quite a few rides on the roller coaster, and be glad for all of them.

The exit queue drops people off in the midst of the picnic pavilions, inside the space enclosed by the coaster. This is curious because there was a table and a park guard checking that people entering that area from the midway had the wristband indicating they were part of the groups that had reserved pavilions. We have no explanation for why there's a need to limit entry on the ground when you can get to the same place by going through a ride.

The most interesting ride besides the roller coaster, I think, was the Victorian Railway, which is a simple narrow-gauge railroad which does putter around some of the edge of the park, including the outside of the Hellcat, and past a number of statues of wildlife, elephants and bears and lions and zebras and, what the heck, a giant bulldog. It feels like the quirkiest and most personable of the regular park attractions.

Clementon Park also has a log flume ride that's apparently well-regarded as these things go. It's called King Neptune's Revenge, with your classic rotating-platform launch platform, and it's a nice, long ride much of it over the lake. It's also got a pretty steep drop that got us very well soaked. We staggered out of the ride, soaked pretty much up to our shoulders, bunny_hugger worse than me, and ran into a group of people considering whether to ride it. ``Learn from our sins in life,'' I said, not loudly enough; one of them pointed to us and said, ``See, you don't get too wet on this ride!'' I think he talked some of them into going on King Neptune's Revenge. Maybe.

Someday bunny_hugger may forgive me for trying out the Thunderdrop ride. This was a tower ride, and I thought it was maybe one of those that launch you to a considerable height. It ran the other way, though, bringing you up and dropping as we'd probably have known if I had paid attention to the name or if we'd seen a ride cycle. She's not too fond of drop rides, and dropping from maybe sixty feet down wasn't her preferred method of riding, but, she survived and this might have been a good taste of dropping considering something which would come in a few days.

Clementon Park has a cute little kiddieland, a bit hard to see because the access to it is behind some buildings including the gift shop, but the whole thing is enclosed so it's probably very attractive in drizzly days. That's got some normal little flat rides where kids go in circles and make buzzing noises; it's also got a Safari Train ride that putters around in a small loop, which made us think of the Safari Train ride at Casino Pier, the last thing we'd ridden before our wristbands expired.

The park has a Ring Of Fire, which goes in a tight loop and gives you a lot of time upside-down at low speeds, which bunny_hugger does not like as a ride. But she liked the ride T-shirt they had in the gift shop, and by the way who makes a ride shirt for a Ring Of Fire, and felt that she couldn't buy it in good faith if she hadn't ridden the ride. I found a park shirt that includes what looks vaguely like heraldic symbols on the chest, naming the park and the Hellcat ride --- nicely enough --- as well as one of the water park rides. The roller coaster was easy enough; we wouldn't get to this water park ride.

But we did go to the water park. We'd got there kind of late in the day, so we didn't have time to do very much, but we'd brought our swimsuits just in case we felt like it. What we did have time for was the Endless River, a lazy river ride. Getting into the inflated doughnut was the worst part for me, since I tried pulling my legs up through the middle and went tumbling over backwards into the water, which is one way out of the problem of the water being not quite warm enough to wade into. Also I bonked my head on the concrete base of the river, though not enough to do me any lasting harm, I think. While we drifted some packs of kids came racing past us, because they weren't at the age where you can just be lazy in a river-like fashion, and the water park officially closed so we missed the other attraction on my park T-shirt: Torpedo Rush. Based on the appearance of the thing it's a drop tower that ends as a water slide. It looks unspeakable.

Still, there was an hour or so between the water park closing and the main park closing, so we had the chance to wander around some more, take photographs, and get a few more roller coaster rides in. We closed out the park at the too-early hour of 8 pm (they apparently don't have many lights, which is rather like Michigan's Adventure in that way), with a last ride on Hellcat, and we wandered around taking pictures for only ten minutes or so. For us, that's pretty restrained lingering.

Trivia: James Madison sent his 1814 State of the Union report to Congress less than four weeks after the British burned Washington, after calling Congress into session two months early. He noted the United States wanted only ``peace and friendship on honorable terms'' from Britain. Source: Union 1812: The Americans Who Fought The Second War Of Independence, A J Langguth.

Currently Reading: Empires Of The Word: A Language History Of The World, Nicholas Ostler.