austin_dern

We got up Sunday, a little too late for the hotel's breakfast, and I printed out the maybe-unnecessary and maybe-falsified ArriveCan receipts for our passage through Ontario. I also did one more check to see if I could find my poor lost pens in my car; no luck. They must have evaporated at Sylvan Beach, and I bet it was on the Bomber ride. I also got a picture of the weird sign promising the Bon-Ton and the Sears were there. We didn't go past the place with the Arthur Treacher's again.

After a spot of trouble finding our way back to the main road --- it turns out our hotel was so on top of it that my satellite navigator couldn't imagine we needed direction --- we were off, heading westward. If we had more time we might have hung around Rochester more; it turns out there had been a large pinball tournament characterized as a ``mini-Pinburgh'' that weekend. Also it turns out there's several antique carousels in the area, such as a 1905 Dentzel, a 1928 Allan Herschell, and a 1924 Spillman. We keep saying we need to sometime do a carousels trip out to Binghamton, but now I'm wondering if we don't need to just take the Thruway through to Albany, pop up to Saratoga Springs (a 1910 Mangels/Illions), and then head back on I-88.

On the way back we pulled off at any old stop for lunch. I assumed we'd be able to find something we could eat at this gas station. I also assumed we could buy gas there, but I couldn't even get the pumps to the point where they asked me for my card. It took so long at this that someone from the register inside came out and asked if we were having trouble, and yeah, we were. She gave it a try and didn't get any farther than I did, so we went inside to pay there. It turns out their credit card network was not playing nicely with anything. I was ready to give up, but she said if I paid for a specific amount they could engage the pump for that. So I made a guess and bought US$30 worth of gas, which didn't quite fill the tank completely, but was enough to get us home. I like the range on my car and especially like that for most of this trip I was cruising at up to 60 miles per gallon, somehow. (Hybrid cars usually get better mileage in city driving.)

Also they didn't have anything vegetarians could eat apart from chips, even though it was a fairly large and modern-styled gas station. So we took a guess at which way town was and drove in, finding a Taco Bell. Also realizing that this was Batavia, where we had gone to eat at a family restaurant twice back in 2019, around our visit to Darien Lake. We'd drive past the exit for that park, and think about what a happy day that was. Also that that's another park with the Fascination game, although I don't believe it was running the day we visited.

As we kept driving closer to Buffalo we drove over Grand Island, and right past the location of what was formerly Fantasy Island. The park has only slowly been reopening under Gene Staples's management, as Niagara Amusement Park and Splash World. Mostly kiddie rides and the water park first, which, fair enough. Apparently the Silver Comet roller coaster is now running there; I'm not sure if it was at the time we visited. We saw the Silver Comet from the road, though; we also saw the Ferris Wheel, although that hasn't been running. It still bore the old Martin's Fantasy Island logo, now two park names out of date.

Niagara Amusement Park is getting several old friends in. One is the Shuttle Loop, a coaster we had ridden as the Cascabel at la Feria de Chapultepec back in 2018. (Others may have ridden it when it was at Kennywood, as the Laser Loop.) Another is the Ghost Train, which we'd ridden as the Flying Witch dark ride at Rye Playland. And yet another is dear to our heart: the Serpent, formerly at Kokomo's Family Fun Center in Saginaw, surprised and broke our hearts by going to the other side of the Great Lakes on us. I'll write more about that unless I forget.

Oh yeah, also coming in, according to Wikipedia? A caterpillar ride that had formerly been at La Feria de Chapultepec. Wikipedia says the caterpillar was operating at that park until 2019, that is, that we could have seen it. But if we had seen it --- and we were all over that park --- we would absolutely have ridden it, and had four thousand pictures of the now-rare ride. I can find pictures of the caterpillar at La Feria, but not any more reliable dates about when it was there, or any park maps to say where it was and how we could possibly have missed it. This park map from 2013 lists a ``Tren del Amor'' which seems like a name someone might give a caterpillar ride (it goes around in a circle, like a Himalaya or Musik Express, but a canopy closes over each car), but I can't find a picture that would confirm this. (I don't see any ride names that are obviously a translation of 'Caterpillar'.)

So that will be a mystery for a future visit, all going well.

We went on through Niagara Falls and somehow while following the satellite navigator's directions to get to the Rainbow Bridge, I got lost. While the satellite navigator made up its mind what to do next I started just driving around trusting there would be street signs to the second-most-prominent feature of Niagara Falls, and so it was. We joined the quite long line of cars at the border check around the Rainbow Bridge.

If our experience getting into Ontario early Sunday afternoon was a reliable guide, then we had made a very good choice Friday to drive east and cross at the no-wait border crossing at Thousand Island Bridges. It was at least a half-hour, maybe 45 minutes, just between paying the toll and getting to the passport check.

When we got to the Canadian passport booth the customs person waved off the ArriveCan receipts, which now join the mass of papers we'll leave around the house for when we need scrap someday. She asked where we were driving from, and where we came from, and then asked if we were just driving through Ontario. I blinked and said, truthfully, ``Well, we were hoping to stop and see the Falls.'' She waved us in and there we went, our cover story about ``deciding'' to stay at a Niagara Falls Holiday Inn unneeded and unasked-for.

On to our first attempt to ride Leviathan, and what we really rode instead!

Fountain just within the Medieval Fair section. The base has an inscription warning 'Drink Ye Not'.

St George and the Dragon, we suppose, at the top of that fountain.

And from the fountain you can see Wonder Mountain. The Castle Trader there is the spot that had that dragon plush.

Leviathan's ride sign, seen from behind. I did not remember that it had an image of the roller coaster on it, but bunnyhugger tells me it did.

The workings underneath Wild[e] Beast[e]'s launch platform. Can you spot the gate-opening mechanisms? It's a long metal pipe connected to a few other metal pipes.

At the station Wild[e] Beast[e] has a plaque giving the ride's manufacture name (three E's, not all in a row), and showing off an old logo (only one E), and two Crew of the Year posters, both from more than ten years ago and for the Drop Tower ride, which this is not.

Trivia: The ancient Athenian calendar had months which were either ``full'', with 30 days, or ``hollow'', with 29,. Full and hollow months generally but not always alternated. Source: Mapping Time: The Calendar and its History, EG Richards.

Currently Reading: New Brunswick, New Jersey: The Decline and Revitalization of Urban America, David Listokin, Dorothea Berkhout, James W Hughes.

Today is just a day for my humor blog. Here's what's been running:

• Tales From The 80s, last week's big piece, with the shocking revelation about Tales From The Darkside.
• In Which I Encounter Some Bambi LARP while on my evening walk.
• Statistics Saturday: Top REM Studio Albums Of The Year, 1983 – 2011 a guide both useful and dumb.
• 60s Popeye: Paper Pasting Pandemonium, but a polite pandemonium so, you know, a cartoon.
• Filling my mind so it’s good that I got my work done early today one of those quick dumb bits.
• What’s Going On In Mary Worth? Is banana bread hard to make? June – August 2020 and seriously, how can you not work out how to bake banana bread? My dad sent me an e-mail about this specifically.
• Statistics August: People Wanted To Know About The Guy Who Drew Pluggers Last Month, my usual readership review.
• Everything There Is To Say About Writing A Résumé so you never need worry about me repeating this week's big piece.

And now ... we reach the end of our Darien Lake trip. Much of the last hour was taken up with the magic show, but the lighting conditions were not ones that let me get good pictures, unfortunately.

Ride of Steel's station has these diagonal slats that make it look like the Volunteers of America thrift store out on Saginaw.

The magic show! bunnyhugger remembered the magician from when he worked at Cedar Point, a decade-plus ago. She volunteered for one of his stunts (of which I got no good pictures; it was quite dark) and she wasn't able to get the hang of a trick he showed everyone in the audience how to do (a thing about making rubber bands appear to jump from two fingers to the other two fingers on your hand). Afterwards we talked about Cedar Point and he told us that it wasn't that he got too big for them --- he went on to working cruise ships for a while --- but that Cedar Point decided to do their magic shows in-house rather than hire outside magicians. So that was fun to learn.

There were several minutes left in the park's operating day after the magic show so we rushed to Predator for one last ride here.

A look at Predator's lift chain, on its return leg; the lift hill is above us here.

Comic foregrounds for your photography needs.

Ah, so, the Giant Wheel: notice the sign. This particular Ferris Wheel had been at the 1982 World's Fair in Knoxville, Tennessee, and was the World's Largest Ferris Wheel at the time. We didn't ride it.

Midway game operator putting away the Bank Shot prizes.

The center fountain and surrounding areas as we walked out of the park.

A better-populated directions sign than the one from a couple days ago.

The other side of that directions sign, and a view of one of the midway games that I think is the one we played. We won a pineapple duck.

Going back out the park; here's the overhead arch with the six flags from the departing side of things.

The exit gate and its sweet message ``We Miss You Already!'' Nice place. It was 5pm when we left it.

Trivia: Ecstasy was originally patented in Germany in 1914, by Merck, as a treatment for obesity. It was never marketed. Source: Molecules at an Exhibition: The Science of Everyday Life, John Emsley.

Currently Reading: Equal Time for Pogo, Walt Kelly.

PS: How August 2020 Saw People Finding Non-Comics Things Here, some statistics for my other blog.

There's a grasshopper in the basement, somewhere. It's more convenient to us than having a katydid in the bedroom, but we have to hope the grasshopper knows what he's doing. Seems to be near the hay kept downstairs, at least.

Also, the ant colony in our driveway has had another pretty good year: the other day it was sending out torrents of winged ants, looking for a place to expand into. Apparently the neighborhood Facebook group has had a lot of people saying their ants are flying too. I guess it's nice to know the last couple years have been good for somebody.

Pinball At The Zoo is still officially scheduled for the first weekend in October. It can't possibly happen, of course, but I'm curious how close we'll get to the date before they concede the point.

Comic strip reading, now. What's Going On In Mary Worth? Is banana bread hard to make? June - August 2020 gets its plot reviewed and it comes to the giddy delight of Toby, alleged grown woman, coming this close to burning California down in the attempt to make banana bread. It's great.

Now back to Darien Lake, in the June of 2019, and another roller coaster with a special surprise!

Ride of Steel's queue, seen from the rear of the launch station. There's a lot of space for riders; the lift hill is on the right here.

Ride of Steel returning to the station. You can see how it really looks like it goes off forever from here; that's the ride with a hill perpendicular to the return hills in back.

The Predator: Darien Lake's wooden roller coaster and a well-regarded ride.

Some plaques commemorating, on the left, Inside Track's naming this ninth-best roller coaster in the world in 1990; on the right, American Coaster Enthusiasts and a few other groups salute the park for having a great wooden roller coaster.

Maker plate for Predator. Summers and Dinn are from Cincinnati because that's the group that grew out of making The Beast at Kings Island, a ride that by all right should have been a fiasco (novice roller coaster designer just going back and asking for more money to put in more coaster, and getting it) but worked out brilliantly.

Predator returning ot the station. The woman's hunched over just enough that, with the light reflection on her seat, it looks like she's a bad Photoshop job. I swear she really existed.

And here's the train after us getting ready for dispatch. The Predator was, delighted to say, my 250th distinct roller coaster credi.

Walking down the Predator's exit. It goes out onto a lower part of the park so there is a lot of space to walk back and forth leaving the ride. You can see the track of the coaster in the background.

Ride of Steel's station as seen from above, at the Predator's exit queue.

And here the Predator's exit queue gives a view of Ride of Steel's station and also some maintenance areas, including hoops of lights.

Predator's lift hill, and the tunnel underneath it which you walk through to get to Ride of Steel or to get back from its exit. The main part of the park is in the background to the right.

Haymaker, a ride which looks much like a large-size Paratrooper. It's made by Heintz Fahtze and if flatrides.com is right, this is the only installation of this model running.

Trivia: In 1790 Representative William Smith of South Carolina argued that the Residence Act, which moved the seat of government to Philadelphia for ten years and then to the District of Columbia, was unconstitutional. His reasoning: only Congress had the authority to decide when and where it would meet, and therefore a bill requiring the President's signature to say where and when it would meet was patently constitutional. Washington deferred to Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson for advice about whether the bill was safe to sign. Source: Washington Burning: How a Frenchman's Vision for our Nation's Capital Survived Congress, the Founding Father, and the Invading British Army, Les Standiford. And yeah, they got really hung up on constitutional sophistry in this era but I'd like to see some deeper thinking into constitutional implications.

Currently Reading: The Plastic-Man Archives, Volume 8, Jack Cole. Editor Dale Crain.

PS: So I'm hosting the 141th Playful Math Education Blog Carnival and I'd be grateful for your help!

We went to another drive-in! And one we haven't been to before, on US 23 near Flint. This brought us very close to our friend MWS's house, but he wasn't available so we couldn't sit in adjacent cars or anything. Our goal: watching Bill and Ted Face The Music. The gauntlet to get there: they showed it after the R-rated and quite violent Unhinged, because apparently every other movie they could possibly have paired it with was unavailable? Like, I could get deciding not to pair it with either of the first two Bill and Ted movies. But, like, why not Wayne's World, then? Or Airheads? Harold and Kumar? Any other genial-dopey-pair movie?

Also on the bill: light rain that turned into steady rain with a massive lightning storm, which was just lightly immersive as the first scenes in Unhinged took place at night in the rain, and the climactic scenes in Face The Music included a lot of alarming things in the sky.

I'll have more thoughts on Face The Music later. I want to vent some about Unhinged, which is coming to a bad-movies podcast near you. It avoids being offensive by virtue of being too dumb to make the audience think we should take it seriously. But, like, the opening credits is this long spiel explaining the phenomenon of ``road rage'', like this is 1992 and they're a special report for your Fear At Five local newscast. And even tosses in how with the deep cutbacks to police departments and thousands of police layoffs there's no way of handling increasing ``road rage''. So it starts off mis-reading the room so fully that you'd think it was working for the Biden-Harris campaign.

Anyway this may be my New Jersey upbringing showing, but you have an absolute and unqualified right to give the finger to anybody who's screwing up traffic, and that person has to grimace and accept, yeah, that they deserved it.

Also an observation I made during the film: cars don't catch on fire and explode at the end of every accident the way they used to in the 70s and 80s anymore. Now they just go free-wheeling end-over-end while parts fly off. It's neat to recognize what stunt effects are going to date this era of film and to wonder what their replacement will be.

Oh also after both movies, I learned this drive-in has some demon lurking in the men's room. One of the sinks had a plastic bag duct-taped over it, and the thing was billowed out full as I started washing. And then the sink breathed. Like, the air inside evacuated and the bag fell down over the sink handle. A couple seconds later it billowed out again to full. And a couple seconds after that, the bag deflated again. So I don't know what extradimensional horror is lurking under there and breathing in the men's room sink at the US 23 Drive-In in Flint but I'm not stupid enough to stick around to find out, thank you. I warned bunnyhugger about this but did not take her over to see it because I do not want our faces ripped off by some tentacled hell-beast THANK YOU. We drove home at 120 mph.

Back to fun stuff. Darien Lake, for example, in the June of 2019.

Bees! There's some wonderful bushes lining the queue to Viper and we were just admiring these when we overheard someone complain that the park put in all these plants that attracted bees. bunnyhugger and I looked aghast at each other after hearing this.

And here's Viper, lift hill on the left and its big loop to the right, with a train just past the brake point.

Viper's station is pretty airy, although the paint seems to be a bit old.

Viper arriving at the station. I think we got to skip ahead in line when they asked if there were any two-rider groups waiting.

Viper's lift hill seen from the exit, which does wander through some surprisingly empty park space.

Big sign for Grizzly Run, which we thought was the name for an area of the park. No; that's just the log flume's name. The area?

The area's called Rowdy's Ridge, and I like these ride safety signs for giving you both the area and the ride name. Also a pretty good view of the ride logo.

Darien Lake amusement park is adjacent to, and somewhat grown together with, the Darien Lake Performing Arts Center. Here's the gate that separates the two. There's also a campground that abuts both.

Moose! Moose! Moose on the loose! A surprisingly fun ride here. The mount goes along the track, rocking up and down, while a prerecorded audio tells you about the things you're passing, like this ``campground'', and tells corny jokes. The ride op talked about it as the best ride in the park and it is, certainly, the one we remember most fondly. We rode one like it, but serious and medieval-knight-themed, at Festyland in France and it's surprising that the ride doesn't have more installations that we can see.

Props outside Moose On The Loose. It's the kind of ride where they talk about the chow.

Moose On The Loose's logo and a pretty good description of what you get from the ride.

Loading station. The ride op insists on you putting your thumbs to your temples to make moose antlers before setting off. And was happy talking to us about other parks; bunnyhugger had her Six Flags over Texas t-shirt on so the ride op knew exactly what sort of people we were.

Trivia: The Soviet Union went through seven military Chiefs-of-Operations between June and December 1942. Source: Why The Allies Won, Richard Overy.

Currently Reading: Computers In Spaceflight: The NASA Experience, James E Tomayko. NASA Contractor Report 182505.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We went in.

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

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

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

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

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

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