austin_dern

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.