austin_dern

By now it was early afternoon and we were ready for lunch, which suggested eating somewhere in Erie. We were also right across the road from Waldameer, which doesn't require paying at the gate. You could just walk into the park, and, we did. While eating fries and overhearing the Swingin' Safari show again, we felt it was ridiculous to be in the park and not ride anything. So we bought a Wally Card --- a credit-card like contraption that's the only way the park takes money --- and put enough on it to take a ride on the Ravine Flyer II. That'd give us happy memories to leave Erie on.

When we got to Sandusky, Ohio, we took a detour away from the usual approach, the Causeway. Back before 1957 the only way to drive into the park was on the Chaussee, a two-lane road along a narrow spit of land to the east of the park. The Chaussee is still there, and it's at least geographically sensible to take it when you come from the east like that. We'd meant to take it last year but couldn't find it. The signs try desperately to ward you off of it. It's a neat path, though, on a tiny width of land (some of the Chaussee has actually sunk and is no longer drivable), with houses on one side and beachfront on the other, and you get a nice long time to see the park.

The park was packed as we drove in, at an hour nearing sunset. We'd tried several times to find pinball at parks this trip and come up with nothing, but Cedar Point, we knew, wouldn't disappoint us. They've had a row of a dozen games in the main arcade, a selection of 1970s electromechanicals plus for some reason two (count 'em) copies of Atari's Hercules. This was an attempt at helping pinball fight back against video games by making it really big, and it's close to twice the length and width of a normal pinball machine, played with a cue ball-sized ball. It's also achingly slow, because the table has to be very level or the ball would come screaming down at the flippers, and this causes the ball to roll very, very slowly across an enormous field. Plus the machine ate bunny_hugger's quarters and we had to have the attendant load up a credit. (On the bright side, it's got quite good art showing the various labors of Hercules. It's just a dull game.) Still, we had our pinball, and we got to see a number of people come in and play a couple games to their general delight.

Our first ride was the Blue Streak Roller Coaster, itself celebrating its 50th year and so, depending on just how you treat Kennywood's Thunderbolt, either the second- or the third-youngest wooden roller coaster we rode this trip. Cedar Point's been working on making the park better decorated lately, and the place has looked very good, including chaser lights along more of Blue Streak than I remember before.

We walked back towards Gemini, to see what's become of the old Gemini Midway which we expected to be obliterated as part of the park's renovations. It was changed in many of the ways we expected: the former Junior Gemini kiddie coaster now opens onto Camp Snoopy and is called Woodstock Express (though you enter by going underneath the roller coaster's track, always attractive to us). The Monster ride has new lights and, we think, new-painted cars, plus a new sign that's awfully attractive and that looks like it should age well. The new flying scooters and Disk'O ride are similarly well-apportioned, and the whole midway's freshly painted and covered by an overhanging mesh of lights. It's a pity that much of what bunny_hugger remembered as the Cedar Point of her youth was lost, but what's there is quite attractive and looks like it should age well.

The Gemini roller coaster was only running on one track, but there was almost no wait. As we walked through the line some kids ran ahead of us and we took up our casual walking-wide stance, making it hard for people to cut in line. Sure enough some kids said their friends were ahead of us and I said something like, ``Oh, don't worry, you'll get together at the station''. And they did; it was a walk-on ride.

We had heard rumors that the Iron Dragon ride had put seat belts on. Iron Dragon is a suspended roller coaster, with over-the-head restraints, that almost moves gently enough it barely needs any restraints. It's the only roller coaster in the park that explicitly allows you to take loose stuff like stuffed dolls you've won into the car with you. We wanted to check it out but the ride was closed to allow the Luminosity show --- with dancing, lasers, fire and fireworks --- to proceed. I suggested they might reopen Iron Dragon after Luminosity was done, but bunny_hugger's more aware of park procedure than me: the show starts a half-hour before park closing and finishes as the park finishes for the night.

So, we closed the night with a ride on the Kiddie Carousel, which was indeed when the park closed for the night (they turned the lights off after we were done with the Kiddie Carousel) and joined the masses leaving the park.

Here, I'd made a bad strategic error: in a bit of puckishness I found the parking spot closest to the front that I could, for the pointless bragging rights of parking, I think, two rows from the entrance (preferred parking excepted) on a fiendishly busy day. The trouble is this meant every car in the world was in line ahead of us to get out of the park. We did a lot of sitting, waiting for cars to clear out so we might join the rivers of cars waiting to flow into the main paths of cars waiting to join the larger paths leading back over the Causeway. At one point an SUV which had been sitting dead turned on and jumped into an empty spot ahead of me; I couldn't gun the car to take the spot back because a family of pedestrians was just ahead of me. I could honk, angrily, but that just made the pedestrians worry about what they'd done wrong. All the meanwhile the fun of a two-amusement-park day and the cheer of dropping in an amusement park mostly to play pinball was wearing off, and bunny_hugger was getting more anxious about how much driving we'd have to do after midnight.

After, without exaggeration, an hour of shuffling around I finally got free to break out of the rivers of traffic and exit by way of the Chaussee, starting off a couple miles farther west than would be ideal but certainly saving hours of traffic time, even despite the traffic jams along that. At one stop we did get to see the nearly-full moon above the water, framed by trees, in a scene so beautiful it was worth all the traffic anxiety for its gorgeousness.

We drove home in a straight shot, rather than taking the one or two breaks we otherwise might have, so as to be home and abed sooner rather than later.

The house was fine, of course, and the bed so wonderfully familiar and inviting and ready for us.

Trivia: The first popular American board game, The Mansion of Happiness (made in the 1840s), featured a spiral of 66 spaces to get to its eponymous goal; named spaces on the paths there included ``humility'', ``charity'', ``generosity'', ``cruelty'', ``whipping post'', and ``prison''. Source: The Game Makers: The Story Of Parker Brothers From Tiddledy Winks To Trivial Pursuit, Philip E Orbanes.

Currently Reading: A Call To Arms: Mobilizing America For World War II, Maury Klein.

PS: What's Going On In The Old Universe, investigating whether something's just got to happen if you let the universe run long enough.

Nevertheless we were really there more for the rides than the beauty, and they have got some beauties of rides. They hadn't any new rides from the previous year, admittedly, but we had more chances to go on them, and to try things we'd passed up for lack of time in 2013. The least notable of them, and the one with longest lines, was the Steel Dragon, a spinning coaster. It tends to attract lines because it's clearly a roller coaster, but it's not so big as to be terrifying, and since only four people can go in a car at once it has relatively low capacity.

The Steel Dragon sends up parties in groups of four, two facing forward and two facing backward, and after the first big drop and hill the car's allowed to spin freely so that the rides are never quite the same time after time. I'd keep trying to get a ride facing backward as the ride starts --- you just so rarely see down the lift hill --- but those are the choice seats and people would run to them first. Nevertheless, it's hard to figure a park which wouldn't be improved by adding one like this.

The big and most notable would be the Ravine Flyer II, named for the Ravine Flyer roller coaster of the 1930s. The notable feature (shared by the long-gone and the newly-present roller coasters) is that it leaps across the four-lane highway adjacent to the park for a quick bit of spiralling around. It's just fun to go across the road that way. It's also fun to be on the highway and see a roller coaster leaping above you. (There's also a kiddie version, the Ravine Flyer 3, which for complicated reasons was built before Ravine Flyer II; it hasn't got any roads to leap over but it does cross the entry queue for a cute imitation of its namesake/s.)

The original Ravine Flyer was in about the same position as II, but was torn down after a man's death (he fell out of the car and onto the highway), but a part of it remains. The original ride station survives as one of the picnic pavilions, and after a couple of roller coaster rides we walked around the pavilion trying to work out out just where the roller coaster might have been. It's hard to figure exactly, really: as best we can figure the likely track width and space needed for brakes and other mechanisms it seems like there's way too much space there. Possibly they had much of the ride queue underneath the cover too. We tried to imagine, from knowing where the station was, and that it had to cross the highway, what Ravine Flyer I might have looked like, but kept falling short. I've only found a few little glimpses of the original coaster, which don't give much to go on, but then, what's imagination for?

Other notable historically important rides include The Whacky Shack, one of the last and best-preserved Bill Tracey dark rides. The link there provides a lot of great pictures, showing in brighter and clearer light than usual what you get by riding on it. Waldameer spent much of the off-season between 2013 and 2014 focusing on repairing and restoring attractions, and the Whacky Shack's one of the beneficiaries. It's still got playing, in the entrance queue, an endlessly repeating loop warning that some disembodied spirit may just take off your arm if you go messing with the props.

The park's also got a really good Pirates Cove walkthrough, again a Bill Tracey attraction, and that too seemed to have more stuff just working this year than last. We were pressed a little during our walkthrough as packs of kids were running through, trying to get ahead of us, and we couldn't figure what the point was besides some kid-induced desire to get through as much as they possibly could at once. We lingered more than usual, including walking all the way through a maze that there's a bypass for.

The unusual-for-us ride to go on was the Thunder River, a log flume attraction. bunny_hugger had sworn them off last year after several unhappy soakings, but in the temporary sunlit heat of the day at Idlewild we took one and that went well, and that Saturday was, after its rough start, looking similarly hot and sunny. Thunder River's quite nicely designed, with a pair of canals winding through the Waldameer beauty, and a pair of lifts and drops that didn't soak us more than we were ready to take.

The horrible mistake we took was the Sky Ride. As with many parks they had a suspended cable car system and we thought it'd be a decent way to get from near the north to the far south end of the park. Getting on the ride gave us a number of fine aerial views of the park, at least so far as they can be seen through the heavy tree cover. The Comet roller coaster particularly looks really beautiful from above, almost like an ornate cylindrical cake. We also spotted a couple of roofs onto which apparently there's a tradition of throwing hair scrunchies and rubber bands and coins. This helped feed my thoughts of something Roller Coaster Tycoon 4 should have, but won't. In about long enough for bunny_hugger to have had enough time spent suspended by cable car far above we seemed to be getting near the south end of the park and then to realize the mistake.

See, we'd assumed there were two stations for the sky car ride. There's not; the ride just takes you out over the park and brings you back, which is fine if you haven't got a fear of heights and if you don't want to sit rather than walk the length of the car ride. bunny_hugger's not so fortunate regarding heights and was not happy to see all the terrain we'd just hovered over flowing back beneath us, especially as at least one car had idiot kids rocking so as to shake themselves and, we could feel, ourselves too.

Absolutely none of this should be taken as a mark against the park. I don't think there's anything we might seriously hold against it past that it wasn't open late enough in the evening for us. And we got, while waiting for a front-seat ride in Ravine Flyer II, to see they had posted an ``Operator Message for Train Breakdown'', taped up as if they figure to need it often. (You could probably have written it yourself, without any help. It reads: ``Ladies and Gentleman [sic], we are experiencing technical difficulty [sic]. Our Maintenance Staff is working to correct the issue. Thank you for your patience.'')

Our last ride of the day would be through the Whacky Shack, and I think we were even the last car to go through. The ride operator checked his watch to see if it wasn't just too late. Sadly it wasn't even sunset yet, though the twilight glow was settling in. We wandered around the park a little more, admiring it and taking scenic photographs and the like, and letting the parking lot crowd empty out, before returning to our hotel (and then heading out again, I think to Subway, for dinner).

Trivia: The cost of home delivery of groceries in 1923 averaged 1.2 percent of a store's total sales, an amount about equal to half a typical store's profits. Source: The Great A&P and the Struggle For Small Business In America, Marc Levinson.

Currently Reading: A Call To Arms: Mobilizing America For World War II, Maury Klein.

Last year we had intended Waldameer, in Erie, Pennsylvania, to be the last park we spent a day at. It got cheated in time because we stopped in Conneaut Lake Park and that ended up being so much more fascinating than we could have imagined. We could only give Waldameer a partial-day trip, and while it's a smaller park it was also clearly worth a full day. This time around we were ready and set aside full days for both northwestern-Pennsylvania parks.

I also managed to immediately screw things up a little by failing to bring my camera along. We had a hotel that was barely two miles from the park, which was great, but it did mean giving up our great, by-the-gate parking lot. But that was saved by the rain which came through. In what we guessed was the tail end of the storms which kept visiting Conneaut Lake Park the previous day, a heavy rainstorm started just about as we entered the parking lot and it carried on as we drove back to the hotel, returned to the amusement park --- we were able to get a slightly worse spot, but still first row, against the gate --- and had some time to sit and wait as the rain receded. I suppose it's better we spent the time in the car driving back and forth rather than sitting in the car in the parking lot, or hiding under a pavilion enclosure. Still, I felt dumb.

The rain we were a little optimistic about, since if there were heavy storms in the late morning or early afternoon we might see lesser lines. And it was a weekday during the school year, but we forgot that every school in the area would be sending out delegations on field trip days. This set off a debate about values: both bunny_hugger and I had school field trips to amusement parks, when we were in school. Hers put up some pretense of being educational by giving students worksheets to fill out information like how high a roller coaster is and how fast it goes at fastest; mine just trusted we would, eventually, get the school bus back home. In no case is spending a day messing around at an amusement park of any educational merit, so, what's worse: her schools for pretending this was a good use of the 180 class days per year, or mine for admitting it's a June day and we're not going to do anything useful in the ovens of our classrooms anyway?

Still, there were several schools having field trip days so that promised to send flocks of kids, often running through rides ahead of us, at least until the appointed hour for the school buses to return people home.

We got our wristbands for unlimited rides --- Waldameer offers both pay-one-price and buy-one-ticket admission to rides, so you can just walk into the park and hang out if you feel like that --- and were right next to the arcade so we naturally poked in to see if they had a pinball machine. We'd checked for pinball machines at all the arcades but seen none, not even at Kennywood (if Conneaut Lake had a functional arcade we missed it), and Waldameer wasn't an exception. They had video and redemption games, though.

We did try playing some of the rolling-ball games, ones akin to Fascination. bunny_hugger turned out to be a natural at this Blackjack-inspired one where rolling the balls scored various cards and you got tickets for rolling up to 21 (and lots of points for getting 21 on exactly five balls), and soon racked up very many token tickets. We looked over the merchandise and found that we'd have to get several hundred more tickets to afford the cheapest attractive thing, a triangular pendant for the park made in the style of triangular pendants from the 70s and 80s, and stashed the tickets back in the car. We would come back later in the day and get the rest of the tickets needed so we had this little triumph, and at a cost certainly not three times what just buying the pendant in the gift shop would have been. (Besides treating the real prize as playing enough to get the prize, we didn't suspect the pendant was for sale in the gift store until after we'd won it, anyway.)

Trivia: The parliament organized in Frankfurt in 1848 contained 95 lawyers, 105 professors and secondary-school teachers, 124 bureaucrats, and 100 judicial officials. Source: 1848: The Revolutionary Tide in Europe, Peter N Stearns.

Currently Reading: A Call To Arms: Mobilizing America For World War II, Maury Klein.

PS: To Build A Universe, a spot of mathematical physics creeping into what happens if you just let the universe run on long enough.

We haven't seen Conneaut Lake Park in one of its important phases, that of when it puts on its Halloween livery and presents itself as if ghost-haunted. Given the state of things it's very easy to imagine the park as haunted, and it's hard to imagine what could be done to make scarier, say, that abandoned jungle path, or the tunnel which the Blue Streak roller coaster goes through that's got all these rotted boards with holes in them and garbage bags collecting stale rainwater that sometimes spills out. But there's some traces of it. Besides the Hostile Hostel front --- the attraction put in by that Mission Amusement show for the Travel Channel --- there's ``Missing'' signs that have to represent some Halloween stuff left up because Conneaut Lake Park.

But the ``Missing'' signs are done with a very nice touch, showing faces and such mentions as ``last seen on July 25th 2013 refusing to smile at the person taking his photo'' (this to a person who's just glaring at the camera) or ``last seen on July 22nd 2013 with a paintbrush, a paint bucket and a dream''. This is so nice and normal and park-healthy that it's reassuring to see and only maybe later you notice that the ``Missing: George Christon'' poster (``last seen on August 1st, 2013 drawing pictures of roller coasters using sidewalk chalk'') ends with the line ``If you have any information or have seen Rita [sic] please contact the police immediately!'' If you don't feel warm and fuzzy about that this isn't a place you should ever be.

And we had by now spent nearly the whole day at the park, between rides and exploration and sitting in the carousel building waiting out the rains. We did spot a couple of American Coaster Enthusiasts in the park --- they're easy to spot, generally, because they're generally middle-aged guy nerds wearing cargo shorts and T-shirts that either have the ACE logo or show off obscure or distant parks, so imagine a guy holding forth on how it's Joss Whedon's critics who have a problem with female characters whilst wearing a Polar Coaster T-shirt from Story Land in Glen, New Hampshire, and you know who to look for --- and enjoyed a weirdly long ride of the chair swings. The ride had gone about a normal cycle, but then stopped because a kid needed to get off because of some reason or other. The ride operator told everyone else they could stay on if they wanted, and then we went through a whole ride cycle again; it was enough swings, really, to risk being too much swings, but you can't argue with the general niceness of having so much ride time.

Still the evening was coming, and the wonderful glow that a park gets around sunset, and there was a bit of rain and then it let up enough that we decided to just try riding the Blue Streak and the Carousel for as long as we could. Blue Streak is a wonderful roller coaster, and as often happens, it's even better at night when it's harder to see just what's ahead of you. I remember we'd thought last time that the back was a better ride than the front --- not that either was bad, but that the return leg is less exciting in the front seats --- but this time around, and especially at night, we didn't have that sense. Maybe we just didn't get it last time, perhaps because the whole Conneaut Lake Park experience was overwhelming us. Maybe they've been getting the Blue Streak in better shape yet. Maybe we just had a better roller coaster day.

So that's what we did for the rest of the night, until the park had to close and release its handful of guests and larger handful of employees. We took a long slow walk back out, taking in what might be our last visit there --- though, if we did use our Idlewild rain check for their Halloween event, and took in Kennywood's, wouldn't Conneaut Lake Park just be perfect to see then? --- and regretting that the miniature golf course had been too rain-soaked to play, and went out to the parking lot where mine was the only car still present.

We drove north, to our Erie-area hotel, and wondered about what the journalist was doing there.

Trivia: Beginning in 1281 the government of Venice began paying subsidies on salt landed in the city from other areas; merchants could then use these funds to dominate the spice trade and lead the grain trade in the Mediterranean. Source: Salt: A World History, Mark Kurlansky.

Currently Reading: Bob-Lo: An Island In Troubled Waters, Annessa Carlisle.

The carousel, as it did last year, had Artie the Artizan band organ playing, in good order and without needing any emergency repairs. We spent a bit of time watching the horses, and trying to guess which of the ones on the inner row were originals (nearly all the carousel's animals have been sold off and replaced with Carousel Works replicas) --- we can find documentation only of one but apparently five of the inner-ring ones are antiques to the ride --- and noticing the ride still had one of the horses facing backwards with a giant plush rabbit strapped across the saddle. No idea, still. We also paid more attention to the pales on the center of the carousel. They seem to depict stuff in the Conneaut Lake area, and we realized one of the panels shows the Log Cabin. The gift shop on the midway, the one with the curious collection of Geauga Lake merchandise (Geauga Lake, in northeastern Ohio, closed nearly a decade ago), is called the Log Cabin Gift Shop. Is there a connection?

When we got to the gift shop we asked the cashier. She said she didn't know about the panel but apparently the Log Cabin used to be a restaurant. There are a series of short bar-type stools at the main window, the way that a diner or a soda counter might be organized. Perhaps the gift shop really did used to be a restaurant of enough local note to be memorialized on the carousel boards. It's yet another mystery of the park.

The carousel has the arm for a brass ring dispenser, and it's on some older lists as a carousel with a working brass ring machine. We did not see it work, but that might be a result of it being a low-attendance day. There were never more than a scant few people in the park and there were not operators running every ride. (Some were running back and forth between several rides based on where people wanted to go.) Running the brass ring dispenser would require at minimum two people on the carousel ride, and there wasn't the staff for that. Stil, on one ride we did take outer row horses and reach for the imaginary ring, which we credit as practice for when we get to Knoebels next. (If all goes well that will be in about a month.)

The Turtle ride, or Tumble Bug depending on which park you go to, was there and running again, and the rearmost car was open to passengers again. Our operator this time didn't tell anyone the object was to not hold on to the center --- which made such a thrilling ride last time --- but it did have a guy riding who noticed the Leap-the-Dips shirt I was wearing and talk about how he wanted to Altoona and enjoy Lakemont Park.

And we rode the Devil's Den, one of the park's prized dark house rides. This was repainted as part of that Travel Channel program's renovation work last year, with the main thing being the infamous gum wall, where you stick chewing gum, changed from showing off merely painted flames to also including a prominent devil's head and the encouragement ``Stick it to the Devil ... before he sticks you''. There's still a staggering array of bits of gum on the wall and the top of the ride at that part. On the inside there's a string of dark-house stunts like fake spiderwebs and fluorescent-painted monsters, which I believe have been repainted pretty much as they had been before. The ride looks in really good shape, considering, and I trusted that if the park has a future the Devil's Den ride will be part of its prouder attractions.

We stepped into Kiddieland --- there were even fewer kids around than there were regular patrons (I suppose that's logically necessary) and maybe two people working all the rides --- where we really hoped to see the Little Dipper since now we know that junior roller coaster is one of the oldest steel coasters still operating. Also we got to see a kid taken on the junior carousel. We were surprised to see the mechanism was working this time: the operator, who was talking quite nicely with the kid, who must have felt quite privileged to have the whole Kiddieland to herself, didn't have to grab a pole and walk it around. She just turned on the ride and it went. We expressed amazement about this to one another and realized that maybe wasn't tactful. We tried to be quiet.

We also had to rush out of the rain because the storms came back and threatened to drown the park. Fortunately Kiddieland is right next to the main carousel and has a direct entrance so we could wait out the storm in the bench seating that surrounds the carousel, but the rain kept going on, feinted an ending, and then came right back up again. After a slow beginning at the park the rain was promising to make things worse. The rain did start to pass, and we ventured out into the Kiddieland again to wonder at things like what was obviously some kind of stage for puppet shows or the like, and then the rain came back and we hid again.

While considering how very much this was like Roller Coaster Tycoon scenarios, where a bit of rain will turn any enclosed ride into people's favorites, we noticed that just across the road the bumper cars were working. We had passed on the bumper cars last year but heard that was a mistake because allegedly the cars run wild. We had no reason to doubt this, so we ran through a relative lull to catch them.

Unfortunately bunny_hugger and I were the only ones at the bumper cars then, which limits the fun of the things. And there was a puddle of water on part of the track which would make for an obstacle. But the cars could go pretty quickly. But the cars are quite swift. Or ... well, we'd learn on the next time around when two other people came on, and four functioning cars (possibly all there are) were on the track. Three of them move really quite fast, but on the second go-round I got one that was noticeably slower than the others. This happens. Also, the cars really do smash much more intensely than any other bumper cars I've ridden. Two cars crashing their fronts at an acute angle will have metal smash against metal, no question, and that is a livelier ride than any I've had, even in the ride's slow car. We waited out more rain in the carousel house, getting close-up photographs of all the horses, original and replacement.

Trivia: In 1968 an average of ten fully containerized cargo ships sailed the North Atlantic per week, carrying a total of 200,000 twenty-foot containers holding 1.7 million tons of freight. Source: The Box: How The Shipping Container Made The World Smaller And The World Economy Bigger, Marc Levinson.

Currently Reading: Bob-Lo: An Island In Troubled Waters, Annessa Carlisle.

We were driving roughly north from Pittsburgh and trusted that we'd find somewhere to eat along the way. We didn't exactly but we did stop at a gas station for a bathroom break, and to pick up some kind of snack, and on an impulse I decided to fill up the tank. It struck me that while we had half a tank of gas left, it's not like I was likely to cry out in the middle of a tiny Pennsylvania town, ``darned it, if only I hadn't refilled the gas!'' While I was filling it up --- and bunny_hugger was checking the rest stop's recreation areas for pinball machines (they had none) --- a pretty heavy rain got started. This wasn't a long-lasting one, but it was a warning for the day ahead.

We were returning, if all went well, to Conneaut Lake Park. It's hard to picture things quite going well for Conneaut Lake Park, given its postapocalyptic shape and the way stuff that should kill small amusement parks keeps happening there. Since our short visit last July they'd had some renovations done for the pilot episode of a Travel Channel show, including the installation of a new ``Hostile Hostel'' attraction for their Halloween shows, and suffered a catastrophic fire at the beach house, and been scheduled by the county for a tax sale based on nearly a million dollars of unpaid property taxes. By sense, the park was dead. They'd opened this year, and got volunteers out to help spruce it up and paint it. That's the sort of park it is. (It's also, bunny_hugger would learn, near the Pymatuning Reservoir, referred to as the spot ``where the ducks walk on the fish'', because the habit of people feeding wildlife is so prominent and respected there that every fish in the world comes up to be fed, and every duck in the world follows them. Roadside America has pictures, and they're stunning.)

This was Thursday, scheduled to be their first operating Thursday of the year, although we were not positive they wouldn't call it off, particularly when the morning was so heavily rainy. When we got to the parking lot, what we thought was the main parking lot, about twenty minutes after the park's scheduled opening, we saw ... nothing. Not a soul. This was a bit unsettling. But after all it was a weekday afternoon, and it'd just been raining, and we heard the rattling of the Blue Streak roller coaster's lift chain so that was running at least. And someone else came up and parked some distance from our car, so the scene wasn't completely abandoned. We could've gone to where the ducks walked on fish instead. (Actually, our contingency plan in case the park were closed for the day was to continue north to Waldameer park, and take the day there, and return to Conneaut Lake on Friday.)

The first thing we saw besides emptiness was that the front of the park had been repainted. The admission gates had fresh colors to them, even if the admission gate interiors were still dusty and abandoned, wooden folding chairs in various states of foldedness sitting around. You get ride tickets from a booth inside the park anyway. Behind the entrance were some Christmas wreaths. (This isn't a uniquely Conneaut Lake thing, I should point out; in the ride queue at Kennywood for The Phantom's Revenge we noticed their holiday decorations, sitting underneath the elevated launch station platform.)

There's still a curious empty spot where some flat ride used to be --- we noticed a rusty old screw thread on the ground and chuckled about the souvenir (which we didn't take) --- but the fences and the rides up front, doing test runs, looked fresh-painted. Some of the benches were also clearly newly painted in nice, bright and cheery colors. The Tilt-A-Whirl was still nonfunctional, but, the Flying Scooters and the swing ride were in good order.

Along the path to the midway is a miniature golf course, by reputation a great one, and also a narrow-gauge railroad. The station was visible but the train wasn't running; our understanding was that the engine --- historic and old and renovated thanks to a fundraising drive around 2006, memorialized in the walkway up to the station by bricks with people's names on them --- was destroyed in the fire that ruined the beach house and their Fascination tables and their spare Blue Streak roller coaster train. But we later found the train, sitting in the open, parts taken out for what looked like maintenance. Apparently the report was mistaken, or the damage was repairable.

In short, while the park didn't look like a normal, functioning spot with a healthy attendance and more than four months to run until it was sold to pay back taxes, it looked better than it had last year. It turns out that last year the park was also looking better than it had in years. In short, as much of a disaster area as Conneaut Lake Park had looked to us last year, we were seeing it on an upswing, as the place pulled itself together.

Last year we'd visited the park only because we realized it was conveniently on the way to Waldameer, and it'd give us the chance to see an antique carousel and a classic roller coaster, and it kept fascinating us more and more. The result was we had only a partial day at this park, and only a partial day at Waldameer. This time we set aside full days for both parks, and if the rain held off, we'd have plenty of time to explore Conneaut Lake Park. But the abundant time came also with an awful knowledge: barring a truly bizarre turn of events this would be the last time we'd ever see this tiny, ancient, clinging-by-the-love-of-its-community park before it was sold off and almost certainly closed.

Trivia: In early 1943 Alfred Hitchcock planned to direct a movie starring comedian Fred Allen. Allen objected to a plot twist by scenarist Sally Benson and the project was shelved. Source: Fred Allen: His Life And Wit, Robert Taylor.

Currently Reading: Madame Blavatsky: The Woman Behind The Myth, Marion Meade.

Happy anniversary, my dear bunny_hugger. Thank you for so many wonderful days and happy experiences and the promise of so many more to come.

The biggest part of Idlewild we hadn't really seen before, other than the water park, was Hootin' Holler. This is not a Barney Google themed area but rather a ``historic village'' originally constructed for the Bicentennial and relocated to the middle of the park and rethemed to an Old Western town. There were a couple rides there we just couldn't go on --- the Howler, for example, is a Tornado-style ride that's just too vertiginous for bunny_hugger to ride and can be marginal for me.

But there was Paul Bunyan's Loggin' Toboggan, a log flume. And the day had warmed up, and the sun finally broken through, and ... Last year, after getting horrifically soaked several parks in a row bunny_hugger declared she would never, ever ride a log flume or similar ride again. She suggested we ride the log flume. This left me a moral quandary: respect her clear statement of last year or respect her choice on the scene now?

The Loggin' Toboggan has in the entry station seven hardhats, with the baffling sign: ``Mill operated by The 7 Axemen: Elmer, Elmer, Elmer, Elmer, Elmer, Elmer, & Elmer.'' This means something.

The ride operators were talking about the weather: it had been rainy in the morning, and then it finally started to let up, and then it started sprinkling again, and then it let up again to where it was now quite nice. And the Òoggin' Toboggan is a pleasant ride, through the tall trees and deep forest before bringing you up the hill and dropping dramatically. It also didn't soak us badly, either. We just got the little sprinkling of moisture on us and our clothes that makes a hot day feel better. After the ride we were sitting for something or other and I noticed the flux of people coming out the entry queue, the universal sign of the ride suddenly closing. We didn't think anything particular of this at the time.

One of the other Hootin' Holler attractions is Confusion Hill, basically, a mystery house walkthrough that seems a little unusual for an amusement park. bunny_hugger and I were the only ones in our group, which spoiled some bits where the guide's spiel clearly called for a good-sized audience. It also meant we got through the whole attraction quickly, though, as she showed off features like water rolling uphill or jars rolling upwards or a chair sitting stably on the wall. It's a very disorienting place to walk through since even though you know full well that the floor is just at extreme angles it's hard to not think of the floor as level and you notice you and the guide and everyone else standing at thirty degree angles. It's all quite good fun and the Darkride and Funhouse Enthusiasts association named it one of their top-ten favorite walkthroughs.

Somewhere in Hootin' Holler when bunny_hugger was first there a decade ago had been a mystery swing, where you sit on a stationary bench and the walls and floor and ceiling of the room rotate around you. We've been on them now at Dutch Wonderland, Blackpool, and Great Adventure. Sad to say Hootin' Holler has lost its.

There's also a little narrow-gauge railroad that runs between Hootin' Holler and the Raccoon Lagoon (where mostly kids rides are kept). We took that ride, sitting in the second row of seats so as to get a little shade (we took longer than we should have to realize we could sit on shaded benches waiting for the train to approach), and ending up between one very loud kid and the rest of his group. Still, it's a nice little ride, and we got a few glimpses of the back of the Mister Roger's/Daniel Tiger's Neighborhood ride, between going out to Raccoon Lagoon (where, from a distance, we saw the Thomas The Tank Engine performance going on) and taking it around back. On the loop back we passed within a few feet of my car in the parking lot, which was inexplicably thrilling to me.

Since it was warm and close to our usual coffee break time we looked for something to drink. Coffee didn't seem available, but we got some soda and sat in front of the carousel, listening to the two organs playing in succession and trying to date exactly when their music scrolls date from. My guess was 1980 at the latest. They'd been playing ``Raindrops Keep Falling On My Head'' earlier, and I warned the instruments not to tempt fate like that. We also got to wondering what songs would be included on a modern band roll. The best I could think of was Walk The Moon's ``Anna Sun'', which has the kind of driving beat and melody that I think make it recognizable or fun for band organs. We spent maybe a whole lovely half-hour sitting in the gathering overcast, in the middle of a park, watching the carousel and finishing our drinks and just enjoying being present. The band organs both stopped playing for a while and there was some quiet.

Then a park employee came over and asked if we'd heard the announcement.

Trivia: When Ransom Olds returned the Olds Motor Works to Lansing (from Detroit) in 1902 he set up the factory on a 52-acre site which had been the fairgrounds for the Central Michigan Fair Association and then the Michigan State Fair, before the State Fair moved and the Central Michigan Fair Association declared bankruptcy. Source: R E Olds: Auto Industry Pioneer, George S May.

Currently Reading: Madame Blavatsky: The Woman Behind The Myth, Marion Meade.

Idlewild is smaller and less deeply weird than Kennywood, so even though it's an hour from Red Roof's successor hotel, we felt comfortable sleeping in a bit later, much-needed rest. There were no crises going on at work that anyone felt the need to involve me in, and a scare in which our pet rabbit had been not eating his pellets and barely interested in his fresh vegetables --- which can be the first sign of serious trouble with a rabbit, or just gas --- had passed and he was eating enthusiastically again and complaining how he's never been fed ever. And for a wonder we didn't even have trouble finding the place; it's nearly a straight shot on the Lincoln Highway out of Pittsburgh to the east.

We bought tickets using the buy-one-get-one-free coupon. Idlewild hasn't got a real gate; they just give you wristbands to ride stuff. One of the first things we saw was the Spider or Octopus ride (I'm not sure which it was), down for renovations: all the arms and cars were off and all that remained was the central post and the sphere that rotates to send the cars rising and falling. It was a moment to inspire saying, ``Aw, I wanted to ride the Lunik 24!''

But important things were working, and rather well. The antique carousel, one of the last ones made by the Philadelphia Toboggan Company (it kind of shows: they have multiples of the ``lead horses'', the most finely decorated horses on the carousel, representing PTC burning off its overstock of more lead horses than they had carousel orders for), was in good order and, better, its Artizan Style D band organ was working. It hadn't been last time we visited, but we heard a rumor they'd gotten a band organ to work. It's better than that, though: the other band organ, a Wurlitzer Caliola, was also working again after years and they were alternating between the two instruments. (The Calioli is much more calliope-like, without the drums, and has a more ethereal sound.) Considering how often parks will just play one CD of carousel music, and it's usually the same CD with upwards of fourteen tracks of ``American Patrol'' and ``How're You Gonna Keep 'Em Down On The Farm'', to have actual and diverse and not-quite-identifiable songs playing was great.

Near to the carousel is Rollo Coaster, built in 1938 and while a small ride also a fun one. It's close to the ground and overgrown by trees and manually operated in all its stages --- there's even a buzzer to warn the brakeman that the train is coming around --- and no seat belts or even restraints to drop down, just a bar to grab on in case you feel like you might be pitched out of the car. While we were waiting a kid ahead of us asked ``Why is it called Rollo Coaster?'', which nobody was willing to answer, though bunny_hugger said sotto voce to me, ``It's its name. Why are you called Madison?''

I'd noticed the Wild Mouse was rolling again; it had drizzled a bit earlier in the day and the ride has to shut down for some time after rain. Remembering our success with the Exterminator I suggested we see what the line was like, and it wasn't too bad, although since they were running only two of the tree trains it wasn't as good as it could have been. Still, we were right to get on the ride early: people kept drizzling into the line behind us and there wasn't any sign of that letting up.

This wild mouse had operated at Alton Towers (as ``Alton Mouse''), briefly, but unfortunately it was there after the publication of that guide to Alton Towers that I found at the Michigan State University library. I'd have loved to know how they described it.

bunny_hugger was delighted by an alternating process in the kids getting into cars, though. The ride operator and signs warn that you should keep your hands on the grab bar because of sudden stops. One group of kids would ignore this and get thrown violently forward at a stop that's just before the lift hill. The next group of kids, learning from this experience, would hold on tight and not be pitched forward. The group after that, having seen the previous kids have no problem at that stop, would ignore the instruction and go flinging forward at the stop.

The wild mouse twists to the side on the lift hill, just a little bit, but by design to allow for a rotating barrel to wrap around the lift hill and add some more disorientation to the experience. There's no barrel at Idlewild, though, and apparently there's very little evidence that there was ever a barrel at Alton Towers or at its original installation at the Wiener Prater (where it was ``Speedy Gonzales'') in Vienna. We tried to figure out if the track's current layout would even make a barrel possible, while someone behind us in line pointed out the tilt and declared that was the scariest thing she'd ever seen.

By now we were pretty well starved, and went for lunch at the Boardwalk Pizza, which is at the border between the park-park and the Soak Zone water park, where we had pizza and salads out of a sense that we should eat something kind of healthy-ish while we were on our tour. We also poked around the gift shop, which has a growing number of items featuring Duke, the dragon from Dutch Wonderland, which has been a sister park to Kennywood and Idlewild for a couple of years, although the t-shirts seem to suggest they think he's some kind of dinosaur, which, just, no.

The biggest unique attractions at Idlewild are the Story Book Forest and the Mister Rogers' Neighborhood ride. We'd been to both last year as part of the Rain Check Trip, although we can't go back to Mister Rogers' Neighborhood: the park is renovating it into a Daniel Tiger's Neighborhood ride, and it's in the middle of being worked on right now. But we could still go to the Story Book Forest, and walked over to it. Along the way we passed some of the picnic areas where the stuff from some family's picnic was sprawled out on a table and a squirrel was prowling around beneath, apparently trying to figure just what were the highest-priority items.

Trivia: At the Battle of Monmouth (28 June 1778), the British lost 358 soldiers killed and wounded, and the Americans 356. More than sixty on each side died of heat stroke. Source: The First American Army, Bruce Chadwick.

Currently Reading: Giant Brains or Machines That Think, Edmund C Berkeley. No, no, it really is quite interesting.

PS: Reading the Comics, June 27, 2014: Pretty Easy Edition, as there were a bunch of mathematics comics this week, but not about very deep topics.

Since bunny_hugger got into pinball we've been looking for amusement parks which have machines. Cedar Point has a bunch, obviously; Michigan's Adventure had the rumor of one that turned out to be untrue. Kennywood? We heard talk of there being old machines in its arcade. We hadn't thought about it. But if any of the parks we planned to visit would have pinball machines, surely Kennywood would be the one. On to find the arcade, then, which was next to Jackrabbit and across from a great 50s-style refreshment stand with neon signage.

Did they have pinball? No. They had a bunch of games, certainly, many modern ones and quite a few from the late 70s and 80s, including yet another arcade with the Popeye video game that's some kind of imitation of Donkey Kong that I can't play. I couldn't play this one either as it was out of order. But other games, like Pole Position, were there and functional and bunny_hugger played that well enough to get into the Top 100 Players of the Day or whatever their high score table exactly was. It reinforced my thinking that of the many video games out there I can't play any of them worth squat. Also apparently there was some kind of Die Hard video game for some reason? Asteroids I understand.

On a raised platform above the floor they had items from the past, because of course they do, and apparently Kennywood just never throws anything away. Among the stuff were some old carousel horses, what looks like a seat for a driving ride, some miscellaneous arcade-type ``test your love'' machines, some one-person movie projectors --- one title card promises the chance to see ``Whipping The Huns''; another, ``Johnny Comes Marching Home'' and yet another, ``Movie Queen'' --- and so on, in that vein. They have a similar display of miscellaneous old stuff in the pizza place at Lost Kennywood, that including the miniature circus wagons they used in the 30s to show off raccoons and rabbits and squirrels for public amusement because it was the 30s --- so even when it wasn't quite what we hoped for, it was still great, and Kennywood. They also had a sign giving the exchange rate between Fascination tickets and regular redemption game tickets, but as far as we know (and found) there's no Fascination parlor at Kennywood. But why keep the sign around if there's no parlor? Other than it's Kennywood and they apparently don't throw stuff away.

We took a ride on Racer, just beside it, the last of the wooden coasters we hadn't gotten to yet. We've been trying when we visit to get the reach-across-and-slap-hands thing that's current at Cedar Point's Gemini racing coasters to catch on at Kennywood, and this group seemed promising, but our car got too far ahead of the other for it to matter.

I mentioned the joys of finding touches of nature in the amusement park. Here's one of them: in the main lagoon were several mother ducks and their flocks of children. We tried counting them some, but it was hopeless; there were the ducklings belonging to several mothers puttering around and orbiting adult ducks in different combinations. At one point a mother duck brought two whole lines of ducklings in neat, uniformly spaced rows flanking her. I riffed this as ``The Kennywood 4th Duck Flotilla shall now reenact the Battle of Jutland.''

But it was getting toward mid-afternoon and despite the threat of rain several times over it never quite broke out into more than a few scattered droplets. It was warm enough, though, so we went to the Golden Nugget to get some of the square ice cream cones, dipped in chocolate and rolled in either nuts (my choice) or sprinkles (hers). I broke with my habit and ate the cherry first, saving it from the squirrels.

This brought us pretty near the Auto Race, a ride that was closed during the Rain Check Trip and that we didn't get to on the original Pennsylvania Parks Tour. It's a vintage ride, going back to the 1930s, though the cars have been refurbished. It's a long windy path of self-driving cars, but, they're great old-fashioned cars and given how often the ride was non-functional last year and persistent rumors that This Will Be Its Last Year (though why the money they spent on refurbishing the ride over the winter?) we couldn't resist. Possibly we should have: the ride had a long, fairly slow-moving line, rather like a Wild Mouse roller coaster does. While we were waiting, in fact, the ride stopped and everyone had to walk back to the station while the cars were dragged into the station and restarted. I believe it happened even a second time while we were waiting.

Now, it's a good ride, with wonderful old-style cars that fit one (1) adult. I gave steering it a try, a little, but determined that I couldn't turn the wheel, so I just sat back, in the back seat, and enjoyed the ride in a driverless car. bunny_hugger explained to me you can too turn the wheels, it's just very hard, and it's regarded as a mark of real ride expertise to be able to go the whole path without the car hitting the left or right bumpers. I can't imagine being strong or dextrous enough to manage that.

With that ridden, though, we went to one of our old friends, the Turtle. These tumble bugs used to be common and now there's only two of the adult model left, at Kennywood and at Conneaut Lake Park. With luck we'd be riding all the adult-size tumble bugs in existence between that Tuesday and that Thursday.

Trivia: The number of accountants or auditors in the United States grew by about 24 percent between 1930 and 1940. Office machine operators grew by 31 percent; typists and secretaries by 11 percent. Bookkeepers and cashiers shrank by two percent. Source: Before The Computer: IBM, NCR, Burroughs, and Remington Rand and the Industry They Created, 1865 - 1956, James W Cortada.

Currently Reading: A Stranger In Olondria, Sofia Samatar.

We had a decision to make the night we got to the Red Roof++: would we go to Kennywood or to Idlewild park the next day? Both are in the Pittsburgh area, Idlewild about an hour away, but it's also a much smaller park, requiring less time to see thoroughly. We'd thought that after the full day travelling we might sleep in a bit and take in Idlewild the first day and Kennywood the next. But we also checked the weather forecast. The whole week looked to be rainy, and it would be, but the chances of rain according to Weather Underground were much higher for Wednesday than for Tuesday. We decided it was better to go to Kennywood on the less-likely-to-thunderstorm day, and hope for the best.

I also couldn't go right to bed because there was a minor catastrophe at work. I'd been doing some fixes to a longstanding problem discovered in my code, and that set off a subtler but no less urgent problem that had to be fixed, so I put a couple of hours into urgent testing and debugging and posted a solution to that while bunny_hugger more sensibly got to sleep. I also mailed a warning that I wouldn't be able to handle any crises because I'd be out of the house, which is as close as I got to quite telling work that I was tromping around western Pennsylvania amusement parks all week. (Another problem did crop up, toward the end of the week, but I was able to hack a solution to that together in the evenings and in no particular rush.) There's a lot of code that, frankly, I need to just rewrite altogether.

Anyway, come morning, we set out to ... Giant Eagle, the supermarket chain. I'd had the idea Giant Eagle was kind of in the class of the Krogers' around here; based on this sample, they seem to be more upscale, on the order of Wegman's or the Renovated Krogers'. You know, the kind of supermarket that has fake wood veneer under the produce department. They had fairly cheap Kennywood tickets and two-for-one coupons for Idlewild tickets, the best pricing deal we could find. And they were real proper tickets, too, on nice card stock in bright green. The Idlewild two-for-one ticket was just a sheet of paper but, what did we expect, to bring in a Pepsi can? (I kind of did.) We also got some doughnuts to serve as breakfast and tried to use the self-check-out lane, only to get stalled out when it insisted on having our Giant Eagle loyalty card number, which we didn't have because we're not loyal. The Kennywood tickets are supposed to be purchased only by people with loyalty cards too --- we were ready to sign up for one for that --- but they didn't ask for them at the customer service desk where the tickets were sold. Altogether, there's a lot of this we can't explain.

Onward, to Kennywood, and the twisty maze of roads from Red Roof++ to the amusement park, which we're getting to be pretty good at navigating considering that the roads are an insane mess of twisty passages. There is one intersection I don't know that I can describe in words. It starts as two roads, one higher and one lower on the hill, which come to parallel one another as they get to the stop light. Past the cross street there's just the one road, continuing what had been the left-hand road. In front of the right-hand street is a gas station. If you have the light from the right-hand street you just kind of drift from your road jotting over to the side and onto the continuation of the left-hand road. It's like what you build when you're playing SimCity and don't have any idea what you're doing, except SimCity doesn't actually let you build road tangles quite like this. Pittsburgh has many wonderful features but the way there doesn't quite seem to be enough space for any of its roads, resulting in tense little intersections like this, don't show it at its best.

We got to Kennywood about when they opened their gates to let people into the park. They give about a half-hour for people to filter into the park before rides start, preventing a tidal wave that swamps the stuff nearer the entrance. They told bunny_hugger to get her bag screened; she'd brought her new camera with detachable lenses and a bag of fair substance in. They didn't say a word about my meager little camera. I don't take this personally. Except they did give her, and everyone else whose bag was being screened, a window sticker with a Kennywood arrow that included on back a coupon for half-off admission till midsummer. This seems like an awfully generous compensation for having someone peek in your bag.

Mind, her camera bag was pretty big and she didn't want to carry it all day necessarily, so she rented a locker for the day. This is on the second floor of a gazebo near the entrance, above the fudge shop, and we'd end up going back to it several times over the course of the day and generally selling me on the idea of using a locker inside the park. It was rather easier than going back to the car for stuff. Also it let me get a view of the entrance where one of Kennywood's mascots was greeting crowds. Not Kenny Kangaroo, unfortunately --- in our visits there we have yet to see him --- but another mascot, a guy dressed in a big Kennywood Arrow costume, giving high-fives to little kids and parents, and waving at teenagers who just could not believe they were seeing this.

I should mention before I forget: later in the day bunny_hugger noticed that near to her locker, which I think was number 671, was also a locker 668B in place of 669, and she wondered what happened that there'd be an out-of-sequence number like that. I poked around and found some of the other -B lockers and realized what was going on, and she could not believe it. What I noticed: there was a locker 568B in place of 569, and a 468B in place of 469, and so on. Yes: they didn't want to give kids the chance to snicker at a locker number with ``69'' in it. They also had a locker 665B in place of 666. I realize just now that I failed to see what they did for the 690's. I did try to check what they do for locker 420, but that portion of lockers was roped off.

All that said, we got ourselves positioned for 11 am and the start of the day and the welcoming of all guests with the Kennywood opening song, Julius Fuşík's ``Entrance of the Gladiators'', or as everyone knows it, ``that circus song where the clowns come in''.

Trivia: The number of distilleries making rum in Boston grew from eight in 1738 to sixty-three in 1750. Source: A History of the World in Six Glasses, Tom Standage.

Currently Reading: The Age of Radiance: The Epic Rise and Dramatic Fall of the Atomic Era, Craig Nelson.

PS: Reading the Comics, June 22, 2014: Name-Dropping Stuff Edition, yes, more mathematics comics.