gucky

A happy Canadians-Burn-The-White-House-and-Capitol day to all who observe.

On HerhseyPark: sometime after lunch, maybe before we discovered bunnyhugger's phone was lost and then found, we discovered in a games area what we always hope to see at a park: pinball! A lone game, a modern Stern Star Wars, sitting in the arcade with a bunch of redemption games. We'd have made time to play it, except that of course you can't just put money in a game machine at an amusement park anymore. They've gone Cashless For Your Convenience, and the only way to get a game is to buy a card. And you can't buy just, like, two dollars' worth of games. You have to buy something preposterous. Maybe only ten dollars, but that's at least five games each and there's no way we're playing that much Star Wars at an amusement park. It's plausible we've never played five games of Star Wars in a single day.

Much as we wanted to support their pinball, then, we did not play. Nor did we play later when we came upon another arcade and with with a bigger array of pinball games. Also of bigger pinball games: HersheyPark would become the fourth venue where we've seen an Atari Hercules, the double-size pinball wonder of 1980. (We've seen two of them at Cedar Point, now removed; also Canobie Lake Park, and the since-closed Pinball Wizard Arcade in New Hampshire. The game was aimed at amusement parks on the supposition bigness was spectacle which would earn coin.) And more! Fireball, 1970s classic. Chicago Coin's Hi-Score Pool, a quirky game where you're trying to roll over concealed targets that represent pool balls. The modern Stern Star Trek. The early-solid-state hockey-themed Ice Fever. Comet, the roller coaster-themed game from Python Anghelo that we've only ever seen on location once (at a pizza parlor in Traverse City). The Pinball Map also says there's a Monopoly, but we didn't see it, and it looks like it had been removed for cleaning when we were there. We would have loved to play the games that were present, but without the ability to buy less than a Brobdingnagian number of credits, we'd play none. bunnyhugger would go on to discover there was a flat-rate play-all-you-want card (maybe valid for only an hour or two or something like that) but its price was even more ridiculous than the cards we could get. So, we can only report the existence of pinball at this amusement park, and shrug at the capitalist brain that makes it unavailable.

Besides this, though, we were having a great day for roller coaster riding. With SkyRush we had ridden the last coaster that hadn't been there in our 2011 visit, and we'd got on that barely past noon, with the park not to close until 10 pm and fireworks thereafter.

The most important to get to was Lighting Racer, a pair of GCI-built wooden coasters -- named Thunder and Lightning --- that dispatch together and follow entwined but not identical tracks. Like, the tracks are the same length but unlike the Racer at Kings Island or Kennywood or Gemini at Cedar Point the courses aren't identical up to a mirror reflection. Each track twists around and through the other, so you don't just have a massive mound of wooden support structure but two mounds intertwined, like you made a mistake placing things in Roller Coaster Tycoon. Plus you come to a stop with an actual properly declared finish that gets announced when you return to the station. It's a great roller coaster/pair of roller coasters.

To our amazement there wasn't any line, so we were able to get on both the Thunder and the Lightning side, our train losing both times. Hm. bunnyhugger had one goal for the rest of the day to meet, and that was: we must ride Lightning Racer at night. We've ridden it before and it's an excellent ride by day, but by night the coaster, near the end of the park, is something else.

We also hopped onto their wild mouse coaster, the Wild Mouse. It's the same model as the Fly at Canada's Wonderland, Dark Knight at Great Adventure, Dark Knight at Six Flags Mexico, Dark Knight at Six Flags Great America (the Chicago one), Apple Zapple at Kings Dominion (I don't know that bunnyhugger rode this but it seems plausible, though she'd have ridden it as Ricochet) and, oh, Descente en Schlitt' at Nigloland. I say 'hopped on' and mean it: despite being a wild mouse, and so having 'trains' of a single car fitting at most four people, the line moved fast and dispatched quickly and there was almost no wait. The secret? They don't stop the trains. They run the ride the way wild mouse rides should, with the car moving slowly through the station and you hopping in, belting up (I can't swear the ride had seat belts, actually), and pulling down the lap bar without stopping. And so there were four or five cars moving through the ride continuously, and there was no wait. Riding a wild mouse that was run correctly might have been the high point of the trip.

(The low point of the high point: the ride was sponsored by a mouse trap company. I appreciate a sick joke but c'mon. But I did like the sign measuring how many mice tall you are.)

After this we finally got onto Comet, and when I say 'finally' consider that it was like 2 pm. I believe we even took the slight extra wait for a front-seat ride. There was a line here but not as long as a couple hours earlier and short enough that we were having a weirdly good riding day. It was something our pinball friend JTK refers to as the Dollywood Effect, based on his own experiences on a packed day at Dollywood: the midways were jammed full of people but somehow none of the rides he wanted to be on had queues worth mentioning. We've had this before at parks, including this trip already (Kennywood and Dutch Wonderland were quite kind to us; Six Flags America never felt packed at least). This was a particularly intense version of that.

So we were on to SooperDooperLooper, their late-70s Corkscrew-class coaster, and I think did walk on to the orange old ride. And then, it being about 3:30, we went and left the park. Sort of.

With that cliffhanger I think you'd like to see the carving and final reveal of our Halloween pumpkins from last year. Ready?

And now to the pumpkin-carving. bunnyhugger works on one of her fine designs.

She's having a good time!

My pumpkin. I turned away from the extremely gentle Harvey Comics-esque jack-o-lanterns of the last couple years for something a bit more mousey. Not scary, but less obviously merry. Yes, on the door in back is a sticker of Aubrey Plaza from the 2012 movie Safety Not Guaranteed, why do you ask?

bunnyhugger's mother sure she's doing terribly at this, while bunnyhugger admires her own work.

Lining the pumpkins up outside to get a photo, unlit.

And here's what bunnyhugger's parents' pumpkins (the left two) and ours (the right two) look like while in service.

Trivia: After the first night of the British invasion of Washington, Mayor John Peter of Georgetown, D.C., sent a flag of truce and received promises that the British would spare the city. The British Rear Admiral George Cockburn promised the mayor that his troops would give the protection that President Madison had failed to. Source: Union 1812: The Americans Who Fought the Second War of Independence, A J Langguth.

Currently Reading: Lost Popeye Zine, Sundays Supplement, Volume 17: 1955, Tom Sims, Bill Zaboly. Editor Stephanie Noelle.

This past week on my humor blog? If you watch its RSS feed you already know, but for the rest of you, it saw the start of new Arthur Scott Bailey stuff in the world of Fatty Raccoon and some Usenet nostalgia and some prejudging a Terrytoons cartoon I never heard of before and, finally, of course, Gasoline Alley. The proof:

• MiSTed: The Tale of Jimmy Rabbit, Part 1
• This Is Somehow an Independent Thought From That People-Texting-PANTS Thing
• Statistics Saturday: Episodes of _The Astronut Show_ And Whether I Imagine They’re Better Or Worse Than I Imagine, Without Seeing Them
• An Update on How Disappointing Is _the Astronut Show_
• You’d Think They Would Have Labelled Themselves a Type-E Person but …
• I Also Have Questions About the Make and Programming of the Bat-Computer
• What’s Going On In Gasoline Alley? When did Baleen and T-Bone split up? May – August 2025
• MiSTed: The Tale of Jimmy Rabbit, Part 2

And now to close off our early-October visit to Cedar Point Halloweekends. Next time? The brutal chilled temperatures of late October Halloweekends when it would be ... like ... in the 70s and sunny, because we let rich bastards break the climate.

Peering over the Siren's Curse construction fence to see the lighting scaffolds around the Celebration Stage or whatever exactly they did call it.

Wild Mouse's sign by night. We would learn this year that the gray sign mouse there is named Gary; get it?

Matterhorn ride in motion alongside the Giant Wheel.

And here's the Scrambler --- sorry, the Atomic Scrambler, one of the oldest rides at the park but recently given a new location and snazzy new name.

Here's the queue for a night ride on Raptor. Yes, sometimes this whole queue is ... well, half the queue gets filled, during the serious Halloweekends weather. Mostly I like how the track's illuminated in a giant S there.

Another picture from the Raptor queue of the last surviving picnic pavilion there.

Lined up here for a closing ride on the Carousel.

bunnyhugger looks out on the people not so fortunate as to be on the carousel.

She ponders: is it right that I get on the carousel when other people can't? But what is she supposed to do, not ride?

A last picture of the carousel. Note the parent on the wrong side of the horse to guard their child, but I like the way they're looking off to someone.

The gates. We had to leave, ready or not.

And a last picture of the entry plaza, or as we'll forever know it, the place we saw the eclipse from.

Trivia: There are about 200 grams of the explosive sodium azide in a car's airbags to rapidly inflate it when needed. Source: Nature's Building Blocks: An A-Z Guide to the Elements, John Emsley.

Currently Reading: Lost Popeye Zine, Sundays Supplement, Volume 17: 1955, Tom Sims, Bill Zaboly. Editor Stephanie Noelle.

After our visit to Dutch Wonderland concluded --- including a visit to the gift shop that took longer than we expected; we thought hard about the various plushes on offer --- we had another park to get to. We could get to Hershey Park and if everything we were assured about their sneak-preview ticket plan was accurate and true we could get there for a couple hours and increase our chances of riding all the roller coasters. Hershey has fourteen roller coasters, five of them new since our last visit and one significantly re-themed. And we planned our big day to be the 4th of July. Would that be a crushingly busy day? Or would it be a ghost town, as (for example) one Six Flags Great Adventure visit was? No way to guess, but more time seemed the wise course especially if it didn't cost anything.

Heading out on the Lincoln Highway --- incidentally the only time we saw a Wawa; I offered to stop and get something but we'd already eaten and I think we even had some pop left in our souvenir cup --- I got to worry about exactly what you'd expect me to worry about: what if we got to Hershey Park early? Which is a silly worry on several counts, that you can just hang out in the car a couple minutes and that the people taking your admission aren't jerks, they'd surely point out if we were using an all-day ticket five minutes before we could get a day and two hours at the park. In any case I didn't need to worry. Between how long after Dutch Wonderland's closing it took for us to actually leave the place, and how far it was to Hershey, and what a long, twisty path of small-town roads you end up on if you're taking the satellite navigator seriously, and that the final turnoff from the highway into the park takes you on a long enough approach road that I started to worry we had missed something before we even got to the parking lot, we had less than the allotted two hours when we got to the park.

I grabbed what seemed like a good spot next to the Hershey Stadium, a football stadium that looks like something from a 1930s movie about going to college. I like the style. But it meant we had a longer walk than we actually needed; as I'd learn on the walk in --- and would learn from following the parking lot traffic agents the next morning --- there were spaces much closer to Chocolate World and to the amusement park. We would once again not get to Chocolate World; maybe someday if we spend another day or two in the area. But we would get to see oddities like a statue for what I take to be the Milton Hershey School's mascot, the Spartans. It looks like Sparty, but in chocolate, and Chocolate Sparty was something we would glance at and then smile to each other about for the whole of our trip.

Our tickets --- on our phones, not printed out like decent people --- were accepted without problem so far, despite my worrying that if bunnyhugger and I both used the ticket on page one of our two-page PDF it might complicate things. I don't know whether we managed to pick opposite tickets or if the buy-N-tickets-at-once generates a QR code that says the same one can be used up to N times. Probably that. Now we just had to worry that something would go wrong with admissions the next day. It would not.

First thing we would do is ride the Carrousel (as they style it), of course, which is right up by the front of the park. It was moved recently, part of the park's installing of its big Candy-monium ride, although I couldn't tell you from where to where. Somehow, my normally freakishly good geographic memory --- good enough that I could draw you a tolerable map of Festyland, an amusement park we spent seven hours in back in 2015 --- failed me completely with Hershey. I had no concept of how things in the park fitted together, and never would get any, and that would lead us to a terrible fate, yes. But that's a tale for later.

The carousel --- Philadelphia Toboggan Company #47, built 1919 and moved to the park in 1945 --- is a lovely one, in excellent shape and well-painted and with a platform gleaming in nice varnished wood. The ride is a bit slow; I think it was running about three rpm. The band organ was playing Beatles tunes. Not exclusively, but of the four songs we heard while in the vicinity three were Beatles and one was the Beach Boys. (At this remove I couldn't swear to which songs, but I think two of them were When I'm Sixty-Four and California Girls. I note that musicnotes.com has organ arrangements for Only A Northern Song; It's All Too Much; Hello, Goodbye; Strawberry Fields Forever; Being for the Benefit of Mr Kite; Your Mother Should Know; and It's All Too Much. Your Mother Should Know sounds plausible as one of the tunes.)

As our ride came to an end we felt the welcome smell of cooler air rushing in, the tease of a storm front maybe taking away some of the excessive heat and humidity of the weather. It would not, but it would send a lot of gusty winds our way, almost as good. But then came the thing that could wreck all our hopes of riding anything.

There was thunder. All the rides would shut down until the storm passed.

I bring you in photographs now back to a familiar place, Cedar Point early in Halloweekends last year. Will I get all my Halloweekends pictures from 2024 done before Halloweekends 2025 arrives? No.

Here's our old friend Troika Troika Troika. maXair is the big pendulum ride behind it.

Caught someone walking into the sunset over our sequicentennial brick.

And here's the Coliseum dressed up for Halloweekends.

The sun had just got to that level where it makes the skyline look like it's burst into flame. Top Thrill 2's reverse tower adds a lot to the scene.

Here people walk to the sun as if drawn by an irresistible force. (Really it's just that's the way the midway is laid out.)

And here's a show on stage. I imagine they were playing music and daring the audience to be scared or something.

Trivia: In planning its ``Ideal Section'' for what a model strip of what highways should be, the Lincoln Highway Association in 1921 decided: it should have a right of way at least 100 feet wide, and a paved width of 40 feet, allowing two ten-foot-wide lanes each direction, flanked by five-foot grass shoulders and gravel sidewalks. Curves should be avoided; those that were unavoidable should be banked with a radius no less than 1000 feet, so cars could safely drive them at 35 mph and trucks at 10. There should be no roadside ditches and no advertising signs. Source: The Big Roads: The Untold Story of the Engineers, Visionaries, and Trailblazers Who Created the American Superhighways, Earl Swift.

Currently Reading: Threads of Life: A History of the World Through the Eye of a Needle, Clare Hunter.

We did a lot of ambling around Dutch Wonderland. It's a very good-sized park for wandering around without specific purpose. The attraction we most absolutely had to see besides the roller coasters was the (Dutch) Wonder House, an optical-illusion stunt. It doesn't quite date back to the start of the park --- it opened in 1964, a year after the rest of the park did --- but it's still wonderful. It's a couple benches inside a miniature house and, while you sit, the house starts swinging back and forth and rotating. It's hard resisting the illusion that you're rocking upside-down, and it's remarkably good at that. We've been on a handful of these (they're not so common as they were in the 1960s) but this was the first we'd been on together and it was nice getting back to it. The ride operator assured a worried kid before the ride started that they didn't actually move. It spoils the surprise a little, but it's better than a kid refusing out of fear to ride.

The ride that took us the longest time to get on was the Monorail. We're always going to be interested in a monorail ride, of course, but it had more of a line than we expected and for more of the day. We ended up getting a seat in the front car, just behind the driver, and could see stuff like the security camera and the row of dials and buttons and also the box fan the driver had pointing at them this --- go ahead, say it with me --- hot and muggy day. The monorail is a single-station loop, although it does go past a part that clearly used to be a stop. It's outside the park grounds, though, so it must have been in use before the park became pay-one-price and you could just wander in and buy ride tickets a la carte. The path it follows is a good one, though, taking you through what's now the heart of the park and then outside all the way to the edge of the Lincoln Highway (the park is on US 30 in Lancaster) before coming back inside.

We also took the Dragon's Lair ride. This is a boat trip along a little lake that goes out past the entrance of the park, where you can see the Lincoln Highway and all. We weren't sure whether the giant head of Duke, or of a different dragon, emerged from the central mountain last time. We are more confident that they'd added a bit of a fun search game. There are signs challenging you to find an alligator and a couple frogs and so on, and these figures are arranged along the boat's path. Nicely, they're not all placed right by the signs. A couple are even well past the next sign, so you have a modest but real challenge seeing them all.

If anything was disappointing about the place it was food; we couldn't find vegetarian options and settled for fries, and ended up in a line at the fries place that was very slow-moving as somehow a bunch of groups ahead of us were making 'get a bucket of fries' complicated. While waiting we got to see that one of their live-action shows is themed to Daniel Tiger's Neighborhood, complete with Daniel Striped Tiger mascot. That they have this is a spinoff of Hershey selling the park to Kennywood, as that made Idlewild --- which has a Daniel Tiger's Neighborhood section --- a sister park. (In trade, you can see Duke stuff at Idlewild and Kennywood.) We didn't have time to watch Daniel Tiger's Grr-ific Day!, but we saw it happening while doing other things.

Also we learned, later, that we had given up too easily. There's a cafeteria where we went to refill our souvenir drink bottle (the guy I bought it from was definitely caught by surprise by my asking how long between refills and told me fifteen minutes or whatever) and rebuild strength under air conditioning some. On the menu there, turns out, they had veggie burgers. By then we'd already eaten, but if we'd had any idea that this was an option we'd have gone there sooner.

And now even more of that Cedar Point trip taken in early October last year. You know, it's probably a good thing I was without camera for a while as it spares you a bunch of pictures of ... well, mostly Pinball At The Zoo. But it's a while you won't be crushed under my poor ability to leave pictures out of sharing with you.

Further along by Raptor here's a couple of what look like old water tanks, I think props maybe originally from Disaster Transport, done up as jack-o-lanterns, signifying ?? ???? ??? ? ??????.

Though Siren's Curse would not open until this year they were already selling merchandise for it.

And over here's the end of ValRavn's lift hill, and its two very steep drops. Also underneath, some of the grease trucks they had in. They haven't had Cupzilla back and I hope it's still around.

Here's one of the Snake River Falls boats already moved to the Rides Graveyard. Corkscrew's coaster goes by in the background.

Anyway here's the poem written to eulogize Snake River Falls. Also a kid who jumped up on the concrete wall beside it.

This is looking over in the direction of where Siren's Curse would be erected. The building there was for the lighting and audio and stuff for the stage shows.

Trivia: After a week in which Louisiana governor Earl K Long burst into profanity at least twice in the state legislature, he was flown from Baton Rouge to Galveston, Texas, the 30th of May for mental observation. After medical testimony that Long was mentally ill and likely to injure himself or others, Galveston Probate Judge Hugh Gibson ordered Long into protective custody. The 12th of June, Long charged in a court petition that he had been drugged in Louisiana and bound and taken to Galveston by force. The 17th he was released from John Sealy Hospital in Galveston to enter the Ochsner Foundation Hospital in New Orleans, which he exited the next day, only for state police with a court order from his wife remanding him to the Southeast Louisiana State Hospital. The 26th of June, Long discharged the director of state hospitals and the superintendent of the State Hospital, naming replacements who declared him sane and set him free. Source: The Year We Had No President, Richard Hansen.

Currently Reading: Threads of Life: A History of the World Through the Eye of a Needle, Clare Hunter.

The not-a-full-day park we figured to go to before Hershey was, of course, Dutch Wonderland. It's maybe an hour from HersheyPark and though they're no longer owned by the same company --- Kennywood's chain bought out Dutch Wonderland, and now Dollywood's company owns Kennywood and Dutch Wonderland --- but they make a natural pair of parks to visit together. We hadn't been to either since that weekend in 2010 when bunnyhugger applied for a community college job she knew she wouldn't get (nor, really, want) but figured was a good way for us to get some parks in.

Something new to Dutch Wonderland's outskirts: the Cartoon Network Hotel (the sign outside says Eat Sleep Cartoon), which had we known was there would have ... probably not got us staying there instead. But maybe we'd have gone to poke around and see the lobby at least. When I say it's on the outskirts I mean, it's literally the next parking lot over, the place to stay if you want to be a short walk from the park. I have no idea why Cartoon Network put their hotel next to Dutch Wonderland instead of a higher tier of park except maybe they figured to work out all the bugs in the concept before it'd be something anyone would notice. The hotel --- which has been owned by Dutch Wonderland's owners since 2018 --- opened in January 2020 so I guess they had a trial by fire all right.

Dutch Wonderland --- ``A Kingdom For Kids'' --- looks like something that opened as a roadside attraction themed to the Pennsylvania Dutch of the area --- the name and some of the older attractions, including animatronics of a quilting bee and of guys gossipping around the wood shop --- that somehow mutated into a fairy-tale-kingdom-themed place. And yet, says Wikipedia, the stone castle facade entrance was built by Earl Clark, the potato farmer who opened the park and ran it for decades, before the park's 1963 opening. We need a fuller history of the park somewhere.

We didn't get in for opening; we'd just been doing too much driving for that. But we were there before noon, and saw in the restaurant/event space as you enter the park's mascots --- Duke the Dragon, the Knight, the Princess, other folks --- doing some kind of get-ready-to-go chant, putting their hands on their head and waving at each other and looking silly the way you expect for some team-building ritual. And then, when we got through the ticket booth, we saw the most remarkable thing ...

They had park maps! And good ones too, on decent-quality paper and folded up with a cover and everything. Not as excellent as the maps at d'Efteling in 2012, but good maps that you could use to get around the park and keep as a souvenir. I snagged one for myself and failed to be clear enough to bunnyhugger that she might want to pick one up herself. But near the end of the day I did snag a couple pristine copies.

Oh also after this? We saw the mascots walking back from the restaurant into the park proper. Considering our good luck with Kenny Kangaroo and Freedom Eagle I leapt at Duke, and got permission to get bunnyhugger's picture with him. But just the one, as he was going in. I had assumed the rally I saw in the restaurant had been a start-of-shift we're-ready-for-this thing but apparently I misunderstood? Maybe it was celebrating that they got through the first meet-the-characters of the day without disaster.

Just before disappearing back into the off-stage areas Duke's straw boater hat fell off and he did his best to recover it but I think finally his handler had to pick it up. He was doing well for being caught in a big purple dragon costume in, have I mentioned recently, brutally hot and humid weather.

The spot where Duke and company disappeared was guarded by a bunch of walls, done up to look like several houses in a vaguely old-timey-German house, painted with windows and balconies and holiday events and such that gave us renditions of Duke welcoming you to the place, and the Princess and the Knight too, and Merlin and the new dragon that we knew was somehow tied in to the new roller coaster the park got since our 2010 visit, and also an Easter bunny, which is how we learned the park now had an Easter event. I don't think we ever got the rabbit's name or saw a plush of them but now we know they're out there.

We also did some rides and stuff too but I'm 800 words in so let's call that enough for one day.

On to the next thing in my photo roll which turns out to have actually happened before that Michigan's Adventure closing day and rainout. Sorry. But are you ready to guess what the day featured? Place your chips please and then we'll show you ...

And here we are, Cedar Point, early October, taking in what we hoped would be a low-key Sunday. It's not as low-key as we had hoped. The spots on the car next to us ar eat least some of them artistically placed; notice there's a smiling cat behind the rear passenger's window. On the bumper was written 'tell your cat I said psspsspsss'.

Gorgeous warm day, though, with the sun nearly six times its normal size in the sky.

Also the lawn to the side of the Midway Carousel was incredible. Look at that putting green!

Oh yeah, did you remember Cedar Point has a swinging ships ride? I forget this every single time even when I see it.

Here's the swinging ship ride --- Ocean Motion --- reflected in its pond.

And here's bunnyhugger getting some quality time in on the Midway Carousel, a traditional first stop.

Trivia: TerryToons's second Oscar nomination was for the 1944 short My Boy Johnny, a string of jokes about what the G.I. could expect on returning to home life after the war, with such modern conveniences as planes with outdoor swimming pools, helicopters for every child, and automated homes with, for example, hands that wash and dry you. It lost to the Tom and Jerry cartoon Mouse Trouble. Source: TerryToons: The Story of Paul Terry and his Classic Cartoon Factory, W Gerald Hamonic, PhD. (That's the one where Tom gets a book about How To Catch A Mouse and, following its instructions, blows up the house, the book, and himself, but not Jerry.)

Currently Reading: Threads of Life: A History of the World Through the Eye of a Needle, Clare Hunter.

After our last visit to Six Flags America --- well, this news just came in. Apparently parkgoers have been grumbling about how many times big rides have been down this season and as you'd expect more of them have been doing as the season wears on. One person claiming to have been at the park the 2nd of July --- same as we were --- said they were able to ride every coaster, though, including Batwing. Which if true means that had we gone to the park sooner --- or stuck around later --- we'd have completed the set. Well, nothing to do now except maybe hope that the ride gets relocated or the park gets saved. (There's no reason it couldn't be sold to some other chain or even to independent buyers, after all. I'd say that kind of thing never happens except this is a world with Gene Staples, the guy who saved Indiana Beach and is trying to save Clementon Park and Fantasy Island/Niagara Amusement Park.)

But our next target was driving north to meet up with my brother. Just him, unfortunately; his wife and kids were visiting her family up in South Jersey. He'd found a Mexican restaurant --- a good bet for something vegetarian --- somewhere in Howard County near enough to his home and not too far from our path up north. It was in some kind of shopping/entertainment complex that apparently the whole of the county was attending, as we went through a huge parking lot to find not a single space open, and saw my brother on a corner where he advised us of a parking garage not too far off. I think we ended up on the fourth floor of that.

Also while orbiting the place we noticed a bar with a row of pinball machines and joked that why didn't he have us meet up there instead. We had thoughts of heading over to it but it was crowded, the night ended up being long, and we didn't have the time. It's also possible we forgot about it by the time we were done with dessert.

I did take a selfie with my brother to send my father, who'd spent much of the previous week texting every fifteen minutes to ask if we had figured out when and where we were meeting up. This soothed his anxiety about our rendezvous so well that he never responded to or acknowledged the picture in any way. And we got some time in talking about him, and the rest of the family, including the revelation of why there's one member I just never hear any word about. Unfortunately, the circumstances of why that is preclude my sharing it here so please know that bunnyhugger, on reading these words, gave me a hard time about presenting something as disproportionately mysterious.

After dinner we all went around to an ice cream parlor around the block and with a line of about six hundred people in it. My brother said it was a good one and it was, and also we hadn't had just a big ol' ice cream cone in ages. (Well, cup, for me, but the spirit was there.) And he's hoping to get on a little trip to Iceland (again) with Dad (again) and I think by the end of the night was proving how reasonable the fares from Detroit were. Also mentioning that if we downloaded some podcasts right there, with advertisers thinking we're in Rich Government People Land, we'd probably get them laced with commercials by weapons makers aimed at weapons-buyers for federal agencies, like, a missile that was faster than a (something)-horsepower motorboat. Credit to the advertising agency for making us realize we always just assumed that any missile was faster than any motorboat, huh?

With the hopes that it won't be an embarrassing number of years before we meet up again, we set back out. An ancient plan of ours, when we thought we might met my brother for a late lunch, was to get up to HersheyPark. Hershey's one of the few amusement parks to offer Starlite admissions, a cut price for the last several hours of the day. And they do something even better, a sneak peek admission . If you have full-day tickets you can use them to get in the last two hours of another day; the thinking is the day before your full-day use but that's not explicitly required. So what we had been thinking was to go to Hershey's the full day of the 4th of July, and --- since we had a partial-day park planned for the 3rd --- get Starlite tickets to go in the last four or so hours that day. And then the 2nd, which this was, we'd get to use the sneak-preview two hours, and maximize our chances of getting on all the major rides given we expected the park to be impossibly busy.

We were hilariously too late for that, though. And it turned out that we spent enough time at the partial-day park on the 3rd that we could only use the sneak-peak admission. Perhaps that would be enough. But as we drove through the Maryland night we couldn't know that.

So to surprise you? We're going back in time! Because I somehow blew right past a couple of pictures, including of our October visit to Marvin's. Please take in a couple views of the Marvelous Mechanical Museum in its old location.

Huh, that's a weird plate! I wonder if it means anything.

So inside the guy who runs the league was working on Ultimate X-Men, which I think was the brand-new game then, and I took a moment when he was away to get some photos from on the playfield. The Sentinel Head there is the thing to bash as much as you can when you start playing.

Ultimate X-Men continues the trend of having fewer pop bumpers; there's only two on the playfield and here's one of them.

And there, on the other side of the playfield, is the other. Although they're separated they do bounce the ball between them some and I like the early-80s-game style of that.

Enough staring close at pinball. Here's our good friend the possibly fake Fake Cardiff Giant.

Another detail photo of Mickey Mouse's Chocolate Factory because my previous one hadn't made clear enough for a friend that yeah, their candy factory is about covering turtles in chocolate and shipping them out. Reflections keep this one from being quite so clear but at least you see the turtles swimming in chocolate there.

Trivia: As many as 170 Cuba-bound ships carrying enslaved people destined for Cuba were organized in New York City between 1859 and 1861. British authorities estimated about eighty thousand enslaved people were brought in during this era. Source: Smuggler Nation: How Illicit Trade Made America, Peter Andreas.

Currently Reading: Threads of Life: A History of the World Through the Eye of a Needle, Clare Hunter.

I have told already the disappointment we had at Watkins Regional Park, to which we went after finishing at Glen Echo Park. Since Watkins Regional Park is almost across the street from Six Flags America we did go there for one last trip, and one last attempt to get the final roller coaster of the trip.

That would be Batwing, which we never saw operating on Tuesday. It might have operated on Monday but we never got there. Good chance it didn't, though. Apparently, the ride has not been reliable in forever, with (I had somehow got the idea) a lot of problems with the electrical supply. So we failed once more, and for the last time, to ride Batwing. There's no knowing what Six Flags will do with the park's rides when it closes; it's theoretically possible that they might relocate it to some other park. But the ride is a quarter-century old and it's not hard to imagine management figuring they could just buy a brand-new roller coaster with a different set of problems instead. bunnyhugger rode its twin at Geauga Lake, and we both rode the Geauga Lake twin when it went to Kings Island and became known as Firehawk, so at least we know roughly what the experience would have been.

We didn't figure to spend the whole day at the park --- at one time we had the idea we might get up to HersheyPark for the last couple hours of the day --- but we did want to at least get in some last rides. I got to take time for that Wonder Woman elevated-swings ride, along the way noting that the ride queue went past three signs explaining Wonder Woman's deal. Two of the signs had grammatical errors. Lovely view of the park, at least.

We got a front-seat ride on The Wild One, once more without waiting. And we prowled a little around the Looney Tunes Movie Town or whatever it's named, since that's on the way back to the carousel. I discovered the little fiberglass structure billed as Bugs Bunny's house and it was somehow pleasantly nothing. The big thing about the interior is it had painted on shelves of canned carrots.

After our last ride on the carousel --- bunnyhugger rode one of the camels, which are surprisingly hard to get on despite the fact they're laying down, just because they're also very wide --- we went, at her suggestion, for a ride on The Flying Carousel. This is a swings ride, not so elevated as Wonder Woman's is. Just an ordinary amount of elevation. Also the ride operator, as they had earlier days, was doing some nice crowd work, doing Simon Says games with the riders, that sort of thing.

By then it was past 5:30 and my brother had figured we were meeting for dinner after all. And we were resigned to not getting to HersheyPark that evening. But something appeared to stop us from leaving that early, and it was something we never expected to see.

Likely anyone reading this knows that the legacy Six Flags parks have the Warner Brothers Cartoon character licenses and you can expect to see, like, Bugs Bunny or Sylvester the Cat or Tweety in costume. But did you know they have individual park mascots too? At least some of them do? Six Flags America has a bald eagle, name of Freedom, and Freedom was there doing crowd work and photographs just as we were getting ready to go. We couldn't believe it when we saw Kenny, repeatedly, at Kennywood. But to see and get photos with a mascot we didn't even know existed? Astounding, and I at least wondered if we might see mascots at the other parks we planned to visit. Stay tuned; the answer might surprise you.

Well, it was only about an hour until the park would close, but we didn't think we could stay any longer. We headed out to meet up with my brother, and from there, reach Pennsylvania.

In pictures, now, back to Michigan's Adventure and what we did and could not believe we saw after going to the car.

As we headed back into the park we saw this, something we just never see at Michigan's Adventure: inclement weather!

It wasn't bad enough to keep us from riding Mad Mouse one more time, at least.

But you can see it's already dampened the pavement and the park staff was taking in setups like this taste-the-candy thing.

We were among the last riders on Mad Mouse before the rain would shut it down.

More sensible people --- we thought giving up too early --- exited the park and stayed dryer than we did.

Here's an entrance to Camp Snoopy, under the light rain.

Trivia: James Lovell became prime crew on Apollo 8, bumped up from backup, in the summer of 1968 when Michael Collins needed surgery to remove a bone spur from his spine. Source: Chariots for Apollo: A History of Manned Lunar Spacecraft, Courtney G Brooks, James M Grimwood, Loyd S Swenson Jr. SP-4205. This brought Buzz Aldrin from Lunar Module to Command Module backup pilot, and made Fred Haise became backup Lunar Module pilot. (Apollo 8, which flew in December 1968, had no Lunar Module but the title was used anyway.)

Currently Reading: Threads of Life: A History of the World Through the Eye of a Needle, Clare Hunter.