There's No Logical Explanation for This Discombooberation
Aug. 18th, 2025 12:10 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
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.