gucky

We got up and packed and faced what we figured to be a long day on the road. And figured to eat on the road, which ended up getting delayed as we started right out on the Pennsylvania Turnpike. The first rest area we came to just had a Roy Rogers so there wasn't anything to really eat there. We did get fountain drinks, though, at my first time buying anything at a Roy Rogers since the early 90s when they last had restaurants outside Turnpike service plazas. I got a Coke Zero with a shot of fruit punch so, if you're being generous about terms, I made a Roy Rogers at the Roy Rogers. This was not me trying to be funny; a bit of some fruit drink in your main fountain pop really makes it.

Anyway, a bit after this I pulled off at whatever the next exit was, because we needed gas and there was a Sheetz promised near the exit, and there we were. It happened that we had got off in Ligonier, Pennsylvania, which fact likely means nothing without this next: Ligonier is where Idlewild Park is. We'd been to Idlewild a couple times, enjoying the park that dates to 1878 and its 1930s(!) wooden roller coaster and its Mister Rogers Neighborhood-themed section and especially its fairy-tale dioramas walk-through area. But we hadn't been there since ... certainly not later than 2016, when an accident on Rollo Coaster shut it down and saw the vintage trains replaced with new ones. The old trains not only had no seat belts or individual lap restraints, they didn't have any restraints at all. The new train belts you in and lap-bars you in and even has blinders around the side so that the trees, which come very close to the car, are even less liable to whap you in the face. It's hard to imagine the ride being nearly so much fun without and we hadn't gone back to face it.

But still. Here we were. We couldn't spend the whole day there; it would push our return home until way too far past midnight. But we could drop in for a couple hours. It would be expensive; we didn't have season passes or coupons that would help any. And yet ... how often do we say we'd like to see Idlewild again, only we don't get around to it when we happen to be seeing Kennywood? And so bunnyhugger bought tickets online while also trying to let her phone navigate us to the park. I don't know why we didn't get my satellite navigator out of the glove compartment and let it do its job.

We got to the park --- it's just off the Lincoln Highway, like Dutch Wonderland --- and bunnyhugger showed her tiny phone with our tickets to the parking lot attendant. There isn't a separate gate admission, just the parking lot guy. I assume if you just walk up they ask what your problem is. I misunderstood the instructions about where to park and drove to the only lot we've ever used before which was also flagged as full, but I didn't know where the others were because I failed to pay attention to the big sign with an arrow. Fortunately, circling around found a spot big enough for my car and we could go into the park to use the bathroom.

And then right back out of the park, more or less, because adjacent to the park is the semi-separate Story Book Forest attraction. In the distant past they were separate admissions but now they don't bother. You just walk through a gigantic book --- repainted since our last visit --- and smile awkwardly at Mother Goose. There were more performers in the Story Book Forest than I remember before --- I'd remembered Mother Goose and the pirate-ship captain and I think there may have been another. This time around there were ones almost everywhere, including the Crooked Man (of the Crooked House), holding one of those folding rulers because that can always be at some additional weird and crooked angle. There was also a Goldilocks and a Mother Hubbard and I bought enough into the characters to feel like I was intruding by going around and inspecting their homes.

Unlike the last time, Mother Goose was not tossing peanuts out to a brave chipmunk making sorties into her little cottage.

I mentioned the pirate-ship captain. They're there for a little boat that's on a pond, and the captain gives you permission to board and look around the small deck and all. The captain also did a bit of talking with us and some stage magic, calling over someone who was kind of watching over the train playground equipment (the little engine that could? Maybe? That seems out of line with the fairy-tale/nursery-rhyme motifs of the place but they also have a Tom Sawyer raft so they're not perfectly consistent) to help out, lending his hat to make lollipops appear out of nowhere. The lollipops whose flavors we'd earlier given as our favorites, of course, so you know what kind of performance they're going for. I enjoyed this but also felt irrationally like I was forcing the actors to go through all this fuss. I suppose you don't go engaging with a childless couple, the male of whom has a lot of grey hair, if you don't like engaging that way, though.

The Story Book Forest seems to have a good bit of new signs, expanding some on the fairy tales and nursery rhymes presented. The little building that introduced us to the rhyme ``There was a jolly miller / Who lived on the river Dee // He worked and sang from morn' till night // No lark so blyth as he'' still looks like it must have been a snack stand, once upon a time, but it was boarded up and didn't look like it had ever been otherwise. They also still have the sign, ``Hickety Pickety My Fat Hen // She lays eggs for gentlemen'' which we have never seen anywhere but here. There was a chicken coop behind the sign, but no evidence of chickens, and that reminds me we didn't see goats near the billy goats gruff bridge either. We did see a couple little bits that were clearly left over, or anticipating, Halloween, like the word 'BOO' stuck on the wall next to nothing appropriate.

Near the end of the trail, just before the gift shop, was a slightly baffling feature we weren't sure we remembered: a fairy-tale style castle guarding mock Tudor-style buildings. Inside was a sword in the stone, and a fountain with a bronze Duke the Dutch Wonderland Dragon, who'd say encouraging things as you tried to pull it out. We could swear we remembered something having been there on our last visit but certainly not Duke (Dutch Wonderland wasn't yet a sister park to Idlewild back then). We turned out to be wrong about this. While there had been an Enchanted Castle at the end of the trail in the past it had been removed after the 1996 season. For all that the forest looked like it was unchanged, it's actually had a lot of refurbishment, including a lot of paving along the trail that I didn't notice. Well, that's accessibility for you; when it's there all you notice is that there's no problems.

We could plausibly have been satisfied just with the Story Book Forest visit. But there was still the amusement park, with an important carousel and two noteworthy roller coasters ... and who knows what else might have changed since Dollywood took the place over?

Photos now have reached Friday of our Halloweekends trip last year. I again promise to try keeping it to interesting shots but we'll see how long that lasts.

Guess who forgot to re-set his camera from ISO 3200 to a daytime setting and how long it took him to notice! But at least it gave this routine photo of entering the park a neat washed-out look.

Frontier Town by early, brilliant, light when you can see the trees' color.

Here's the Town Hall Museum, which survived the off-season, but who knows how long it'll keep doing that?

This is that animatronic pumpkin scarecrow-or-something that I always photograph by night instead, when it doesn't work. It's set up by the viewing area of the water rapids ride.

This is the back side of the animatronic where you can see the frame, mostly, but also some tarps.

A chicken holds court at the petting zoo.

Trivia: Kauffmann's, the Grand Depot department store of Pittsburgh, opened in 1871 primarily to serve the wealthier staff of the Jones & Laughlin Steel Corporation, providing morning coats and stiff shirt collars. They had strong sales of $21,585 for the first year. Source: The Grand Emporiums: The Illustrated History of America's Great Department Stores, Robert Hendrickson. Kaufmann's was bought by the May Company in 1946, and ended up part of the Macy's chain, with their traditional downtown location closing in 2015.

Currently Reading: Knowing What We Know: The Transmission of Knowledge From Ancient Wisdom to Modern Magic, Simon Winchester.

After finally riding Fahrenheit and taking a needed bathroom break we headed, fast as we could, for the front of the park and the Carrousel. It would be exaggeration to say everyone in the freaking world was in our way --- the parking lot, rumor was, would be a great spot to see the fireworks from if you found a good spot --- and yet there we were. Our plan had been to turn back if we didn't get to the ride by 9:30 and time, you know ...

Well, I saw the carousel, slightly obstructed by other things, at a time when my phone still said it was not yet 9:31 and at that point it seemed foolish to give up on the ride over a matter of sixty seconds' more walk. The carousel was again (still?) playing the Beatles-and-Beach-Boys songs we remembered from our first trip the day before. My recollection is also we missed a ride cycle and had to get on the next one, eating up even more precious time. But we got our ride in, and our pictures, and now we just had to get to Lightning Racer.

We started off well, with me having the advantage of long legs and a fast stride. But you know my great sense of direction? That mental map I have of a place I've visited only briefly? It failed me here; I never got the hang of where stuff was in HersheyPark and I was left stumped for what way to go. The park signs weren't good; they would point toward a couple of attractions --- with good signs, showing the full logo, mind --- and Lightning Racer was not consistently one of them. And posted maps would only give some local features, not stuff way on the other end of the park. So I got the attention of a guy working carnival games --- annoying someone who thought I was trying to cut in on their game --- to ask what way to go. Turn off that way and go through The Hollow, sounds good.

The employee steered me wrong. So did another employee I asked a few minutes later when we didn't seem to be getting anywhere. I don't know how. Maybe they were as vague on the park directions as I was, especially if they get rotated around games and might forget just where they're facing. Maybe they were thinking rightly but we'd have to follow a path obvious to people familiar with the park and opaque to newbies.

But the nightmare was, we weren't getting anywhere near Lightning Racer, and we were getting near the end of the night. I describe it as a nightmare and that was the feeling; it was almost exactly what would happen if we were dreaming about missing a roller coaster. We would fail to get a night ride on this coaster, and I blame myself. If we'd waited for bunnyhugger to load an online park map we would have had a chance. Heck, if we'd figured out the route while we were becalmed waiting for Fahrenheit, we'd have made it. But we didn't, and we settled for a ride on the nearest coaster instead, the Great Bear, a good ride but only an okay consolation.

But the park was closed, except for the people sticking around for fireworks. The question is where they'd come from and it turned out ``right over the fence from where we were'' was, if not right, at least close enough. We --- and a crowd of several dozen --- ended up standing by a little nothing part of the park, near one of the emergency exits used by ambulances, watching the Fourth of July show.

It was a good show. It was a big show, going on for maybe a half-hour. There was a moment about twenty minutes in that I thought was building into the climax and no, it was not. The false climax was just the new level of activity and it seemed like the show might never end. Then the true climax came and you'd think that would be the end of the show, right?

Of course, there are always a couple stragglers, fireworks that didn't go off during the show that are fired afterward to clear them out. There were a lot of stragglers, enough to seem like the show had decided to start over again. Like not just a couple fireworks but a dozen or so, some fired simultaneously. Ah, but then that was the end of the show, right?

No, because there was another round of stragglers, and most of the crowd we'd been watching with gathered again to catch another dozen fireworks. And that was the end of the show ... except that a minute later another round started, drawing more applause and laughter.

I lost track of how many times the show started back up again. At one point I called out, after a minute's silence, ``Was there anything else?'' and on cue, there were a couple more fireworks. I nearly fell over laughing at this. bunnyhugger tells me some kids tried the same line and were rewarded with another short round. But eventually, finally, we saw what surely must have been the final fireworks, and if there were any more we didn't see it. We walked back to the front of the park, and the car, figuring to take our time and linger in the gift shop because the traffic jam to get out was enormous and slow-moving.

We had got past the front gate and diverted to our car when we heard a chilling cry: ``Does anyone know CPR?'' Neither of us do, but I now and then feel guilty that I don't. Someone had collapsed near a car and there was a moderate-sized, confused crowd around. Someone from another section of lot came running, moving like a superhero cartoon and jumping over a small fence, racing to the rescue. So we felt like we had no business sticking around any longer and ... well, goodness. We later on saw ambulance lights flashing, so we can hope there was a good ending there, and go on with our disappointment about Lightning Racer smacked hard back into perspective.

And this closed our Hershey visit. Saturday we looked forward to nothing but the long drive back across Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Michigan to home, with nothing to do but stop in Cedar Point as a waypoint. But then we also had planned on a night ride on Lightning Racer, so how good were we at executing our plans?

Back now to Halloweekends, on Thursday, as we dive into the night.

Here's a sunset picture behind Maverick that I think came out pretty well.

Here's the same sunset only in portrait.

And then here's Maverick's braking area, on the left, with a couple trains of riders. The queue is to the right and you can see the darkness settling on Frontier Town.

Looking up above the Frontier Trail bathrooms, once upon a time the receiving station for the other sky ride, at the setting sun and just a bit of a vapor trail.

bunnyhugger sitting down to rest near the Celebration stage; we were probably watching a bit of the show while having a snack.

Here we're peering up into Rougarou.

Trivia: Flying STS-41D in 1984, McDonnell Douglass payload specialist Charles D Walker used an electrophoresis experiment to purify a gram of hormone, drug purification being a big promise of spaceflight. On return to Earth, it turned out the sample was contaminated by pseudomonas microorganisms. Source: Shattered Dreams: The Lost and Cancelled Space Missions, Colin Burgess. Pseudomonas is a family of microorganisms that turn out to be responsible for a lot of hospital-acquired infections.

Currently Reading: Lost Popeye Zine, Volume 70: Deucedly Odd Goings-On, Ralph Stein, Bill Zaboly. Editor Stephanie Noelle.

After getting back into HersheyPark bunnyhugger took her half-hour walk --- yes, added up she did far more than a half-hour walking in a day at the park like this, but she likes to have a continuous specific block for her exercise --- and I got on a ride she absolutely would not. This is the Hershey Kissing Tower, fifty years old this season. The tower's 330 feet, although riders only go up 250 feet, much like the Star Tower at California's Great America (which I rode while she took her walk, back in 2023) or Space Spiral that used to be at Cedar Point. It's got some lovely views of the park and the landscape outside, and yes, the windows are Hershey Kiss-shaped.

Reunited we together rode another 1970s ride and one you don't hardly see anymore. This is Coal Cracker --- it's in the western-themed section --- and it is a log flume. Not just that, though, it's that model of Arrow log flume ride where the launch station is a big rotating platform that you descend stairs to. A model of this was one of my favorite things at Great Adventure as a kid, maybe just for the relativistic thrill of stepping between the rotating and non-rotating sections. I believe it also has this little hill at the bottom of the big drop so that while you splash a photogenic bunch of water around it doesn't land back on you, making for a thrilling but not soaking ride.

After this, back to more roller coasters. Trailblazer, a mine ride a year older than the log flume (and equal in age to the mine ride at Great Adventure, also a childhood favorite). And looking over Jolly Rancher Remix, which up to 2021 had been known as Sidewinder. This is yet another Boomerang coaster, like The Bat at Canada's Wonderland, Boomerangs at Six Flags Mexico, Darien Lake, and Elitch Gardens, Sea Serpent at Morey's Piers, Zoomerang at Lake Compounce, and bunnyhugger does not enjoy the back-and-forth shuttle motion of any of them. We rode it in 2011, but since then it was re-themed from 'western' to 'candy'. Part of the gimmick is a tunnel that reports have it spray Jolly Rancher scents and weird scent mixes into, which must admit is interesting a concept. But the line was long (and it can't run a second train because of that whole 'collision' thing) and since we'd ridden it before it sank to the bottom of our informal schedule. And, dear reader, I regret to tell you that we never did get to it. However, it would be the only roller coaster we missed.

Somewhere around this time we ate, lured to a place that promised walking tacos made with a plant-based meat substitute. We had doubts, justified after several people in front of us had extremely long interactions trying to navigate the menu of a window that offered two different things with your choice of four toppings. Anyway they did not have the plant-based meat and looked suspicious of us for trying to claim such a thing ever existed. We got the meat- and plant-meat-free walking tacos which is also how I learned that Fritos makes bags specifically for walking taco preparation. Who knew?

More HersheyPark roller coasters. One that we rode near the log flume was Great Bear, this nice long ride that spends a good bit of its time over the water, and gets you nice views of the whole of The [Comet] Hollow. The ride has theming of Ursa Major and a neat ride sign of the constellation. And this got bunnyhugger to wonder: is this name a subtle joke? Because many roller coasters have been named Big Dipper, to the point that it's been British English terminology to say ``big dipper'' for a roller coaster. (You hear this in Peter Gabriel's ``Sledgehammer'' where a big dipper is going up and down.) This is also why kiddie coasters are called Little Dipper so often. To go from Big Dipper to Great Bear is not far. Wikipedia offers that the name also references the Hershey Bears minor-league hockey team, but nothing of a Big Dipper reference. If HersheyPark ever used to have a Big Dipper (or Little Dipper) the Roller Coaster Database doesn't know of it.

Night was setting in and we had a couple things yet to do. One was riding Fahrenheit, which had been the newest roller coaster in our 2011 visit. It has a vertical drop of, you guessed it, 97 degrees. (I suppose the extra 1.6 degrees would have been a little too much.) Others were Jolly Rancher Remix if we could get the chance, and another ride on the carousel so bunnyhugger could get pictures with her better camera, and then a night ride on Lightning Racer. I voted for Fahrenheit and it was looking like a good choice, another suspiciously-short-line for the ride.

Then the ride came to a halt.

Carrying on with Thursday of our big Halloweekends trip last year here:

The Giant Wheel, seen from on end. I also liek that it's nearly got the change in cabin colors balanced top-to-bottom.

Here's the late-afternoon sun and leaf colors and the track of ValRavn.

More of ValRavn and the diversity of autumn colors beneath it.

People walking off down the Iron Dragon midway, toward Millennium Force and the Frontier Trail and beyond that, Maverick.

Rougarou's coming into its own around the lagoon trees like this, too.

And past here is the Frontier Trail, more or less. Again, love the way the trees have turned here.

Trivia: The Hotel Hershey offered for high-end spa visitors [ as of the early 2000s when this book was written ] a whipped cocoa bath or a chocolate fondue body wrap. Source: Sweets: A History of Temptation, Tim Richardson.

Currently Reading: Lost Popeye Zine, Volume 70: Deucedly Odd Goings-On, Ralph Stein, Bill Zaboly. Editor Stephanie Noelle.

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.