terrycloth

After Tuscora Park our destination was Kennywood; New Philadelphia is a natural break point on the way to Pittsburgh and Pittsburgh a good break point toward Maryland. And we hadn't been to Kennywood since, well, last year, but still. We had a new hotel, this time. We've accepted with regret that the Red Roof Inn we always used had degraded a bit too much. The hotel we stayed at last week was well-placed for the substitute Pinburgh, but we could surely do better for a Kennywood hotel. bunnyhugger found one, and kept its exact location a secret, the better to surprise me.

Also to delight me. I am obliged to report there was a drawback, and that is that we didn't go through the Fort Pitt Tunnel and get to see the spectacle of Pittsburgh lit up by night. Instead, we got a long series of twisty passages, all blocked by construction, and I badly overshot the hotel when we finally reached it.

The hotel was a motel, your classic courtyard style thing with fieldstone walls, and an office with windows tilted outward in that imitation air traffic control panel of late-50s construction. We were the last people to check in; the clerk asked if we had a reservation because he had only the one room and it was spoken for. On learning we were there for Kennywood he was delighted, and just as if a character actor began giving us impossibly complicated instructions to get to the park, better than the satellite navigator could do, and referencing landmarks with mentions of what they used to be. As best I remembered the instructions his advice coincided with the satellite navigator's but talked a lot more about the county airport.

The motel was lovely, apart from the interior having been renovated into that generic stuff with fake floors and white walls you get anymore. But it was the first of a bunch of great stays we'd have places. The only disappointment was the Wi-Fi, which was weak and slow. The next night I'd go to the main office to ask if I had the connection information right and I did; we were just in a spot where it didn't work. bunnyhugger made the sacrifice of setting up her phone as a hotspot again.

A bigger struggle and one threatening our day: we didn't exactly have Kennywood tickets. Or maybe we did. No way to be sure. bunnyhugger had tried buying tickets a day or two before, at home, but got a weird error message about something having gone wrong and maybe the transaction was rejected or something else? I know this sounds like I'm being vague for comic effect, but the situation was vague. bunnyhugger could see a pending transaction on her account, but never got an e-mail or message and the transaction never moved to accepted or rejected or anything.

She had tried again the morning we left, with a process that eventually accepted her credit card, and then never produced tickets to print out or, like normal people, save to their phones. At the hotel, past midnight, there still wasn't anything in her e-mail. So, I went and bought tickets, figuring, maybe there was some freak problem with her account. Or her computer: not mentioned in all this has been that her MacBook Air, subject like most of its model year to a problem where the video screen stops working, had finally failed soundly. She was using my old laptop, basically functional but with absolutely zero battery life, and a magnetic plug connector prone to falling out, crashing the computer, with the slightest movement. The operating system and web browsers are several years out of date, naturally, and maybe that was causing trouble.

That was not causing the trouble, as I made my purchase and got a spinny wheel and never saw anything. We had just resolved to the annoyance of going early in the day to the guest relations desk when the e-mails came. Both of our sets of purchases had come in. And, who knew, maybe the purchase from a couple days before might too. (As far as I know, it never did.)

So we had to form a fresh plan, and this was it: we would use my tickets, bought on my credit card, for Kennywood. At some point during the day when we had time, we'd go to guest services and get refunds for the tickets bunnyhugger had bought, all of which were on a different card. We supposed refunds for two or possibly four tickets on one card would be easier than two or possibly four tickets on up to two cards. And so it was, ultimately. We got in fine, and we went to guest relations at the end of the day we went to guest relations and learned, first, they'd had some web problem the other day that caused attempted purchases to fail. So that's the tickets from that day resolved. And they pledged to refund bunnyhugger's tickets. So all the trouble resolved as well as we could have hoped. Plus, we got a day at Kennywood.

(It happens in the time between when I wrote that and when I posted this, bunnyhugger spontaneously thought to check whether she had been refunded. She was, just a day or two after our visit, as we were promised.)

So what amusement park thing came up next? None at all! Instead, it happens that I spotted a friend hanging around the front porch ...

Do you see them? Look close.

That's right! There was an opossum hanging out in the hostas, hoping they weren't perceived by me.

I was zooming in so as to give them some space, but I can't swear they weren't looking back at me.

From a tiny bit closer I got to see their head. I think they're young because the ears seem pretty full and round, so they haven't been wrecked by a bitter winter.

I could see the creature pretty well, but that's impossible to photograph.

This was, I think, a flash photograph, my best chance at recording their fur color and a bit more of their shape. Haven't seen them around since but they're welcome to have about.

Trivia: As late as July 1972, NASA representatives believed that the Soviet Soyuz capsule carried bottled nitrogen to make up air lost to space. It did not, and carried no air reserve. The Soviet design insisted on virtually no air leakage, while the Apollo Command Module would lose something like a tenth of a pound an hour. Source: The Partnership: A History of the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project, NASA SP-4209. (The book doesn't give an exact figure for Apollo's leakage, instead quoting a person's oral recollection, and who plausibly was giving an order-of-magnitude estimate.)

Currently Reading: Lost Popeye Zine, Volume 67: Dopy Nick or The Pink Whale!!, Ralph Stein, Bill Zaboly. Editor Stephanie Noelle.

What brought us to New Philadelphia, Ohio, of course was Tuscora Park. It's a onetime private amusement park that converted to a county park with a couple of rides. Most notable is an antique carousel, but they also have an antique kiddie roller coaster that unaccompanied adults can't ride, and the only other operating Parker Superior Wheel. (The other only other is the wheel at Crossroads Village, outside Flint, which runs at design speed and so is excitingly fast.) It also has a small bundle of other rides, mostly kiddie rides, although it has got a swings ride we were just barely able to squeeze into at least once. Also a miniature golf course that we had never, ever gotten there in time to play. An eighteen-hole golf course at that.

We would not get there in time to play golf this time either. Even if we weren't very slow players, we got there right about as they were selling their last cards for the day. We had meant to get on the road sooner, and I don't remember what kept us. May have just been the last-minute battening down of our hatches, watering the lawn and such. A couple traffic jams didn't help.

But our goal was to have a good resting point, somewhere we could stretch for a couple hours. Also to ride an antique carousel; the one they have is a circa 1925 Spillman, designed as a portable, but it's been in New Philadelphia since 1941. We would get tickets for two rides on the carousel (eventually) and one on the Superior Wheel, managing to time things so that we got the last carousel ride for the night. The carousel also had its band organ going nicely.

The organ's got that MIDI hookup that lets it play an enormous number of songs, not just the eight or so that a scroll might. I got a picture of some of the Playlist Favorites, and it includes some that you'd guess like The Washington Post March, Parade of the Wooden Soldiers, and American Patrol. It's also got ones I never heard of, like Beautiful Ohio, Lincoln Highway (a march), or Paul Revere's Ride (another march). I don't know what The Minstrel King March is but I'm not looking it up either, thank you.

We'd thought the park might be somewhere we could eat and turns out, yeah. They have veggie burgers now. Not your modern kind of high-quality fake meat patty like an Impossible Burger or a Beyond Burger or something. Just your old-fashioned gardenburger sort of thing. But it was fresh-cooked (and the last order they took before closing up for the night) and that helps make up for some shakiness. We ate while watching the carousel once we found a bench that wasn't still wet from afternoon rain.

Also we learned, from reading the historical marker, that we had the wrong idea of the park's history. It turns out this was not a longrunning amusement park that turned to a county park when the locals wouldn't give up the carousel and roller coaster and whatnot. Tuscora Park had opened as a private amusement park in the summer of 1907, offering what you could have in that day, swimming pools and pavilions and concerts, baseball, bowling, that sort of thing. But it was sold at a sheriff's sale in 1911, and the city council bought it in 1912. Basically all of its history --- including every amusement park ride it has now, and plausibly all the rides it ever had --- was from its public ownership.

While we once again didn't get there early enough to golf in miniature, nor to ride the miniature train, we did get to see the park in lovely evening glow when the temperature had given up on the low 90s, and to see the park through to closing. Very good first park for our trip.

And now, let's close out the pictures of Cedar Point on that not-quite-Halloweekend weekend last September:

Skeletal rider set up in Frontier Town, all ready for Halloweekends. Note that the horse does not suffer from Bone-Ear-Tis.

Entry portal to Top Thrill 2, fenced off from people who might mistake it for an operating ride.

Probably won't see this like again. Here's the entry area fenced off from a different angle.

Evening view of the Midway Carousel, with Raptor's lift hill in the background. Look how nice that sky is.

See? Here's that same picture with EVEN MORE SKY. Look at that sky. Such a gradient!

And a last look at the park, settling into sunset. I think the park was still open but we had to be home for me to get to work in the morning, so we left at dusk.

Trivia: The first day of Working Group 1's negotiations for the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project focused on which would launch first, the Apollo able to stay on orbit for two weeks or the Soyuz which was capable of about four days (plus a day's margin). The Soviets pushed hard for the Soyuz to launch first, with the provision for unexpected Apollo delays being deorbiting the Soyuz capsule and launching the second one that, up to that point, NASA officials did not know was in the plan. Source: The Partnership: A History of the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project, NASA SP-4209. Since I missed the start of the 50th anniversary I'm just going to run this long. The Backup Soyuz flew as Soyuz 22 in September 1976.

Currently Reading: Beyond Measure: The Hidden History of Measurement From Cubits to Quantum Constants, James Vincent.

PS: OK, it looks like ``Beautiful Ohio'' is the Official State Song of the Buckeys and it sure is a state song, all right.