Cedar Point
We took a mini-vacation to Cedar Point on Tuesday. I'd have to say it was one of the more surreal experiences we've had since moving to Ohio.
Having checked the Doppler radar before setting out, we knew that we'd get wet eventually: an unbroken line of churning rain clouds was poised to sweep across the Lake Erie coast around midafternoon. Our strategy, therefore, called for getting our roller-coaster fix out of the way early, and saving the indoor and other weather-insensitive activities for later.
I discovered, to my dismay, that sometime during the nine years since I last visited an amusement park I've become an incredible wimp with respect to sudden accelerations. After only the third roller coaster, the Millennium Force1, my stomach abruptly started trying to climb out through my esophagus. I staved off disaster only by strolling along very slowly, taking baby steps, and meditating on tranquil pastoral scenes. And I'd eaten nothing solid that day; I should have been able to do two laps on every ride in the park without so much as a burp. Next time I'll pop a whole bottle of Dramamine just before we leave for the park.
I really wanted to try the Top Thrill Dragster, too. It accelerates from zero to 192 km/h (120 MPH) in four seconds (pulling an impressive 1.4 gees), hurtles 120 m (400 feet) straight up, pauses dramatically as it barely makes it over the top, and plunges 120 m back down the other side in near free fall, performing a full helical turn on the way. Just looking at that astonishing vertical climb, visible from anywhere in the park, made my stomach do a slow roll. But there was to be no Top Thrill Dragster for me, unless I wanted the unique experience of barfing in free fall, leaving it hanging in midair during that corkscrew turn and watching my seatmate catch it full on the side of her face. Or even worse: tossing my cookies at the bottom of the drop, into a 200-km/h headwind. Add that to the list of things you shouldn't do into the wind.
After getting thorougly soaked on Thunder Canyon (so that's why everyone else changed into swimsuits before riding!), we took a lunch break. Solid food still had no appeal, but I felt gorge-stabilized enough for a strawberry shake. That was my first big mistake of the afternoon. The attendant walked up to a soft-serve ice cream machine with a clear plastic glass and extruded a long, fluted coil of glistening, brownish grey material, roughly the color of glop but more fecal in appearance on account of the shape. And that was the vanilla; you can imagine what the chocolate looked like. He then added a pink sugary syrup containing about one strawberry molecule per gallon. And not strawberry pink, either; it was a fluorescent, radioactive bubble-gum pink. Now there's a color found in nature! In the steamy, summer-afternoon weather, all the ice crystals in my shake melted within seconds, obliterating what little resemblance my concoction ever had to ice cream. I still got it down okay: I convinced myself it was Pepto-Bismol-after all, it looked exactly like that famous stomach-smoothing medication-and sure enough, it calmed my rebellious innards very nicely. Maybe that bright pink ooze was actually bismuth subsalicylate!
(Later, we noticed that about every 50 m (165 feet) along the midway was a glorified cart selling something called "Dippin' Dots." Despite the bounty of sales outlets, the whole time we were there I saw no evidence that the park had moved a single Dippin' Dot all day. This failure could largely be attributed to a stupid slogan. "Dippin' Dots: The Ice Cream of the Future." Guess what, folks-nobody cares about the future any more. Look at how we treat the environment and our national debt. I believe that Dippin' Dots revenue would soar if they simply adopted the following catchphrase: "Dippin' Dots: Not Nearly as Nasty as Our Soft Serve Ice Cream." People will appreciate both the honesty and the helpful advice.)
Once I recovered enough so that I could watch something besides my feet, I turned to watching the crowd at the park. We really got to see how the other 90% live. Everywhere we looked we gazed upon a sea of NASCAR hats, Bible-quoting T-shirts, and cellulite. And little kids dressed like Britney Spears. I now have a referent for the word "prostitot." Seriously, I don't know anyone, and cannot imagine ever wanting to know anyone, who would even admit to listening to Slipknot, let alone wear one of their concert T-shirts. To those who bemoan the ubiquity of, say, Hello Kitty, I can tell you: you haven't begun to witness the agonizing implosion of popular culture.
Considering the near-100% humidity we'd had all day, I didn't think we'd even notice when it began to rain. That was my second big mistake. Just after 3:00 PM, we started getting pummeled by huge, icy globules direct from the stratosphere. Within a couple minutes we were sopping, and we sat out the next half hour, soaked and sullen, under whatever shelter we could find as we roved the park for indoor entertainment, darting from awning to awning. Curiously, the deluge didn't seem to thin out the crowd in the least. A few people bought ponchos from stands that had materialized all over the park as if by magic; many more, like us, merely toughed it out.
Though the rain eventually slackened off, the ominous rumbles of distant thunder did not. We searched for some diversion that involved no tall metal structures, and settled on miniature golf. That would have been a bit more fun without the unofficial water hazards every other hole. Or the sudden downpour that caught us on the tricky, elevated 14th green. Just when we'd started to dry out a little, too. Sigh.
By this time the intermittent soakings and general waterlogged nature of ourselves and our surroundings had begun to tax our endurance. We figured we'd hit a couple of the less demanding (and lightning-attracting) rides on our way out and go for a late dinner at Lorenzo's Pizza in Oberlin. While Kathy went off in search of a late-afternoon snack, I popped in the arcade to have a look around. I'm not particularly interested in new arcade video games, and even less in the type of games that dispense tickets for redemption at the rate of 100 million earning one pencil eraser; but the Penny Arcade at Lagoon (Salt Lake City's amusement park) taught me long ago that these places often hold secret treasures from the Golden Age of electronic entertainment. And lo, past the deafening roar and seizure-provoking strobe lights of the brand new ticket games, I stumbled upon a clutch of classic games. Zaxxon! Pac-Man! Defender! There was even a Space Invaders-the grandaddy of the all-stars. And better yet, at the very back, looking lonely and forgotten, was a row of old pinball machines from the 60s and 70s. Seeing those reel counters for keeping score, and the funky backglass art, precipitated such a tsunami of memories flooding back from my childhood that I entered a kind of fugue state; I lost about ten minutes wading back to shore through the tide of nostalgia. I recognized several of the titles: Gottlieb's Abracadabra, a favorite of mine from a vacation to Sun Valley, Idaho; Pioneer (also called "Spirit of '76," from the bicentennial); Fireball; and Four Million B.C., a machine I'd only read about (and whose presence here implied that the chaperones of the 812 Baptist youth groups visiting the park every day never ventured this far back in the arcade: "WHAT? Four million B.C.? You can't poison our precious children's minds with that Godless evolution crap!").
I merrily trotted back to where everyone was snacking on pretzels and reported my excellent find, knowing that Kathy and her sister Linda, at least, would be acutely interested. Alas, our experience playing the venerable pinball machines was quite disappointing. The scoring was more or less accurate, but the higher-level functions-such as hitting a sequence of targets to receive a bonus-didn't seem to work. Also, the credit counters were disabled, and all references to "replays" had been blacked out I suspected that the tangled mass of wires, solenoids and metal tabs that governed the "logic" had been ripped out of the cabinet and replaced with a single computer chip that reproduced only the simplest functions of the original game play, but that was practically guaranteed never to break down-a consideration of primary importance given that parts for these antique machines are practically nonexistent. I was mighty tempted to try a game of Defender-just about my first video game obsession-but I desisted after Kathy's sister reported that in her game of Centipede she couldn't move vertically at all, and even the horizontal movement was pretty skippy and lurchy.
Only one task remained after our stroll down Memory Lane, and that was to work out our frustrations with the weather on the bumper cars. Like many of the rides at Cedar Park, the bumper cars looked familiar, being an exact copy of the same ride at Lagoon. I loved the bumper cars when I was a kid, and especially this particular variety, for the steering wheel would turn forever in either direction, allowing the expert basher to turn on a dime, drive backwards and almost pivot in place. The moment I placed my hands on the steering wheel, my conscious brain resurrected a complete set of long-dormant, mad car-bumpin' skillz. I instantly knew exactly what to do. To start out I had to (1) find an open spot, (2) accelerate to ramming speed, and (3) select a victim. Head-on collisions are forbidden, and for good reason. To back-end someone is not proscribed, but neither is it very satisfying, since any idiot yapping on a cell phone can do that. No, the Holy Grail of bumper cars is to slam into someone amidships at full boost, without their noticing your approach. A good solid hit can shove the poor sucker a foot sideways, and even more satisfyingly, scare the crap out of them. I scored a perfect broadside on Kathy twice, and once on our friend Stephanie.
That was all a good bit of fun, and there was nothing for it but to eat pepperoni pizza until comatose. We wrung out our clothing, and those of use who'd thought that far ahead changed into dry socks. Off we drove to Oberlin, with the heater on full blast to help us dry out. We were in a bit of a hurry: we thought that Lorenzo's might close at 9 PM on summer weekdays, and though we'd given ourselves enough time, we had to use our driving time as efficiently as possible. Oh, SIGH: two independent octogenarians blocking our two-lane highway and one unexpected detour later, we pulled into Lorenzo's2 parking lot at precisely 9:01. Not to worry-the place was obviously still open. In fact, it looked as though the entire staff were out for a cigarette3 break. Nope-the entire town of Oberlin had lost electricity, and did not expect to get it back anytime soon: we saw police setting up temporary stop signs at the main intersection downtown.
Undaunted, we pressed on to Midway Mall, which we vaguely remembered had a Pizza Hut within its sphere of influence. (This Pizza Hut is about the first unusual thing I encountered in Ohio: it was open until ridiculously late at night-3:00 AM or something like that. Mom and I ate there whilst ferrying me and the last of my stuff to my first year of college.) Problem was, none of us knew how to get there. We were certain that we should start going north out of Oberlin, but then what? Miraculously, we found it in only three attempts. However, sometime during the last 22 years they'd curtailed their dining-room hours, and therefore were, needless to say, closed tighter than a drum. (We should have been amazed that the dining room exists at all; not a single eat-in Pizza Hut remains in the states of Utah or Washington.) Feeling hungrier and more irascible by the minute, we drove one circuit around the mall and finally located an OSIO Wednesday's4 that was not only still open, but that was willing to serve us actual, physical food. I tend to be leery of trendy chains like this one. Maybe it was the near-starvation, or the advanced fatigue, but my meal at least far surpassed my expectations. And the fried mozzarella cheese slices nearly knocked me out of my chair with the force of their scrumptiousness. Guess I shouldn't judge TGI Friday's when it's only Tuesday.
And just as we were packing up to leave, another torrential rainfall began. We didn't even pause on our way out to the car; we were still quite thoroughly soaked from the first of the afternoon's downpours, almost eight hours previously. Two days later, and my shoes were still damp. And comprehensively mildewed. Sigh.
______________________________
1Technically, because the ride was built in 2000, it should be called "Millenium Force": we all know that whereas the third millennium began on January 1, 2001, the millenium (as universally misspelled on the Internet by doofi who claimed that God works in mysterious ways, but uses a base-10 counting system and likes Nice Round Numbers) really did begin in 2000.
2How do we indicate something that belongs to Lorenzo's? We already have an apostrophe-s from the name; do we tack on another one? "Lorenzo's's"? That just doesn't look right.
3Or, to use the officially sanctioned LiveJournal spelling, ciggerretts.
4For Oh Shit It's Only Wednesday (George Carlin). It was really a TGI Friday's.
Having checked the Doppler radar before setting out, we knew that we'd get wet eventually: an unbroken line of churning rain clouds was poised to sweep across the Lake Erie coast around midafternoon. Our strategy, therefore, called for getting our roller-coaster fix out of the way early, and saving the indoor and other weather-insensitive activities for later.
I discovered, to my dismay, that sometime during the nine years since I last visited an amusement park I've become an incredible wimp with respect to sudden accelerations. After only the third roller coaster, the Millennium Force1, my stomach abruptly started trying to climb out through my esophagus. I staved off disaster only by strolling along very slowly, taking baby steps, and meditating on tranquil pastoral scenes. And I'd eaten nothing solid that day; I should have been able to do two laps on every ride in the park without so much as a burp. Next time I'll pop a whole bottle of Dramamine just before we leave for the park.
I really wanted to try the Top Thrill Dragster, too. It accelerates from zero to 192 km/h (120 MPH) in four seconds (pulling an impressive 1.4 gees), hurtles 120 m (400 feet) straight up, pauses dramatically as it barely makes it over the top, and plunges 120 m back down the other side in near free fall, performing a full helical turn on the way. Just looking at that astonishing vertical climb, visible from anywhere in the park, made my stomach do a slow roll. But there was to be no Top Thrill Dragster for me, unless I wanted the unique experience of barfing in free fall, leaving it hanging in midair during that corkscrew turn and watching my seatmate catch it full on the side of her face. Or even worse: tossing my cookies at the bottom of the drop, into a 200-km/h headwind. Add that to the list of things you shouldn't do into the wind.
After getting thorougly soaked on Thunder Canyon (so that's why everyone else changed into swimsuits before riding!), we took a lunch break. Solid food still had no appeal, but I felt gorge-stabilized enough for a strawberry shake. That was my first big mistake of the afternoon. The attendant walked up to a soft-serve ice cream machine with a clear plastic glass and extruded a long, fluted coil of glistening, brownish grey material, roughly the color of glop but more fecal in appearance on account of the shape. And that was the vanilla; you can imagine what the chocolate looked like. He then added a pink sugary syrup containing about one strawberry molecule per gallon. And not strawberry pink, either; it was a fluorescent, radioactive bubble-gum pink. Now there's a color found in nature! In the steamy, summer-afternoon weather, all the ice crystals in my shake melted within seconds, obliterating what little resemblance my concoction ever had to ice cream. I still got it down okay: I convinced myself it was Pepto-Bismol-after all, it looked exactly like that famous stomach-smoothing medication-and sure enough, it calmed my rebellious innards very nicely. Maybe that bright pink ooze was actually bismuth subsalicylate!
(Later, we noticed that about every 50 m (165 feet) along the midway was a glorified cart selling something called "Dippin' Dots." Despite the bounty of sales outlets, the whole time we were there I saw no evidence that the park had moved a single Dippin' Dot all day. This failure could largely be attributed to a stupid slogan. "Dippin' Dots: The Ice Cream of the Future." Guess what, folks-nobody cares about the future any more. Look at how we treat the environment and our national debt. I believe that Dippin' Dots revenue would soar if they simply adopted the following catchphrase: "Dippin' Dots: Not Nearly as Nasty as Our Soft Serve Ice Cream." People will appreciate both the honesty and the helpful advice.)
Once I recovered enough so that I could watch something besides my feet, I turned to watching the crowd at the park. We really got to see how the other 90% live. Everywhere we looked we gazed upon a sea of NASCAR hats, Bible-quoting T-shirts, and cellulite. And little kids dressed like Britney Spears. I now have a referent for the word "prostitot." Seriously, I don't know anyone, and cannot imagine ever wanting to know anyone, who would even admit to listening to Slipknot, let alone wear one of their concert T-shirts. To those who bemoan the ubiquity of, say, Hello Kitty, I can tell you: you haven't begun to witness the agonizing implosion of popular culture.
Considering the near-100% humidity we'd had all day, I didn't think we'd even notice when it began to rain. That was my second big mistake. Just after 3:00 PM, we started getting pummeled by huge, icy globules direct from the stratosphere. Within a couple minutes we were sopping, and we sat out the next half hour, soaked and sullen, under whatever shelter we could find as we roved the park for indoor entertainment, darting from awning to awning. Curiously, the deluge didn't seem to thin out the crowd in the least. A few people bought ponchos from stands that had materialized all over the park as if by magic; many more, like us, merely toughed it out.
Though the rain eventually slackened off, the ominous rumbles of distant thunder did not. We searched for some diversion that involved no tall metal structures, and settled on miniature golf. That would have been a bit more fun without the unofficial water hazards every other hole. Or the sudden downpour that caught us on the tricky, elevated 14th green. Just when we'd started to dry out a little, too. Sigh.
By this time the intermittent soakings and general waterlogged nature of ourselves and our surroundings had begun to tax our endurance. We figured we'd hit a couple of the less demanding (and lightning-attracting) rides on our way out and go for a late dinner at Lorenzo's Pizza in Oberlin. While Kathy went off in search of a late-afternoon snack, I popped in the arcade to have a look around. I'm not particularly interested in new arcade video games, and even less in the type of games that dispense tickets for redemption at the rate of 100 million earning one pencil eraser; but the Penny Arcade at Lagoon (Salt Lake City's amusement park) taught me long ago that these places often hold secret treasures from the Golden Age of electronic entertainment. And lo, past the deafening roar and seizure-provoking strobe lights of the brand new ticket games, I stumbled upon a clutch of classic games. Zaxxon! Pac-Man! Defender! There was even a Space Invaders-the grandaddy of the all-stars. And better yet, at the very back, looking lonely and forgotten, was a row of old pinball machines from the 60s and 70s. Seeing those reel counters for keeping score, and the funky backglass art, precipitated such a tsunami of memories flooding back from my childhood that I entered a kind of fugue state; I lost about ten minutes wading back to shore through the tide of nostalgia. I recognized several of the titles: Gottlieb's Abracadabra, a favorite of mine from a vacation to Sun Valley, Idaho; Pioneer (also called "Spirit of '76," from the bicentennial); Fireball; and Four Million B.C., a machine I'd only read about (and whose presence here implied that the chaperones of the 812 Baptist youth groups visiting the park every day never ventured this far back in the arcade: "WHAT? Four million B.C.? You can't poison our precious children's minds with that Godless evolution crap!").
I merrily trotted back to where everyone was snacking on pretzels and reported my excellent find, knowing that Kathy and her sister Linda, at least, would be acutely interested. Alas, our experience playing the venerable pinball machines was quite disappointing. The scoring was more or less accurate, but the higher-level functions-such as hitting a sequence of targets to receive a bonus-didn't seem to work. Also, the credit counters were disabled, and all references to "replays" had been blacked out I suspected that the tangled mass of wires, solenoids and metal tabs that governed the "logic" had been ripped out of the cabinet and replaced with a single computer chip that reproduced only the simplest functions of the original game play, but that was practically guaranteed never to break down-a consideration of primary importance given that parts for these antique machines are practically nonexistent. I was mighty tempted to try a game of Defender-just about my first video game obsession-but I desisted after Kathy's sister reported that in her game of Centipede she couldn't move vertically at all, and even the horizontal movement was pretty skippy and lurchy.
Only one task remained after our stroll down Memory Lane, and that was to work out our frustrations with the weather on the bumper cars. Like many of the rides at Cedar Park, the bumper cars looked familiar, being an exact copy of the same ride at Lagoon. I loved the bumper cars when I was a kid, and especially this particular variety, for the steering wheel would turn forever in either direction, allowing the expert basher to turn on a dime, drive backwards and almost pivot in place. The moment I placed my hands on the steering wheel, my conscious brain resurrected a complete set of long-dormant, mad car-bumpin' skillz. I instantly knew exactly what to do. To start out I had to (1) find an open spot, (2) accelerate to ramming speed, and (3) select a victim. Head-on collisions are forbidden, and for good reason. To back-end someone is not proscribed, but neither is it very satisfying, since any idiot yapping on a cell phone can do that. No, the Holy Grail of bumper cars is to slam into someone amidships at full boost, without their noticing your approach. A good solid hit can shove the poor sucker a foot sideways, and even more satisfyingly, scare the crap out of them. I scored a perfect broadside on Kathy twice, and once on our friend Stephanie.
That was all a good bit of fun, and there was nothing for it but to eat pepperoni pizza until comatose. We wrung out our clothing, and those of use who'd thought that far ahead changed into dry socks. Off we drove to Oberlin, with the heater on full blast to help us dry out. We were in a bit of a hurry: we thought that Lorenzo's might close at 9 PM on summer weekdays, and though we'd given ourselves enough time, we had to use our driving time as efficiently as possible. Oh, SIGH: two independent octogenarians blocking our two-lane highway and one unexpected detour later, we pulled into Lorenzo's2 parking lot at precisely 9:01. Not to worry-the place was obviously still open. In fact, it looked as though the entire staff were out for a cigarette3 break. Nope-the entire town of Oberlin had lost electricity, and did not expect to get it back anytime soon: we saw police setting up temporary stop signs at the main intersection downtown.
Undaunted, we pressed on to Midway Mall, which we vaguely remembered had a Pizza Hut within its sphere of influence. (This Pizza Hut is about the first unusual thing I encountered in Ohio: it was open until ridiculously late at night-3:00 AM or something like that. Mom and I ate there whilst ferrying me and the last of my stuff to my first year of college.) Problem was, none of us knew how to get there. We were certain that we should start going north out of Oberlin, but then what? Miraculously, we found it in only three attempts. However, sometime during the last 22 years they'd curtailed their dining-room hours, and therefore were, needless to say, closed tighter than a drum. (We should have been amazed that the dining room exists at all; not a single eat-in Pizza Hut remains in the states of Utah or Washington.) Feeling hungrier and more irascible by the minute, we drove one circuit around the mall and finally located an OSIO Wednesday's4 that was not only still open, but that was willing to serve us actual, physical food. I tend to be leery of trendy chains like this one. Maybe it was the near-starvation, or the advanced fatigue, but my meal at least far surpassed my expectations. And the fried mozzarella cheese slices nearly knocked me out of my chair with the force of their scrumptiousness. Guess I shouldn't judge TGI Friday's when it's only Tuesday.
And just as we were packing up to leave, another torrential rainfall began. We didn't even pause on our way out to the car; we were still quite thoroughly soaked from the first of the afternoon's downpours, almost eight hours previously. Two days later, and my shoes were still damp. And comprehensively mildewed. Sigh.
______________________________
1Technically, because the ride was built in 2000, it should be called "Millenium Force": we all know that whereas the third millennium began on January 1, 2001, the millenium (as universally misspelled on the Internet by doofi who claimed that God works in mysterious ways, but uses a base-10 counting system and likes Nice Round Numbers) really did begin in 2000.
2How do we indicate something that belongs to Lorenzo's? We already have an apostrophe-s from the name; do we tack on another one? "Lorenzo's's"? That just doesn't look right.
3Or, to use the officially sanctioned LiveJournal spelling, ciggerretts.
4For Oh Shit It's Only Wednesday (George Carlin). It was really a TGI Friday's.