Now Can't You Just See Yourself Walking Along Leading Your Pet Trachadon
Aug. 19th, 2025 12:10 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
The biggest thing we did at Dutch Wonderland, geographically, was Exploration Island. This was a new spot opened since our last visit which turns out to have been 2011, not 2010 as I'd just thought. They moved the Antique Autos ride to it, and they have a boat ride that goes around the island, and we made the time for both. (There's a point on the auto ride with a warning sign, Mayhem Crossing.) The boat ride isn't a small swan boat type ride, but rather something with three or four benches in a good-size boat, and ride operators directing people where to sit so it stays balanced, and people sometimes listening to directions. Around the island you also get some views of surrounding farmland, so that on one side there's actual cows and on the amusement park side, a statue of a cow that I don't believe was animatronic. If it was, it wasn't operating.
But the middle of the island, now, that had some play area, yes. But also a dinosaur walk-through for the good reason of ?? ???? ??? ??????. But this was cute, a bunch of scenes of dinosaurs set up, with plaques explaining what species you were looking at and something that might be interesting about them. Some of them also moved. I don't know if that reflects all of them being supposed to move but a few breaking or what. There are a couple with buttons, and there's one at the far end of the island with a bunch of buttons so that you can operate the head, the arms, the hips, the tail ... and you can do this together, producing some strikingly lifelike motion by combining two or better three directions at once.
I, on my own, took a ride on the sky chair because I'm like that. I know I rode this in 2011 also. I had the memory that bunnyhugger rode it with me but that seems very hard to credit. Since she was taking her daily walk I used this as a chance to ride the thing she doesn't want to, and took both routes. The ride operator at the far station told me that I didn't need to have gotten off the seat and gotten back on, I could have just ridden through. Well, I didn't know, and figured the best thing was to not presume.
The view was great, though; the sky ride goes over a nice cross-section of the park, including Merlin's Mayhem, and goes right past the diving area where they do a show with stunt and comical dives. We haven't ever made time to see the show, but, maybe sometime. Seems like it's fun and we are glad it's there. I also got to see a bit of Daniel Tiger as his show was going on. Also the sky ride occasionally stops for a couple minutes. Not while I was riding, which I'm sure reassured bunnyhugger if she noticed. The only reason behind the stops that seems to hold is that it stops when the train is coming in to the station, fairly underneath the sky ride's path. If they're trying to be sure nobody can fall from the sky ride into the path of the miniature locomotive I guess I understand the reasoning but it seems like an excessive amount of caution to me.
The park also has a log flume, one of your classic old-style versions where most of the track is in the ground but it rises twice for two splashdowns. (The trough-in-the-ground is by the way the budget option. The Michigan's Adventure guy, when he wanted his petting-zoo fun land to become an amusement park, insisted on getting the big expensive model where nearly all the track is dozens of feet in the air.) We were in the happy position of having the time to ride this and the weather being pretty much exactly what you want for a log flume. This model doesn't go out looking to soak you either, so it was very good for us. The park also had some vintage photographs, put up as part of their 60th anniversary celebration a few years ago, so we could look at the log flume when it was the End Of The Park except for the hot air balloon that I assume was captive that lifted off from what's now ... I think ... the vicinity of the wooden roller coaster?
Near to the end of the day we came across a photo opportunity spot and took it, a statue of a horse-drawn carriage of the sort that might take a 19th century Pennsylvania Dutch person to town or whatnot. And then happened to see in the open park-type area beside it --- adjacent to a tower that used to house a helter-skelter slide but closed in the 14 years since our last visit --- we saw a show going on. Duke, Merlin, and others were doing a show with whatever crowd was gathered around. Merlin was of course searching for Mayhem and because of the reasons had to do a Simon-says-freeze thing on everyone now and then. I think it was supposed to represent a freeze spell, something like that. Great seeing Duke out and doing crowd work again, though. We were having a great day for seeing mascots.
This isn't the whole of our day and there's stuff I would like to talk about besides this about the park, like how the rider-height-requirement is shown as a series of jewels. Like, emeralds, topazes, sapphires, rubies (ruby riders being above the minimum height for everything, although they might be above the maximum height for a kiddie ride). But the day came to an end, and that's all right, as we had another amusement park to get to for a couple of hours.
And now, in my confusing way, I share some pictures of a completely different amusement park from an unrelated trip, our Cedar Point visit in early October of last year:

The performance stage which was at some point called the Luminosity Stage and I don't know what it was called by this point. It's gone now, as the Siren's Curse reconfiguration of that midway has wiped it out as a performance space. Some of the area is Iron Dragon queue.

Still, they had some nice gargoyles watching over the Halloweekends crowd. Hope they're doing all right.

Here's the stage from the other side. Note the spot where Batman emerges.

And here's the construction fence --- looking remarkably permanent considering --- behind which Siren's Curse was rising ... any day now.

Meanwhile, over at the petting zoo either the camel's named Churro or the camel's wishing Churro a happy birthday.

Opposite the petting zoo is Snake River Falls, standing but not operating and not yet torn down so you could tell.
Trivia: In July 1876 The Port Huron Times proposed that the Michigan Building at the (Philadelphia) Centennial Exposition, which had been built so it could be deconstructed at the fair's close, be brought back to Lansing and serve as executive mansion. The Detroit Tribune endorsed the idea. Source: The Bicentennial History of Ingham County, Michigan, Ford Stevens Ceasar. None of this happened; the Michigan Governor's Mansion was built in 1957 and donated to the state in 1969.
Currently Reading: Threads of Life: A History of the World Through the Eye of a Needle, Clare Hunter.