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In my narrative here we're finally reaching August, which you may know of as County Fair Season. bunnyhugger entered photographs into a bunch of county fairs this year, including some she hadn't been to ages, although I didn't go along with her to most of the. Mostly I was tired or felt like not going out somewhere.

Come early August, though, we were up to the two we just don't miss. First would be the Jackson County Fair, with a heck of a spread of exhibits and that impressive building that has a water mil and stream through the center. bunnyhugger had an uncharacteristically poor performance at the Jackson County Fair this year, just ... I'm going to say three ... pictures of nearly a dozen getting ribbons, and this is a fair that gives ribbons all the way down to fifth place. Some of this you can understand; a lot of people entered pictures of dogs or cats for black-and-white-pets and the choice of ribbon-winners has to have been almost a random draw. And some were solid choices, like, a photo of snake-charmers getting a better place in the street photography category than bunnyhugger's picture of people getting chestnuts at the Silver Bells street market.

They also had a category for AI-generated image content, maybe supposing that if there's a specific spot for that it'll keep the pollution out of the photography and visual arts sections. Can't say any of that stood out, although I did notice in among the kids arts someone putting up a cure picture of Dragonite colored in a patchwork mass, like a raggedy doll. It didn't win a ribbon --- what looked like fan art from The Land Before Time did --- but I liked the notion. Als in needlepoint there were a lot of Halloween-themed stitchings done. I have no explanation for this phenomenon. Also, the ham radio guys weren't there when we happened to be around, although they had the display of their gear for us to admire.

I had thought, going down, that this year we might buy the tickets needed to go on the four-storey New York, New York walkthrough funhouse ride, because I had forgotten that was something at the Ionia Free Fair instead. I'm embarrassed to say that we got down there so late, and spent so long looking at the exhibits, and the rabbits and turkeys and chickens, and looking around the midway rides that we didn't have time to actually ride anything. We had just been thinking what rides to go on when the woman doing customer support next to the ticket vending machine asked if we wanted anything before they shut it down for the night. So we grabbed one ride on the carousel and that was all we'd get to ride for the night.

I know we wouldn't have ridden the Gravitron --- bunnyhugger has reasonably sworn that ride off --- but they had a travelling kiddie coaster, an (pardon me) Orient Express, that didn't have any signs saying adults couldn't ride. bunnyhugger had gotten credits for the equivalent ride at two other county fairs and was up for the goofiness of making one of those her 337th or whatever it would be. No luck, though; we just didn't have as much time as we'd imagined. Maybe next year.

At the end of the night we got some square ice cream and sat at picnic benches to enjoy it. While we were there the moment of the fair's closing for the night hit, and a couple minutes later security was coming around telling us, fair's closed, shoo. We had already finished the ice creams so it wasn't that much an inconvenience but it felt needlessly hostile, especially coming minutes after the last midway lights were turned off, instead of, like, a half-hour past.

Now for a bit more Saturday at Cedar Point Halloweekends last year. Don't worry, there's not an endless supply of this left.

Celebration Stage here has opened a portal to the heart of the sun, which is exciting.

The stage, the Top Thrill 2 spire, and the Power Tower, plus some ordinary light posts to add to the whole lights-and-vertical-lines motif this picture.

Stage performance going on. We didn't stop to listen to the show so I don't know just what was going on but horrors of the night coming out and singing 80s rock is a safe bet.

More mid-show footage and vertical lines for you to admire.

And I like this moment for getting the shafts of light pointing out at the viewer.

Back to some serious stuff, like Stitch getting a ride on the Musik Express. Note this is from the inside of the ride building; you can just see the outside in the distance.

Trivia: Of the twelve votes cast by the Smithsonian Board of Regents for their first Secretary, one went to Charles Pickering (lead zoologist of the US South Seas Exploring Expedition), four to Francis Markoe (corresponding secretary of Washington's National Institute for the Promotion of Science), and seven for Joseph Henry. The board then moved the approval of Henry to be confirmed unanimously. Source: Joseph Henry: The Rise of an American Scientist, Albert E Moyer.

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

The Thursday after our Michigan's Adventure trip we had another journey, this one out to Downtown East Lansing, which was having an 80s Night festival. For this they closed off a couple of streets near Pinball Pete's and this little triangular wedge of a park that's in the heart of downtown. Also while there I learned there's a historic plaque explaining why this wedge is there: long ago it had been where the streetcar between Lansing and East Lansing turned around. The trolley's been gone almost a century now but it offers a good spot for 80s Night and other civic events. I don't know where the Lansing trolley turnaround was. I assume near the capital but there isn't an obvious road wedge. Maybe in what are now parklands next to the river.

We didn't get to the whole thing; just too much pulling on our attention, somehow. But we got to a good bit of it. There was a band, a locally famous set, doing spot-on covers of classic 80s dance tunes. I kept waiting for a Trevor Horn-connected song but somehow ``Two Tribes'' didn't fit the dancing-in-the-streets vibe people wanted. There were also hopscotch and long jump and running tracks set up in the street with, I had assumed tape, but when I was by the area a couple weeks later the markings were still there and mostly intact. I don't know what you could possibly put down that would last a month-plus in city traffic. Or they re-lay them every time there's an event night and I didn't know about what that week's was.

We met up with a bunch of pinball-league friends there, partly because they like doing fun stuff too. Also because Pinball Pete's brought up two pinball machines and set them on free play and we weren't going to turn down convenient nearby free play. Unfortunately Pinball Pete's doesn't have any actual 1980s pinball machines anymore. But they brought out two games with 80s band themes, the 1990s Guns N Roses from Data East and the 2017(?) Aerosmith by Stern. The Aerosmith had been temporarily plundered from a bowling alley on the west side of town where someone's trying to start a pinball league; when RED, working for Pinball Pete's, told him they were taking the game out for a couple days he shrugged and said that's fine. Aerosmith is an odd game that seems like it should be fun, but none of the shots are fun to make, and being a little bit off tends to drain you right away. If you have a good game it's fun but it's so hard to have a good game.

The 90s Guns N Roses is decent, but it's also a 90s game by Data East so the scoring is obscure and unbalanced. When I played against bunnyhugger and FAE and MAG I happened to luck into a mode where I just shot orbits, pretty easy to do on the game, and got forty million points each time. Not every game went like that, but it's the sort of thing that demoralizes the competitive play.

Also driving bunnyhugger crazy is the number of kids who would run up and, not knowing how you play pinball, start four games, play a while and then maybe abandon games and maybe not. At one point we had to explain to a woman behind us that we were not hogging the game, we were taking turns, like the game says, within a single game and would let her kid play as soon as we were done. I worsened matters by getting an extr aball, of course.

But most fascinating to me, somehow, was that they had a ``Tetris Tumble'' game. This is a bunch of Tetris blocks, to be put on a base with a semicircular bottom, and you keep stacking blocks on until they tip over. Some kids intuited quickly that the point of the game was you roll the big soft die beside it to pick which shape piece you add, making it a challenge. Others figured, you know, you can put pieces perpendicular to the plane that the base implies, and therefore fit more pieces more compactly than the rules would imply. I like that. Shows imagination.

It was a fun evening, and it was fun going to East Lansing just to have fun. Reminded me that oh, yeah, I could just go to Pinball Pete's and hang out a while, something I haven't done in forever.

bunnyhugger celebrated the 80s of this by taking out of storage her real actual 1980s-vintage Cedar Point T-shirt for the Iron Dragon coaster. I remembered only halfway through the evening that oh yeah, I did have a very 80s T-shirt, my Buggles concert shirt, that I should have worn. Maybe next time.

In pictures, now, we're up to Saturday afternoon and evening at Halloweekends. Hope you like Cedar Point pictures!

bunnyhugger, in Stitch livery, hanging out at the balcony of the Hotel Breakers. Note that Linus is writing the Great Pumpkin on the TV screen down there.

Late afternoon view of Top Thrill Dragster/Top Thrill 2's ``top hat'', at the time the most expensive piece of park decoration they had. (The ride is finally running.)

Some nice early-evening clouds that I liked looking at here.

And a nice moment of the Mine Ride where you see the train coming as close as it gets to the entrance.

More of the nice sunset sky, with a view of the Top Thrill 2 second spire decorative element on the side there. You can also see the now-removed Celebration Stage, lit up in bright blue, bottom center.

And a slight turn of the head gets you to the Coasters diner and the Corkscrew coaster, plus the new water tower, and a sky that looks incredibly darker despite being the same moment.

Trivia: Carson City, Michigan, was named that by Thomas Scott, who was the first (white) landowner in the village and with his nephews built a sawmill and grist mill. Scott had been in Carson City, Nevada, in its boom days. The Nevada city had been named after Christopher 'Kit' Carson. Source: Michigan Place Names: the History of the Founding and the Naming of More Than Five Thousand Past and Present Michigan Communities, Walter Romig.

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

It's another Thursday so you know what that means: I explain comic strip stuff. There's about twice the Mary Worth content this week than you could expect from a normal Mary Worth week so let's dig in, shall we?

• MiSTed: The Tale of Jimmy Rabbit, Part 3
• Now This Is Truly a Hamster That Never Existed
• Statistics Saturday: This Week’s Winners and Losers
• You Could Get _Peanuts_ Stuff for a Blood Donation
• The Heck Is Going on With Mary Worth and Olive? A Special Report
• What’s Going On In Mary Worth? Why is Mary Worth hyping up Olive being so special? June – August 2025
• So Is It Otter Enough for You?
• MiSTed: The Tale of Jimmy Rabbit, Part 4

In pictures, we weren't yet done with the Merry-Go-Round Museum, so please enjoy what we found inside, for example ...

A Cedar Point Peanuts Height Guide? What is this doing at the Merry-Go-Round Museum? ... And it turns out they've got a small collection of Cedar Point historic stuff that's being set up as a museum within the Merry-Go-Round Museum. It's not being set up at Cedar Point, of course, because ?? ???? ?? ????.

But they've got some lovely novelties, including some of the old ride-height signs! Here you see that bunnyhugger is just barely tall enough to ride the Blue Streak and that they used to have a home-grown superhero for the ride sign there. It's been decades since they had anything that custom for rides.

The Merry-Go-Round-Museum has a couple of these things, to put a piece of paper on and crayon over an imprint. This one is of the museum building itself and you see how many kids didn't wait to have crayons.

Couple of figures out front, including an ostrich who can't believe this white bunny.

British carvers made some of these centaur figures, like this one commemorating Boer War hero ... Literally Any British Army Officer From 1901. Any ideas?

Sometimes they restore figures and sometimes they keep them in condition as-found. I don't know the plans for this horse. The way the front legs look is weird and so I suppose that's all the clue bunnyhugger needs to tell you the carver.

Here's a sea dragon, paint all but gone, but pieces of glass embedded in the saddle still making it sparkle.

Bet you didn't know antique horses came in pink, did you?

Don't worry about the sign, it means this is one of two rocking horses made by carousel carers using a merry-go-round design but adapted to being a kid's toy known to exist. There are other rocking horses.

The wood horse up front is one they use to demonstrate how you plan out and carve a figure. The horse in the center with the signatures scribbled all over was new and I don't think we ever got its purpose. Charity, I assume.

Another of the museum's rub-on paper figures, this of a head with carving tools around.

Five tickets seems like a lot just to watch. But, you know, the Rotor? That was worth watching.

Trivia: In his memoirs Erich Dethleffsen, last chief of the Führungsgruppe in the Nazi Army General Staff, described Hitler in the last days as being ``a terrible picture. He dragged himself along slowly and laboriously from his living quarters into the conference room of the bunker, throwing the upper part of his body forward and pulling his legs along afterwards. He lacked a sense of balance; if he was stopped on this short distance (20 to 30 meters), he would have to sit on one of the benches placed along both walls for this purpose or hold on to his conversation parter . He had lost control of his right arm, the right hand trembled constantly [ ... ] The eyes were bloodshot; although all written material intended for him was typed on special 'Führer typewriters' with letters three times the normal size, he could read only with glasses. Saliva often trickled from the corners of the mouth --- a picture of misery and of horror''. Source: Germany 1945: From War To Peace, Richard Bessel.

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

Shortly before our big roller coaster trip we bought a new air conditioner. This because the window unit we've had for the past 712 years produced a groaning, wheezing noise when we tried to turn it on. So bunnyhugger did her research and found an Energy Saver-certified room air conditioner appropriate for our bedroom's size. Turns out it's a much bigger thing than the unit it's replacing, suggesting that we were overtaxing it its whole lifespan.

It is not in our window. Not because we've already started winterizing the house, but because of a series of small nuisances. The main one is that I kept hitting problems where I couldn't grasp how to actually follow the instructions for the stupid thing. One of the advantages of this new air conditioner is the working parts slide out of the frame holding it, so you can get it fitted into your window without dealing with its full weight. So you just slide the innards out, right? No, you need to un-screw a couple bolts put in for shipping (and later reinstallation) and I failed to understand that the first time around.

Also you need to attach the fanfolds, the things that block off the part of window the air conditioner itself doesn't occupy, by attaching these plastic flanges underneath. The flanges are just enough bigger across than the holes for them that I could not do it, and I could not get the LG Phone Help Line to understand this concept. I finally drove the case and the flange over to Best Buy, where both the customer desk person and her supervisor agreed this was weird. Supervisor finally braved pushing the flanges in hard enough that they fit through both holes, though, and we could proceed.

Except that ... this unit is a lot heavier than the one it's replacing. Also a lot longer. We have a brace that's the right size for the old air conditioner but as far as I could tell it didn't even come near the bottom of the new unit. How to make sure the thing doesn't fall out? The case is supposed to screw in to the indoor side of the windowsill it sits on, and it has these footers that attach to rest on the outside windowsill, but that all seemed like not quite enough.

So for fear of a hundred(?)-pound air conditioner slipping out and dropping on one of our cars (the window's over the driveway so there's little chance of hitting a person but a great chance of hitting a vehicle) I kept waiting for some better idea of what to do. This is when I ran across a thing called the 'Magic Mount'. I am I think correctly wary of products with 'Magic' in the name, but the logic of this seems too straightforward to be a problem. It's a metal brace that fits over top the air conditioner, on top of the part where the fans fold in, and it has metal rods that reach out and connect to a base that's 3M-sticky-materialed into the window frame. Or screwed in, if you feel unconfident about the sticky material. The mount transfers the weight of the air conditioner --- up to 200 pounds, they claim --- to the window frame, and assuming leverage works like I think it should, the air conditioner can't fall out.

So right now we have the glue for the base curing, waiting to be ready to put in or for me to chicken out and plunge screws through the base into the window frame. And to convince myself there's no way the air conditioner could slide its lower half out of the window frame and fall that way.

You may protest, it's September, it's autumn in Michigan, why do you have to care about this? To which I say, yeah, it's been chilly this past week but that's fool's autumn. We might be done with 90 degree days for the year but we're going to get nights too hot to sleep unaided. Plus at this point I want the stupid thing done, even if it's just for one hour proving the concept.

Maybe I should screw the frame into the base of the windowsill too. The Magic Mount instructions insist that isn't needed but I'd just like to know, you know?

And now a half-dozen more pictures of Friday of our big Halloweekends trip late October last year.

Controls for the motorcycle ride in Kiddie Kingdom, with the note about the operator going from here to Space Age, which we did not.

Instead we went to the Atomic Scrambler! Don't worry about the skeleton, folks, his body was totally not atomically scrambled.

The animatronic robot here was a piece from Disaster Transport, once upon a time, and was for a while doing business in the gift shop of GateKeeper. It's set up here with a, I assume fake, Out Of Order sign because you see that little lantern badge at the bottom? You could pay too much money to get something that makes displays like this interact with you.

Ah, to dusk already, and Raptor ascending into the purple skies.

Or, if you turn and face a different way, the milky-grey skies.

Here we're back to the Midway Carousel but here's a twist: we're riding in the chariot, which we almost never do. The ride is more fun than you'd think from here!

Trivia: During James Garfield's summer 1881 convalescence an electric-powered blower and box filled with ice, with a network of first tin and then canvas ducts was used to cool the President's discomfort at least. A half-million pounds of ice were delivered to the White House before his September death. Source: Cool Comfort: America's Romance with Air-Conditioning, Marsha E Ackermann. The tin ducts were so noisy as to be worse than the summer heat, thus their replacement.

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

PS: The Heck Is Going on With Mary Worth and Olive? A Special Report on a comic strip that has been going weird in ways not its usual weird.

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.