After our last visit to Six Flags America --- well, this news just came in. Apparently parkgoers have been grumbling about how many times big rides have been down this season and as you'd expect more of them have been doing as the season wears on. One person claiming to have been at the park the 2nd of July --- same as we were --- said they were able to ride every coaster, though, including Batwing. Which if true means that had we gone to the park sooner --- or stuck around later --- we'd have completed the set. Well, nothing to do now except maybe hope that the ride gets relocated or the park gets saved. (There's no reason it couldn't be sold to some other chain or even to independent buyers, after all. I'd say that kind of thing never happens except this is a world with Gene Staples, the guy who saved Indiana Beach and is trying to save Clementon Park and Fantasy Island/Niagara Amusement Park.)

But our next target was driving north to meet up with my brother. Just him, unfortunately; his wife and kids were visiting her family up in South Jersey. He'd found a Mexican restaurant --- a good bet for something vegetarian --- somewhere in Howard County near enough to his home and not too far from our path up north. It was in some kind of shopping/entertainment complex that apparently the whole of the county was attending, as we went through a huge parking lot to find not a single space open, and saw my brother on a corner where he advised us of a parking garage not too far off. I think we ended up on the fourth floor of that.

Also while orbiting the place we noticed a bar with a row of pinball machines and joked that why didn't he have us meet up there instead. We had thoughts of heading over to it but it was crowded, the night ended up being long, and we didn't have the time. It's also possible we forgot about it by the time we were done with dessert.

I did take a selfie with my brother to send my father, who'd spent much of the previous week texting every fifteen minutes to ask if we had figured out when and where we were meeting up. This soothed his anxiety about our rendezvous so well that he never responded to or acknowledged the picture in any way. And we got some time in talking about him, and the rest of the family, including the revelation of why there's one member I just never hear any word about. Unfortunately, the circumstances of why that is preclude my sharing it here so please know that bunnyhugger, on reading these words, gave me a hard time about presenting something as disproportionately mysterious.

After dinner we all went around to an ice cream parlor around the block and with a line of about six hundred people in it. My brother said it was a good one and it was, and also we hadn't had just a big ol' ice cream cone in ages. (Well, cup, for me, but the spirit was there.) And he's hoping to get on a little trip to Iceland (again) with Dad (again) and I think by the end of the night was proving how reasonable the fares from Detroit were. Also mentioning that if we downloaded some podcasts right there, with advertisers thinking we're in Rich Government People Land, we'd probably get them laced with commercials by weapons makers aimed at weapons-buyers for federal agencies, like, a missile that was faster than a (something)-horsepower motorboat. Credit to the advertising agency for making us realize we always just assumed that any missile was faster than any motorboat, huh?

With the hopes that it won't be an embarrassing number of years before we meet up again, we set back out. An ancient plan of ours, when we thought we might met my brother for a late lunch, was to get up to HersheyPark. Hershey's one of the few amusement parks to offer Starlite admissions, a cut price for the last several hours of the day. And they do something even better, a sneak peek admission . If you have full-day tickets you can use them to get in the last two hours of another day; the thinking is the day before your full-day use but that's not explicitly required. So what we had been thinking was to go to Hershey's the full day of the 4th of July, and --- since we had a partial-day park planned for the 3rd --- get Starlite tickets to go in the last four or so hours that day. And then the 2nd, which this was, we'd get to use the sneak-preview two hours, and maximize our chances of getting on all the major rides given we expected the park to be impossibly busy.

We were hilariously too late for that, though. And it turned out that we spent enough time at the partial-day park on the 3rd that we could only use the sneak-peak admission. Perhaps that would be enough. But as we drove through the Maryland night we couldn't know that.

So to surprise you? We're going back in time! Because I somehow blew right past a couple of pictures, including of our October visit to Marvin's. Please take in a couple views of the Marvelous Mechanical Museum in its old location.

Huh, that's a weird plate! I wonder if it means anything.

So inside the guy who runs the league was working on Ultimate X-Men, which I think was the brand-new game then, and I took a moment when he was away to get some photos from on the playfield. The Sentinel Head there is the thing to bash as much as you can when you start playing.

Ultimate X-Men continues the trend of having fewer pop bumpers; there's only two on the playfield and here's one of them.

And there, on the other side of the playfield, is the other. Although they're separated they do bounce the ball between them some and I like the early-80s-game style of that.

Enough staring close at pinball. Here's our good friend the possibly fake Fake Cardiff Giant.

Another detail photo of Mickey Mouse's Chocolate Factory because my previous one hadn't made clear enough for a friend that yeah, their candy factory is about covering turtles in chocolate and shipping them out. Reflections keep this one from being quite so clear but at least you see the turtles swimming in chocolate there.

Trivia: As many as 170 Cuba-bound ships carrying enslaved people destined for Cuba were organized in New York City between 1859 and 1861. British authorities estimated about eighty thousand enslaved people were brought in during this era. Source: Smuggler Nation: How Illicit Trade Made America, Peter Andreas.

Currently Reading: Threads of Life: A History of the World Through the Eye of a Needle, Clare Hunter.

I have told already the disappointment we had at Watkins Regional Park, to which we went after finishing at Glen Echo Park. Since Watkins Regional Park is almost across the street from Six Flags America we did go there for one last trip, and one last attempt to get the final roller coaster of the trip.

That would be Batwing, which we never saw operating on Tuesday. It might have operated on Monday but we never got there. Good chance it didn't, though. Apparently, the ride has not been reliable in forever, with (I had somehow got the idea) a lot of problems with the electrical supply. So we failed once more, and for the last time, to ride Batwing. There's no knowing what Six Flags will do with the park's rides when it closes; it's theoretically possible that they might relocate it to some other park. But the ride is a quarter-century old and it's not hard to imagine management figuring they could just buy a brand-new roller coaster with a different set of problems instead. bunnyhugger rode its twin at Geauga Lake, and we both rode the Geauga Lake twin when it went to Kings Island and became known as Firehawk, so at least we know roughly what the experience would have been.

We didn't figure to spend the whole day at the park --- at one time we had the idea we might get up to HersheyPark for the last couple hours of the day --- but we did want to at least get in some last rides. I got to take time for that Wonder Woman elevated-swings ride, along the way noting that the ride queue went past three signs explaining Wonder Woman's deal. Two of the signs had grammatical errors. Lovely view of the park, at least.

We got a front-seat ride on The Wild One, once more without waiting. And we prowled a little around the Looney Tunes Movie Town or whatever it's named, since that's on the way back to the carousel. I discovered the little fiberglass structure billed as Bugs Bunny's house and it was somehow pleasantly nothing. The big thing about the interior is it had painted on shelves of canned carrots.

After our last ride on the carousel --- bunnyhugger rode one of the camels, which are surprisingly hard to get on despite the fact they're laying down, just because they're also very wide --- we went, at her suggestion, for a ride on The Flying Carousel. This is a swings ride, not so elevated as Wonder Woman's is. Just an ordinary amount of elevation. Also the ride operator, as they had earlier days, was doing some nice crowd work, doing Simon Says games with the riders, that sort of thing.

By then it was past 5:30 and my brother had figured we were meeting for dinner after all. And we were resigned to not getting to HersheyPark that evening. But something appeared to stop us from leaving that early, and it was something we never expected to see.

Likely anyone reading this knows that the legacy Six Flags parks have the Warner Brothers Cartoon character licenses and you can expect to see, like, Bugs Bunny or Sylvester the Cat or Tweety in costume. But did you know they have individual park mascots too? At least some of them do? Six Flags America has a bald eagle, name of Freedom, and Freedom was there doing crowd work and photographs just as we were getting ready to go. We couldn't believe it when we saw Kenny, repeatedly, at Kennywood. But to see and get photos with a mascot we didn't even know existed? Astounding, and I at least wondered if we might see mascots at the other parks we planned to visit. Stay tuned; the answer might surprise you.

Well, it was only about an hour until the park would close, but we didn't think we could stay any longer. We headed out to meet up with my brother, and from there, reach Pennsylvania.

In pictures, now, back to Michigan's Adventure and what we did and could not believe we saw after going to the car.

As we headed back into the park we saw this, something we just never see at Michigan's Adventure: inclement weather!

It wasn't bad enough to keep us from riding Mad Mouse one more time, at least.

But you can see it's already dampened the pavement and the park staff was taking in setups like this taste-the-candy thing.

We were among the last riders on Mad Mouse before the rain would shut it down.

More sensible people --- we thought giving up too early --- exited the park and stayed dryer than we did.

Here's an entrance to Camp Snoopy, under the light rain.

Trivia: James Lovell became prime crew on Apollo 8, bumped up from backup, in the summer of 1968 when Michael Collins needed surgery to remove a bone spur from his spine. Source: Chariots for Apollo: A History of Manned Lunar Spacecraft, Courtney G Brooks, James M Grimwood, Loyd S Swenson Jr. SP-4205. This brought Buzz Aldrin from Lunar Module to Command Module backup pilot, and made Fred Haise became backup Lunar Module pilot. (Apollo 8, which flew in December 1968, had no Lunar Module but the title was used anyway.)

Currently Reading: Threads of Life: A History of the World Through the Eye of a Needle, Clare Hunter.

Wednesday opened, hot and muggy, although a little less brutally muggy than previously. We had three objectives: Glen Echo Park, Watkins Regional Park, and meeting up with my brother. You know how Watkins Regional turned out. We also had a subsidiary objective, after getting to Watkins, of stopping in Six Flags America for one last try at Batwing.

So, Glen Echo Park, first. This used to be an amusement park, a trolley park --- they have a sliver of tracks in front of the gate, although those are ones installed in the early 2000s when they were getting a trolley donated from Philadelphia's transit agency --- on the west side of Washington, so we had to drive about 120 degrees around the Beltway to get there. It's also adjacent to the Clara Barton House, and turns out that at some points in the park's history it tried to harass her out of her home by doing things like building roller coasters right up to and maybe past the property line so she couldn't eat a meal in peace.

Glen Echo Park closed in 1969, a rough time for amusement parks. It was a few years early for big regional parks like Kings Dominion or, uh, Six Flags America to eat its lunch. Reading over the history it was probably wrecked first by Washington closing down the trolley lines (1960) and then desegregation, as a lot of parks shut down rather than handle Black people being treated like people. The park was officially desegregated in 1961 and Everyone Knew the park was unsafe by 1966. But the community rallied to save the park as an historic structure, at least, and in 1970 it became a National Park, although only the carousel among the rides was preserved. A great many of the buildings, many a bold Streamline Moderne style, including the gorgeous entrance, survive. And now I regretted that we had left our letterboxing gear behind, since I keep my National Parks Passport with that and I could've got a stamp. Maybe; I never figured out where to go to ask for a stamp, which they'd probably have done on a loose sheet of paper to go into my book.

The park has an historical marker on a stone, noting the sit-in and the Americans arrested for trying to ride the carousel while Black --- on the date that would become our anniversary, it happens --- and how this led to the park's integration in 1961. And the carousel is in beautiful shape, showing what you can do with an antique when the preservers have Smithsonian money. Well, National Park Service money but I imagine they call their buddies at the Smithsonian for advice. It's a Dentzel carousel so yes, it's got rabbits, and you won't be surprised to know what we rode. You might be surprised that the rabbit has pawpads painted on and, bunnyhugger noted on one rabbit, the wrong number of toes. (The carousel also has ostriches, a giraffe, a deer, and a lion and tiger. It used to have the brass ring game, but that doesn't run anymore.)

The carousel also has a horse carved and painted with Indian motifs, with a shield on the saddle showing a long-haired man in feather hat. This is not a rideable horse; Glen Echo Park declared this to be kept in ``ninety percent'' original paint (with a clear coating) and so for preservation purposes, so people could see how actual original paint looks, no one's to ride it, and the sign explaining its Preservation In Action status is attached to the center pole and blocks the saddle entirely. It also contains a note about the indigenous people who've lived in the Potomac Valley for thousands of years, and honors ``the resilience and perseverance of these Nations''. So I'm assuming that as soon as the fascists hear about it riding the Indian horse is going to become mandatory.

It was not yet, though. The carousel was going, not too fast (I think it may have been doing three rotations per minute), although the band organ had a nice, somewhat quirky selection of things. I can't bring any to mind right now but I feel like it was a lot of 60s sitcom themes. They do have a band organ, and a healthy number of scrolls, although I imagine without knowing that they've converted it to MIDI control for the sake of ease for everyone.

The park is not large --- a lot of these really old trolley parks were surprisingly small --- but I managed to get lost from bunnyhugger nevertheless. Well, I saw her going off to look at the arcade building or something (I was fascinated by the Cuddle Up building; the Cuddle Up was a teacup ride and it's now used for art classes and stage performances), and I figured I'd go take pictures of the front entrance and we'd meet back up, and apparently we just kept chasing each other around and past very slight obstructions until she finally caught me photographing the empty Crystal Pool.

We would get a couple of rides in on the carousel --- we worried we might not at all, because there was a school group there when we arrived and the place was packed with your School Group Chaos, hyperactive molecules of children forming unpredictable groups and sometimes filling up the ride; but they didn't stick around long, not by the time we got there --- and also eat at the refreshment stand. They had margherita sandwiches and I told you we had those at several parks, somehow.

And we also had a wonderful surprise going into the bathroom building! We saw a skink on the tile, holding still, trying not to be perceived. From looking over Maryland skink types I think this was a five-lined skink but if I'm wrong, who's to know? I did watch as the creature got out of the cooler confines of the building into the bushes outside so the creature probably knows what it's doing.

After more time than we somehow expected we'd be there, we took a last look around, trying to find particularly the remains of the amphitheater (did I mention the park opened as a chautauqua?) that used to be over a creek. To our eyes, whatever might remain is hidden by regrown nature, so that's probably for the best. But after all this, regretting only that we wouldn't see the park by night, we went off to our second park, way back on the other side of the Beltway.

Let's take in some more Michigan's Adventure Tricks-or-Treats closing day, please:

Camp Snoopy has a couple banners with the various characters and their achievements. I guess I'll accept Peppermint Patty as taking up spelunking, there's no reason she couldn't be fine at that. Lucy, though ... I question whether 'canoe tipping' is something you can get a badge in. Maybe in unsanctioned scout troops.

bunnyhugger pauses to change film from one kind to another. Hope she didn't forget to change her ISO setting to match!

Now to the Trunk-or-Treat cars, redressed cars from the former Be-Bop Boulevard ride. Here's the Mummy.

I think this was to be Disney's Cheshire Cat but there's defensible alternatives.

Here's the row, by the way, along the edge of the lagoon that reaches back to the water park.

Pirate ship car is looking pretty seaworthy. Note it's got cannons pointed at the next car over.

Trivia: One of the (several) dockings between Gemini 12 and its Agena target satellite was misaligned. Commander Jim Lovel used a series of firings on the forward and the aft thrusters to rock the Gemini capsule free, just as one might rock a car free from mud or snow, without damaging either. Source: Gemini: Steps to the Moon, David J Shayler.

Currently Reading: Lost Popeye Zine, Volume 69: Pappy to the Rescue!, Ralph Stein, Bill Zaboly. Editor Stephanie Noelle.

This week my humor blog reached a milestone, something we've been waiting for for a year now. Want to see what it was? Or just to see me say something different about Compu-Toon? Here's what you've missed:

• MiSTed: The 72 Hours Saga, Part 51
• Of Course, I’m the One Sitting Watching Both of Them
• Statistics Saturday: The Time
• The Least Inexplicable _Compu-Toon_ of All Time
• Statistics July: In Which AI Screws Up Yet Another Month
• What’s Going On In Dick Tracy? Why was that guy stealing art? May – August 2025
• Not the ‘They Are Not Just Plain Deer’ Line, Of Course
• MiSTed: The 72 Hours Saga, Part 52

Now in pictures? We're off to ... Tricks-and-Treats at Michigan's Adventure! But this is different in that it's closing day of the season! We had something that never happened to us before that day at the park. Plus we both went in kigurumi. I wore Stitch's Girlfriend Angel, and bunnyhugger wore ...

Cerberus! The first time she's gone to a park while three-headed. People loved it. Since no rides with an over-the-shoulder restraint were running this was fine to wear. (I used Angel rather than the red panda because Angel's tail would fit under a seat in a way the red panda's could not possibly.)

It was only maybe two weeks after our previous visit but already autumn had got much more advanced. The park really shines this time of year.

Why, the leaves are even trying to match the purple pennants!

Here's the path to Mad Mouse, long ago the main midway for the park and now just kind of there.

We didn't catch the One-Room Ghoulhouse during a story time this visit. Did get these skeletons doing farm warm, though.

Also we finally saw this little stage with performers! We ended up hanging out the rest of the show, partly by virtue of being the four or five-person nucleus around whom the crowd gathered.

Nice little monster tree hanging out in front of the Tilt-a-Whirl.

They had a Mummy Pizza as one of the meal options and yeah, it wasn't bad. The sauce on the side is ranch that I used to spruce up the crust.

Skeletons rooting you on to the log flume that's closed for the season anyway.

And now, the carousel. Or Scare-ousel, since it was running backward.

Many people were in costume, not just us, so we had some comfortable cover. The food stall on the left has been rebuilt since last year and now there's a solid, windowless wall there.

Ride operator giving instructions to the riders on the Scare-ousel.

Trivia: For the close of the 1949-1950 season, the NBC Symphony Orchestra took a six-week tour of the United States, travelling in a twelve-car train with Arturo Toscanini (then 83 years old) and his 106 musicians. The largest crowd, twelve thousand people, gathered in Cleveland. Source: The Mighty Music Box: The Golden Age of Musical Radio, Thomas A DeLong.

Currently Reading: Lost Popeye Zine, Volume 69: Pappy to the Rescue!, Ralph Stein, Bill Zaboly. Editor Stephanie Noelle.

Enough of what we didn't ride at Six Flags America the first day of July. What did we ride? And you won't be surprised it was mostly roller coasters. The park has nine coasters and we had got to three of them the day before. Assuming the rain would cut us off at 4 pm that gave us six coasters to ride in about five hours, which we could definitely do at, say, Michigan's Adventure or on a not-packed day at Cedar Point. The park seemed to us not particularly busy, maybe an effect of the heat or that we were there first thing in the morning. Maybe because the Six Flags decision to close the park is justified. Don't care to suppose that.

We went first to Roar, the other wooden coaster at the park. It opened in 1998, one of the first coasters built by Great Coasters International, the folks behind just so many great coasters, including Kings Island's Mystic Timbers, d'Efteling's Joris en de Draak, Dollywood's Thunderhead, and HersheyPark's Lightning Racer. We didn't know just who made it when we were at the park, but looking at it, with some of GCI's signature moves like this way they bank and turn their drops, we knew who built it. Assuming the park closes Roar is most likely to be demolished; moving wooden coasters was a short-lived 80s fad, and while historic preservation might work for the arguably 108-year-old Wild One, nobody's going to put that much effort into a mere 27-year-old coaster however important it might be as the oldest intact ride from a significant modern manufacturer.

Of course we enjoyed the ride. But I pause here to mention that the Roar logo features the letter A in a different color. This typographic choice carried across a lot of the rides, not just roller coasters but anything that could get its own name featured. Eventually it dawned on us the highlight A was for this being the America park. Sorry to spoil it for you.

With Roar ridden, though, we went over to the steel roller coasters, starting in Gotham City with the Joker's Jinx. It's your bright green and purple with yellow cars style of Joker, just to help you place the tone. And the ride uses a linear induction motor to get the train up to speed, not a lift hill, something we didn't think about until moments before launch. I think bunnyhugger made some hurried moves to secure her sunglasses in the last seconds before takeoff. It's your classic spaghetti-bowl track, and the great thing to us is that it uses a lap bar rather than over-the-shoulder restraints. This means our heads were not banged against anything while we rode.

I'm not sure if this was in Gotham City or in an adjacent section, the suburbs, but we did get to Firebird. This ride is, like Rougarou at Cedar Point, a onetime standing coaster converted to a seated one, so while it's a decent enough ride you can also kind of feel how less intense it is than you'd expect, legacy of the days when people had to bear all its stress on their feet and the bicycle seat tucked between their legs. For some reason this is the one roller coaster the park has dedicated shirts for and it's ... like ... an okay ride but why this?

This would be a new coaster credit for me, my 303rd. But for bunnyhugger? Probably not. This ride, in its earlier, floorless, incarnation, was at Six Flags Great America from 1990 through 2011, where it was known as Iron Wolf, and she surely rode it on a trip then. I mention this because I realized I forgot to explain something about Ragin' Cajun the other day.

As that lead-in suggests: this was not a new ride for bunnyhugger. Ragin' Cajun, like Firebird, used to be at Six Flags Great America, where it was known as ... well, Ragin' Cajun also. But she did ride it there. So not only did she ride a crazy-intense spinning wild mouse that bruised her head and arms and shoulders, but she didn't even get to count it as a new ride. At least Firebird offered no injury to add to insult.

And now ... the last of the Michigan's Adventure pictures from September! We'd make another Halloweekends trip, but that's to come later. For now, take a last look at the park and a last look at September 2024 ...

This time I noticed a sign just before the entrance had the important message: [ blank ]. I forgot to check what it says this season. We'll be back, surely.

So, where was it you said Zach's Zoomer was? ... Also you can see those banners I took the obstructed view from earlier in this photo reel.

Here's the Zach's Zoomer station decorated for Trick-or-Treats. Nothing too elaborate but it was nice.

Back to the Scare-o-sel! Here's bunnyhugger riding the dragon.

And I got a picture of the operational report for the ride.

Finally, a closing view of the Mad Mouse, with the giant human skeleton in front calling out to the heavens! Come over here, look at this ride! Isn't that something?

Trivia: Philip Armour was part of the California gold rush before getting into the Milwaukee grocery business, from which he would turn to preserved and canned meat. Source: The Age of Capital, 1848 - 1875, Eric Hobsbawm. Wikipedia says he made a good eight thousand dollars in the sluice-building business by the time he turned 24.

Currently Reading: The Invention of Scarcity: Malthus and the Margins of History, Deborah Valenze. So I get Valenze's point about Malthus having not paid attention to how much food can be grown in ways that do not get tallied in markets, or that don't get rated by scientists as nourishment (except possibly as famine foods, eaten when nothing else exists). But I feel like this is missing the point that ... like, even if Malthus only talks about wheat, what about the argument about agricultural productivity versus population growth is different if there's a larger class of foods to consider? I feel like an abstraction of ``agriculture produces wheat which is eaten by people'' fine enough for a basic model and that Valenze does not.

Rabbit rabbit! July opened with our facing the question of what to go to. Six Flags America, obviously. But there's also a small public park, Watkins Regional Park, very near Six Flags America --- we passed it on the way to the amusement park --- and it has a rare circa 1905 carousel with mostly Gustav Dentzel figures. There's not many like that. There's some very rare animals on it, including an articulated kangaroo, a rabbit, a hippocampus that defies the usual template for these things and by being literally a horse front end with curled fish-tail back end, bison, leopards ... a lot of unusual stuff. Also a ring machine, not in use but according to the National Carousel Association census original to the ride. (Given that they don't know where the ride was before 1930 I'm not sure how they can know that, but even if it's only from 1930 that's still a good history.) You can see pictures of it there.

Watkins Regional Park would be open (I think it was) 11 to 7 pm. So would Six Flags America; we couldn't go to one without losing time at the other. The obvious thing would be to go to Watkins Regional Park first and trust that we won't lose too much by an hour or two at the carousel.

The trouble: the weather. A storm front rolling in brought the hope for a break from the intense heat and humidity. But the storm would come in, according to forecasts, about 4 pm and not leave before 7 pm. Shaving an hour off of eight seemed reasonable in a way shaving an hour off of five --- less, if the storm were early --- was not. So we went to Six Flags America, taking in as much of the park as we could. Around 4 pm the storm did roll in, and we spent an hour plus huddled in the big cafeteria building, refilling our pop, texting with my brother in weirdly difficult efforts to arrange a meet-up the next day, and reading the posters explaining the park's history all around the building, searching for any one that didn't have some obvious grammatical error. We found two.

The storm did pass and the park started reopening after an hour and a half or so, and we got a couple hours of good riding time, with heat and humidity finally out of the 90s for a little bit. And we would have Wednesday to get to Watkins Regional Park after all. It would even be reasonable because there was one last roller coaster at Six Flags America we hadn't got on, so one last attempt made sense.

Wednesday we would be foiled. We got to Watkins Regional Park, discovering that it, like Wheaton Regional Park, is decorated with a Wizard of Oz theme, props and play equipment matching the book, long in the public domain, with imagery tiptoeing up to the line of The 1939 Movie that is not yet owned by we the people. (Once we knew both parks had Wizard of Oz themes we understood why Google insists on conflating the two. Further confusing things is that Wheaton Park also has an antique carousel, a circa 1910-1915 Herschell-Spillman that used to operate on the Washington DC Mall, which is part of why my brother wasn't sure about which Regional Park we meant to visit.)

But the catastrophe: Watkins Regional Park's carousel was closed. The sign on the ticket booth explained that due to the severe weather they weren't going to open today. Among our questions: what severe weather? It was hot and kind of muggy, but not as intense as the day before, when closing would have been completely justified. But we couldn't do anything, not even bang on the door to any point. The carousel was closed, side panels pulled shut, so we couldn't even look from afar, let alone ride.

In a very cross mood we skipped even looking at the rest of the park, fun as a Wizard of Oz place might be. (I'm more the Oz fan than bunnyhugger is, but you can't have grown up in the era when it was a Special Presentation and not be a fan of The 1939 Movie at minimum.) Instead we drove on to Six Flags America, bunnyhugger cursing out the fate that the most interesting carousel we were likely to see was closed the one day we could have seen it on what was surely the one time we would ever be in freaking Maryland for years. I pointed out, you know, unless we visit my brother and his family some, which she acknowledged would be a chance to visit this. Still. And on such a weak excuse ... My brother was sympathetic to the parks department's closing for weather, but I don't think he understands how you just do not ever see an articulated kangaroo on anything.

But this is how an (accurate enough) weather forecast led us to terrible disappointment. It's worse than that, but I'll let you discover how worse in time.

Meanwhile, not a fiasco at all: last September at Michigan's Adventure. What do you think?

More stuff in the former petting zoo: a ... sorcerer? ... skeleton posing with a staff while shenanigans go on in the background.

Skeletal bunny can not believe how fat that tailbone is.

Here's a couple skeletal rats climbing the chicken barn. Bunny skeleton in the background.

Skeletal vulture also not sure what to make of this. I think this is on the goat enclosure.

Skeleton overjoyed to get some time on the swing. Meanwhile, catch that bunny's reaction to the spider skeleton on the tree. Let me help. Computer? Enhance.

That is a well-posed stance of disbelief there.

Trivia: A 1950s publicity sheet for Disneyland promised that at Frontierland one could see ``a land of hostile Indians and straight shooting pioneers'' and also ``relive the days of the Old South'' by eating at a re-created Southern plantation kitchen, where a Black woman dressed as Aunt Jemima served ``her famed pancakes everyday'' while singing. Source: With Amusement For All: A History of American Popular Culture since 1830, LeRoy Ashby.

Currently Reading: The Invention of Scarcity: Malthus and the Margins of History, Deborah Valenze.

To regrets, now, from our short couple hours at Six Flags America on our anniversary. In the Mardis Gras area was Ragin' Cajun, which looked like a good roller coaster 299 to me. It's a spinning wild mouse, the same model as Exterminator at Kennywood, and Ratón Loco at La Feria, and the Crazy Mouse at DelGrosso's. Only difference from the day before is that this coaster was outdoors, with no props, and that it had no line at all. The cars have an alligator theme, rather than mouse or rat.

Did I say it was a spinning wild mouse? Because it was more spinny than that. It was a SPINNING wild mouse, starting very early on in the ride. This was great, to start with; if you're going to give us a spinning ride it's only fair that it really spins. The ride, however, took it too far. It was more loco than Ratón Loco, itself a ride so spinny that bunnyhugger had cried out theatrically from it. There was no crying out theatrically this time. There was crying out in actual pain, as she slammed into the restraints, leaving her with several bruises including one on the head that she still, over a month later, has. I got a bit nauseous on the ride and had to stop and get some water to recover; the heat and humidity were surely part of that, but the ride coming with its own artificial gravity was more. bunnyhugger would check on her bruises every day for a while after the ride, and when we saw it either not operating or running empty cars (test cycles, perhaps, or just attract mode after not drawing riders) she cursed it, ``good''. We did not ride it again.

After recombobulating ourselves, though, I took out the now sweat-dampened 8.5x11 paper with '300' that I'd brought from Michigan. And made our way to The Wild One, which still bears the centennial badge logo on it. The queue --- empty, when we got up there --- has a number of signs about the ride's history. When built it was the tallest roller coaster in the world, if you accept this as the same ride known as Giant Coaster from 1917 to 1985. (Giant Coaster is the first entry Wikipedia has for the category of record-holding roller coaster height. I did some digging in the Roller Coaster Database and there's so many roller coasters that don't have height data it's not possible to give a definitive answer of what the tallest coaster before this was.) It's also got a nice old-fashioned hand-painted-style ``Please remain seated, seatbelt fastened - Keep all hands, arms, and legs inside the train at all time'' sign.

I hurried to the front seat --- nobody was competing for that --- and a picture from bunnyhugger with the '300' sign. I hoped we weren't taking so much time with this as to annoy the ride operators but I have to figure they've seen this a lot and probably would have been willing to take a picture of the two of us if we'd asked, but we would never dare ask for something like that. bunnyhugger did notice other people getting seats in the middle and asked if there's maybe a reason for this that we should pay attention to? No matter. It's not true that front seat --- or back seat --- is always the best, but given a completely free choice I'll probably take the front until I know better from my own experience.

The coaster is basically an out-and-back, doing just what the description says, with a helix at the end to burn off a little more speed rather than waste it braking harder. It's a classic design, and with its left turn to the lift hill and coming back to a helix surprisingly like Shivering Timbers at Michigan's Adventure. Lovely ride and any park should be proud to have it. It did leave me wondering how the heck this ride could ever have been a side-friction coaster, the style of ride built before 1920 when wheels underneath the track made it possible for trains to go faster and the hills to be wilder.

And the answer is ... I don't know in detail, but the answer is that it's not the same ride. Giant Coaster had a bunch of redesigns, including after a 1932 fire destroyed part of it, which is when it changed from side-friction to upstop-wheels. And again in 1963 after another fire destroyed the station, part of the lift hill, and the helix. Even after relocating, with some rebuilding, at Six Flags America the redesigning didn't stop. In 1997 the helix (lost after 1963, rebuilt after the move) was redesigned again.

But we'd still ride it again, and we did that day, getting a backseat ride in too.

But that wasn't all we would do. We did step back from the more intense rides and, back by the carousel, went on the Minutemen Motors, the antique-car ride. As traditional, bunnyhugger drove. The path started out looking quite good, overgrown with plants, but it emerged into just a big swath of lawn near the parking lot and the back side of the entrance midway. Pleasant but could have been more.

By now it was about 7 pm and the end of the park's day. We did check the main gift shops, looking vainly for some Wild One merchandise. They didn't have any. And it wasn't just that we were looking in the wrong place; someone in the roller coasters Reddit confirmed that the park just doesn't have ride shirts, except for some reason this former-stand-up coaster named Firebird. Disappointing. I guess we'll have to get a bootleg sometime.

That, though, was our roller coaster anniversary, and my milestone coaster, all in one. We still had a full day at the park --- and six more roller coasters --- planned.

Done with the Gourd-geous Gourds now; what else was going on at Michigan's Adventure?

While Michigan's Adventure has closed the petting zoo it only built a couple years ago they did open it for Trick-or-Treating with skeletons to look at.

Also I guess they had a singing group on the goat bridge.

Here's some giant spiders and their webs set up underneath the goat bridge.

And here's a simple ring of ghosts set up near where the miniature horses and such were.

Here's a couple gryphon skeletons in, I think, the end of the goat enclosure.

And here's skeletons of some unicorns with Bone-ear-tis.

Trivia: Tea was introduced to Japan in the 9th century, but did not become popular until it was reintroduced in 1171 by a Japanese Zen scholar. Source: Tea: Addiction, Exploitation, and Empire, Roy Moxham.

Currently Reading: The Invention of Scarcity: Malthus and the Margins of History, Deborah Valenze. Picked up from the university library because I was a viral toot on Mastodon about how the eBook version was no longer for sale.