He didn't know the night

In better circumstances --- ones where society had chosen to contain or eliminate the pandemic instead, ones in which I am not unemployable --- we'd have likely spent our tenth anniversary in Europe. We have wanted to return to Efteling and floated it as plans for a tenth-anniversary trip. There are many more parks we'd want to see in western Europe. Many we'd want to see in Great Britain too, like Alton Towers, or Blackpool on a week when they have any warmth at all. But we have the circumstances we have. If I'd gotten any job at all the first half of this year we might have done a week's trip, likely to some parks in New York and Pennsylvania we've wanted to see or to revisit. But, here and now?

What seemed attainable? And also enjoyable, desirable? A day trip to an amusement park. We had gone to Indiana Beach Amusement Park for my first time, and bunny_hugger's third, for our fifth anniversary, having a glorious day. While we enjoyed their gorgeous and surprisingly Jersey-Shore-or-Blackpoolesque charms an epochal flame war ravaged the Michigan Pinball community, one so complete that the mods deleted nearly all trace of it and we only later gathered confusing legends about just what happened. We couldn't hope for something so spectacular this time around, but we could try for it again.

Indiana Beach was shuttered after the 2019 season, when its owner decided to get out of the amusement park business and focus on family-entertainment-centers. (The same owner also owned Fantasy Island, in Buffalo, which we'd visited in 2019.) But then a Chicago business guy, Gene Staples, combined his love of the park and a three million dollar loan to buy and reopen it. In 2020. He would also soon buy Clementon Park, in New Jersey, similarly shuttered at the end of the 2019 season (staff came in on Community Appreciation Day to find the place locked up, to their surprise), and then Fantasy Island too. In the amusement park miracle story of the 2020s (so far) he's jumped in to the business at what's got to be its worst time in ninety years and seems to be making a go of it. We wanted to see what the park is like, now, with new management everyone calls a savior of independent parks.

It would also be a chance to re-ride a roller coaster from Mexico City. When La Feria Chapultepec Magico was shuttered and demolished, Staples bought some of the rides. Cascabel 2.0 --- formerly Kennywood's Lightning Loop --- he has going to the former Fantasy Island. But Quimera --- formerly the Magnum Force coaster at Flamingo Land in England --- was coming here. It's getting a new name (the Roller Coaster database offers ``American Dreier Looping'' as the not-particularly-imagination-catching name), possibly to further distance it from its history. A derailment on Quimera in September 2019 was the instigating event to La Feria's closure. (The company operating the rides was found to be unable to prove it had been doing safety inspections.) But, if Wikipedia's to be believed, this was also the first roller coaster to have three vertical loops, when it originally toured as ``Dreier Looping'', so maybe the name's a note to its happier history.

I remember the drive to Indiana Beach being around an hour longer, each way, than that to Cedar Point; one that bunny_hugger thinks is too long for a day trip and that I thought was just on the brink of being too long. In this regard I think I'm right; I could do this, but needed more recovery time than I would for even Cedar Point. I had also remembered the last half of the drive, from Fort Wayne to Monticello, Indiana, as an endless series of drives on petty, tiny roads. In this I'm wrong; it's maybe the last half-hour or so that's petty roads, but the rest of it is respectable county roads or divided highways even if we're not on the Interstate anymore.

Also while we were driving through the considerable amounts of nothing we pass in Indiana, bunny_hugger noticed a town with a familiar name. She thought Logansport was a town that had an historic carousel, one that still has the brass ring game. The next day, when we were home and had some sleep, she confirmed; we did drive just past the only carousel in Indiana that we could ride and try to grab a free ride. The carousel was built ... Wikipedia isn't certain, but the National Carousel Association dates it to 1902. We're going to have to stop in again, sometime, possibly when we do our next visit to Indiana Beach, which we agree we should visit sooner than five years from now. Especially since we feel more confident now that it's still within our day-trip range, and is such a great place.

When we finally pulled up to Indiana Beach we pulled into the free parking lot which bunny_hugger was sure we had used last time we visited. I didn't think so; I would swear we had parked in the paid lot, since the receipt for the parking lot rested in my Scion tC to the day I killed it. Given the places we walked past including a sign for a drive-in we'd surely have acknowledged last time, I think we were in paid parking last time, and she'd used the free parking lot some time before.

Also, we had misremembered when our first visit was. We visited the end of June, 2016. June 2017 we spent at Storybook Land in South Jersey, and then discovered the Playland's Castaway Cove on the way to Gillian's Wonderland Pier. We might have remembered because at Storybook Land the cafe had newspaper clippings about a derecho that swept through that park on the 30th of June, 2012, and that stuck in our minds. We remembered the pinball flame war correctly; that was our anniversary in 2016. And we were right to remember having a great time at Indiana Beach.

This dancer had a great bundle of fiber-optic lights so was beautiful to watch in motion.

Here the fiber-optics look like something unearthly's been brought to the furry con.

bunny_hugger had to go to the headless lounge to cool off some, and I sat down to watch every fursuiter in the world walk past in an informal parade.

Trivia: Surfing --- previously thought to be a skill that a non-Pacific-Islander could never hope to master --- became a fad and obsession in the United States after Jack London published an article, ``A Royal Sport: Riding the South Sea Surf'' in the October 1907 edition of Women's Home Companion. (An edited version also appeared in England's Pall Mall Magazine, ``Joys of the Surf Rider''.) Source: Pacific: Silicon Chips and Surfboards, Coral Reefs and Atom Bombs, Brutal Dictators, Fading Empires, and the Coming Collision of the World's Superpowers, Simon Winchester. (Supporting London's article was the spectacle of the first white guy to master surfing, George Freeth, who demonstrated it at California's Huntington Beach. Freeth's secret to mastering this impossible skill was listening to the guy who was teaching and practicing a bunch.)

Currently Reading: The Nightlife Of The Gods, Thorne Smith.