At Palisades in Salisbury Parks the rolly coasters are flyin'

So bunny_hugger and I had our inaugural rides and were ready to dive deeper into the Cedar Point offerings.

The park has, as mentioned, several carousels. One was particularly interesting because of multiple meanings, some historic, some personal, and that was the second which we rode. This carousel's one that has four animals riding abreast, with a magnficent twist: as the carousel turns, the poles on which the animals ride move not just up and down but also forward and back. Thanks to machinery we probably shouldn't want to ponder, this means the four animals riding abreast will overtake and fall behind each other, with the finishing order being random to the extent that mechancial devices can produce random orderings. That's a great and tragically rare thing in carousel design --- Wikipedia says the only other Racing Derby rides like this are in Playland in Rye, New York, and at Pleasure Beach in Blackpool --- I suppose just because of the cost and complexity that the randomization machinery adds to the mechanism. I can't imagine anyone being dissatisfied at adding this element of a race to their ride, except the parents of the kids who have a spirited debate about who came in 'first' in an edge case.

This was really enchanting to me since a big part of my academic specialty is Monte Carlo methods, which have an insatiable appetite for random numbers, which have to be generated by mechanical algorithms. This is that rare amusement ride that has something to do with my doctorate, and I was left pondering things like what the periodicity of the finishing order is. How long does one have to wait before the orders repeat themselves? One of the things appealing to bunny_hugger about this ride are many happy memories of riding it in the past, particularly with the background music which was that of an actual horserace being called, in a race dating back to some unknowably distant history when something was first recorded. Sadly, though --- disappointingly --- they didn't have the horseracing audio for the ride, at least not this time. It was some musical piece that I don't explicitly remember, but it wasn't nearly as suitable as the horse race would have been.

At this remove it's a bit difficult to reconstruct exactly where we wandered and the exact order of rides we took; for one, unlike Seaside Heights, there's actual geography to Cedar Point and it's much easier to take so many walks as to lose track of just where we were going even with the maps and my photographs to look at. Photographs were one of the things I worried excessively about, actually; surely I'd want to take pictures, but did I want to risk my camera? My camera is dutiful and generally dependable, but it's also a pretty big one, and I would have said it couldn't be fit into a pocket, which is a desirable condition for something when you're on a ride featuring surprising and sudden accelerations. I was considering buying a new camera just for rides, something flat and pocket-friendly, but it turned out buying one would require expending effort and money and I could avoid both. It turns out my camera could fit in my pocket, though, at least well enough for the slower rides --- which included almost all the roller coasters --- and for the few where that was particularly contra-indicated there were drop boxes on the exit sides of the rides for just this sort of thing. My logistics-freak side got fascinated with the rotations among the typically three boxes for three sets of possible riders, and so I didn't have to listen to it nagging at me all day.

Perennially interesting to me too was bunny_hugger's talk about the lore of the park, both in details of its operation --- our experience on the Wild Cat, a wild mouse type of roller coaster, for example, included pointing to facilities that used to be a hotel and now were just where staff that was there for the summer could live --- and in the way things had changed over the years. The ancestor to all this was one of skylerbunny's favorite ``Inside this issue'' pictures from The Onion: ``You Can Tell Area Bank Used To Be Pizza Hut''. The idea was entered into evidence earlier in my week with her by a gas station you could tell used to be a Phillips 66 (or maybe 76). And, as with the pirate's cannon playing the theme to Taxi, There were those places around the park where you could see what it used to be.

For example, Iron Dragon, built in the late 80s and one of those models where the seats hang underneath the track so that patrons can have the experience of fearing their sandals are going to fall off into the water below, forced the tearing-out of a boat ride which went through the pond now serving that important role for the coaster, and she pointed out bits that were left over from the boat ride even after twenty years.

Another example of this used-to-be discovery was at the Cedar Creek Mine Ride, one of the oldest roller coasters they have at the park. Being a 'mine ride' means the design of the coaster cars and the track and its settings are such as to make it look like a Western mining camp's accessories. It's a satisfyingly long ride, with some of the passage being over artificial lagoon, and on the way in bunny_hugger pointed out the spots where the wait queue used to lead, when it was shorter. (Although naturally that was also when the number of riders was greater; the ride was originally designed to have as many as five cars on the tracks at once, but these days rarely needs three.)

We did take a plain old railroad ride to get to the distant corner of the park, partly because it seemed a more efficient use of time to go the length of the park once rather than out and back again. Then, too, we were thinking of eating. Tucked on the far side of the park was a stall selling something bunny_hugger was looking forward to, and that I was sold on just from the concept: cheese on a stick. The non-Vegans among you are already interested in this too, aren't you? So that's what we were looking for.

Trivia: The German Empire never had a crown, although there were artistic renderings of one for coins, flags, mailboxes, and such. Source: The German Empire, 1870 - 1918, Michael Stürmer.

Currently Reading: Fred Allen's Radio Comedy, Alan Havig.

[ PS: Happy birthday augustforth. ]