Wednesday we set off, mostly eastward, for Altoona, the town that's always called Altoona, Pennsylvania, as if there were many other Altoonas so the location might be ambiguous. At least I think of Altoona as pretty distinctive: it's got the famed Horseshoe Curve for railroad enthusiasts, and it's the home of the Boyer Candy empire, or at least grand duchy, makers of Mallo Cups and surely you've heard of other things. It's also got Lakemont Park, and the world's oldest operating roller coaster, Leap-the-Dips. Hyphens, we shall learn, are apparently optional. Lakemont Park is not a huge place like Kennywood. In the number and variety of rides it's probably closer to Seaside Heights than anything else, for what good that does in giving you scale. And it's had some hard luck, as small parks have had since the Great Depression, though in comparison to an upcoming adventure we'd realize it's had things pretty good. For a park that's a century-plus old it isn't very well-forested; this is the result, legend has it, of a misfired attempt at cleaning away diseased trees back in the 80s when the Boyer company took over the park and rebilled it as Boyertown USA, in tiny imitation of Hershey Park. Even given the relative size difference between Boyer and Hershey, the difference between Lakemont and Hershey Park seems to stand out, but then, it's not like there's another small family-owned Altoona-area amusement park that Boyer could have bought, except for the other one. Boyer apparently had hopes of expanding the park, with the most tangible result being the Skyliner, a wooden roller coaster they'd moved from Roseland Park in Canadiagua, New York. Moving a wooden roller coaster is weird. Steel roller coasters move all the time, but wooden roller coasters not so much, because of all the wood. Boyer clearly had hopes they were building a major new attraction; the plan fell apart in the midst of the company's bankruptcy and takeover by New York City financiers who relocated to Altoona to be where the action was. Skyliner was a good chunk of what drew us to the park, but Leap-the-Dips was the star attraction. But allow me, as with Kennywood, to put the roller coasters --- three, that adults can ride --- to their own post. We got to the park early in the afternoon, too early to check into our hotel, so we parked in a parking deck that serves, we guess, also for the open-air shopping center at one end of the park (maybe an outlet-store complex that was meant for Boyertown USA? We don't know) and the Altoona Curve minor league baseball team (whose park's outfield ends just short of the Skyliner, and we were so disappointed there wasn't a game because watching a baseball game from a roller coaster, yes, thank you, please), trusting that if we parked confidently enough nobody would break into our car and steal all our clothes, computers, iDevices and the like. We'd have to get used to this; we would be going to multiple parks where leaving stuff at a hotel was just impossible. Then we got lost looking for the entrance. Boyer put in a really quite nice entry plaza, bigger than the park as it exists needs, but fit for something not quite the size of Michigan's Adventure. It's one of the points where you can feel the could-have-beens brushing you. The non-roller-coaster attractions are much the ones you might expect from an amusement park or good-sized fair, with things like a swing ride and a Ferris wheel that bunny_hugger worked up the courage to ride, ``Tin Lizzie'' cars and a Round-Up ride of the kind that was always my favorite as a child. We rode a lot of Round-Ups this trip. It's a simple ride; you stand on the edge of a cylinder, which spins, until it gets fast enough that the whole platform lifts you to a pretty steep angle, so you keep going up and down until the more sensitive are nauseated. The Round-Ups of Pennsylvania were more fun than those of Great Adventure, because the entry points weren't fenced off with sliding doors. They were just, you know, there, with a little chain roped across them. You couldn't really move to the entry points while the ride was going anyway, but the illusion of danger was more present. It wasn't just an illusion of danger on the bumper car ride, either. These cars, with some lovely 50s-style Fairground Art sign, were nicely maintained and we got to our normal routine --- my trying to see how long I could ride without getting bumped by anyone, bunny_hugger seeing how much she could bump me --- and I was trying to see how well I could use the center posts to turn more rapidly when there was a sudden bang, and a girl cried, and the ride stopped. A kid, riding with some kind of guardian, was in a car that was hit, and she flew forward and hit her face on the steering wheel, and the ride operator leapt up to hit the emergency stop button so fast that I didn't see it, though my wife did. It's the first emergency-stopped ride I remember being on. (The ride operator asked if we wanted to go again, once the kid and guardian were cleared. We had been pretty near the end of the ride cycle anyway, but it took surprisingly long for we-the-riders to say yeah, let's go around again.) Lakemont Park is almost unique among the parks we visited in that it hasn't got an antique carousel or even a recreation of one. It's got a kid's carousel, that runs at an arthritic two cycles a minute (most come in about four cycles a minute), and we rode it because we're that sort of people. But it's not really the attraction, any more than the video arcade (which had a Star Trek: The Next Generation pinball on which I did indifferently well, but bunny_hugger loves watching me play so it wasn't a complete loss). Since we got wristbands --- we got a lot of wristbands this week --- we were able to leave the park mid-day to check into our hotel. bunny_hugger found a hotel literally in sight of the park, which I didn't realize. Because I thought the satellite navigator said to turn in two-point-two miles, instead of point-two miles, I didn't realize the intersection we needed was where we were supposed to turn until I was most of the way through it, and I made my most obnoxiously jerkfaced, worst right turn ever, to get us there. It wasn't my proudest moment. But after checking in and relaxing a bit, we were able to go back to the park without particular worry about our belongings, and enjoy the rest of the evening. And also, to ride again the roller coasters. About those roller coasters ... Trivia: In January 1865 the Confederate Colonel Frederick W Sims of the Railroad Bureau contracted with John D Gray of Columbus, Georgia, to produce an unlimited number of railroad boxcars, at costs plus 25 percent. It is unclear whether any were ever delivered. Source: The Railroads Of The Confederacy, Robert C Black III. Currently Reading: Vanished Kingdoms: The Rise And Fall Of States And Nations, Norman Davies. PS: The End Of The World, Qualitatively Explained, as I continue on the illusion from that Sleeping Bear Dunes overlook.