Standing in the middle of nowhere

When Kennywood broke our hearts back in July, closing at barely 7:30 pm, they had people standing by the entry gate to hand out rain checks, a bit of kindness that made bunny_hugger run off and cry out ``KENNYWOOD IS AWESOME!'', which it is. But the rain check was good for only the rest of the calendar year, which would be only to mid-September as it wouldn't let us in for the Halloween events, and was that really worth going to? Yes, we decided, and that's how we made an early September weekend (I'm hoping someday to get my blog back to reporting on stuff done the month I tell it) our Rain Check Trip.

Pittsburgh's about six or seven hours from Lansing, and the logical route since we didn't plan to go through New Philadelphia would bring us right past Cedar Point and it's a shame that past Labor Day, Cedar Point is only open on ... oh yeah, it's open on Fridays, Saturdays, and Sundays. We were heading out on a Friday. By leaving at the right hour of the afternoon and admittedly speeding a little bit we were able to get to Cedar Point just as the park was opening for its short, five-hour, Friday between the regular season and the Halloweekends season. (It was only four hours for the general public, but season passholders like us got in early.)

And I mean there right on time: as we were getting out of the car and bunny_hugger set her contact lens in they played the National Anthem and welcomed everyone to their day at Cedar Point. If I'd driven a tiny bit faster we could've been part of the opening mob. There wasn't a mob, though: it was too light an attendance day. It was so light an attendance day, in fact, that --- and I am not exaggerating this in the slightest --- our parking space was in only the second row from the gate. If we'd been any closer we'd have parked on the Blue Streak roller coaster.

The park was, without exaggeration, the least crowded I've ever seen it, and the least crowded bunny_hugger has seen it in a decade-plus. So we learned that apparently the bonus weekends between the regular season and Halloweekend is the time to go; sadly, there's just the one bonus weekend left anymore. But as a chance to go riding things ...

We enjoyed an incredible summer for walking on to rides. We've had almost no agonizing waits for rides, and we've had astounding things like walking on to marquee rides such as Kingda Ka over and over. And yet somehow Cedar Point chose to give us another incredible walk-on day. For example, we got onto Maverick --- Cedar Point's new ride of a half-decade ago and one that still gets hour-plus queues because it's almost as good as it is low-capacity --- without having to wait. I believe we let one train go so we could get a front seat ride, but, there were people who were just walking through the whole queue labyrinth and getting seats right away.

The marquee ride most thrilling to walk onto this season was GateKeeper, which we rode three times, even though weird stuff kept happening. One time --- I believe our first ride of the day, actually --- the ride started its climb up the lift hill and then stopped, odd by itself, and then it sat there a while. One of the other trains was also stopped at a designated brake spot just ahead of the station too. And we waited. We wondered if we might be walked down from the ride, which, though stealing from us a roller coaster ride, would be a rare and novel event. I joked that, ``At least it's not Windseeker'', the somewhat notorious elevated swing ride that keeps stranding people several hundred feet in the air with no good way to bring them back down, a joke that delighted bunny_hugger as well as the people in front of us who overheard and repeated it.

On another go-round of GateKeeper we waited for a backseat ride, hopped in, and then ... the loading came to a stop because they had to clean off the cars. Someone on the loop before us had gotten sick and thrown up and apparently at a really prime moment in the ride too as they had to clean seats on both sides of the train --- GateKeeper's cars are two wings off a pretty substantial middle section --- and hose the whole thing down. Ours, of course, was among the seats that had to be scrubbed down. This took a pretty long while and the ride operators muttered things to the effect of it being a new one on them. (I can believe this; GateKeeper is a thrilling ride but not a particularly intense one.) We felt bad for the folks who had to wait on the ride but behind the station, but then, we got to be there for a strange and freak occurrence. We love a good ride, but getting to see abnormal operations is maybe better.

Our last GateKeeper ride didn't have any of these freak occurrences; that was just something we got to as we were leaving for the evening, and which we went on because the beautiful ride caught our eye and we figured, well, when else are we going to get to walk on GateKeeper, other than when we were here back in June?

Since this was the weekend before Halloweekends started we got to see the park halfway through preparations for this: from the GateKeeper platform we could see one of the tents where the parade floats are kept. Some of the skeleton tresels were set up, as were most of the steampunk-themed props that adorn Frontier Town, or much of CarnEvil occupying Camp Snoopy.

We had thought to just casually drop in on Cedar Point for an hour or two, on the way to Kennywood, since we just can't casually drop in on Cedar Point; but the one or two hours kept sprawling out and I'm not sorry that it did. Cedar Point maybe suspected that we were going to another park, for how good it treated us here.

But we left at about sunset, and drove back to Pittsburgh where we found our old friend the Red Roof Inn.

Trivia: 45 Huguenot families settled in an area now known as Frenchtown in East Greenwich, Rhode Island, in 1686, although they soon moved to land which would be disputed between Massachusetts and Rhode Island, and then left the area altogether. Source: Rhode Island: A History, William G McLoughlin.

Currently Reading: Images Of America: Conneaut Lake Park, Michael E Costello.