We didn't go back to Cedar Point the next weekend, because that would have been madness. But it was a fun kind of madness, the sort of lark it's great to imagine, and we talked about it a little bit. I think even sometime around 4 pm the next Sunday I mentioned, this was our last chance, if we wanted to dash to the car and run for Sandusky and maybe, maybe get on Blue Streak before it closed for the winter. It was fun to imagine.
We had, for the summer, a just wonderful, exceptional time, in many dimensions but especially in the park-going tours. In many ways this summer served as a second honeymoon, one that sprawled across many weeks and many trips, nearly all of them by road. It's very easy to be married when all you and your partner have to do is things that delight you, when all the daily little problems and worries are forgotten. But this gave us wonderful experiences to draw on and to summon to memory in those cold nights of winter and those days when our fears threaten us. It's expanded and so enriched the vocabulary that is our relationship. May through October saw this arc of delightful things, and part of why I've blathered in such detail about them is that I want to share them with you, and with the versions of us that may be going back sometime to re-read and renew the freshness of those experiences.
We got to visit several aspirational parks, as well, and had the incredible and fortuitous discovery of Conneaut Lake Park. I finally rectified one of my big oversights as a New Jerseyite, a year after giving that up, by going down to Wildwood at last. By my estimate, and I'm not positive I haven't overlooked any, we made at least 24 visits to amusement parks (25 if you count Tuscora Park, closed when we entered; 26 if you count Casino Pier, closed when we visited but with the historic carousel working, and I did visit on my own when they had some of the pier and some rides operating, though I rode nothing), counting revisits: Michigan's Adventure (twice), Cedar Point (six, count 'em, times), Jenkinson's Boardwalk, Great Adventure, Wildwood/Morey's Piers (three times), Kennywood (three times), Idlewild (twice), Lakemont Park, DelGrosso's, Knoebels (twice), Conneaut Lake Park, and Waldameer. We already have sketched out ideas for other amusement park tours we could take, and we've already got our season passes for the Cedar Fair corporate empire for next season. It was the kind of exhausting which makes you energized.
We'll see Lucy The Margate Elephant yet.
Trivia: Samuel Langley's 1896 model aircraft used one-horsepower steam engines; he switched to internal combustion after that. Source: First Flight: The Wright Brothers and the Invention of the Airplane, T A Heppenheimer.
Currently Reading: The Secret History of the World, Mark Booth. I've got it: this is a book designed to send the editors of Skeptical Inquirer into screaming fits about the end of civilization that people write and publish and buy this stuff. Also ... Mary Poppins as an example of a Sufi mystic? The Wonderful Wizard of Oz as an example of applied Theosophy and in the Scarecrow, Cowardly Lion, and Tin Man showing off humanity's vegetable, animal, and mineral natures?
Postscript. It's staggering to think we visited Kennywood more often than Michigan's Adventure, given the relative distances.