Word Salad II

We got to the second meeting of the revived Arcade Pinball league yesterday. This went well and even avoided the heavy rains we were worried might become a problem. bunny_hugger and I got assigned to the same group, something that came up several times in a row at Lansing Pinball League where group assignments are done by a random draw from a hat. Arcade League we're theoretically grouped by ranking.

Turns out we were well-matched, though. Over the course of five games bunny_hugger had three second-place finishes, while I had a first, a second, and a third; combine with with both of us having a first and a last place on other games, and we ended up tied for points for the night. This is not to say we're going to be in the same group next month, but we didn't do anything to prevent that.

The logic of the way Arcade League does things mean between the two of us we got to pick three of the five games we played, and we went for old-school games: Theater of Magic, Cirqus Voltaire, and Taxi. The two people we played with went for older games with their picks too: Attack From Mars and Creature From The Black Lagoon. It was a league night we could have had in the original Arcade league, which was neat.

Back in Dutch Wonderland pictures, we're almost off the monorail and going to another of the ride-while-looking attractions ...

Last picture on the ride, catching a little view of the Potato Patch. A couple years back Hershey's sold Dutch Wonderland to Kennywood (well, Kennywood's corporate overlords) and I think that's when Kennywood's ``Potato Patch'' name migrated out to Lancaster. Not sure; we tried to eat there but the line was impossibly long.

Back on the ground. Here's the best I could do photographing one of the other animatronic miniatures, a woodworking shop. Unfortunately the sun was making bright reflections against its glass so this is the best I could do.

Some ride sign/entrance queues here, one for the Double Splash Flume and another for The Twister, their trabant ride. You saw both in the distance from the monorail pictures!

And then we started having some Kennywood-grade mascotting luck! Here was Duke out and about a second time!

Vintage historical photo of Dutch Wonderland from when the Double Splash Flume opened; if I was making out the locations right the giant balloon was about where Kingdom Coaster is now. I don't know how long a hot air balloon was part of the park's stuff, but note that Great Adventure in the 70s relied on a captive hot air balloon for some of its ballyhoo.

Another vintage photo, of the Dragon's Lair Log Boats, a boat ride that actually runs outside the park grounds, where you can see things from the highway. It's been renovated away from this model, though ... will you see? Well ...

Here we are on the Dragon's Lair boat ride! While things like the hippo and elephant in the above picture are gone, there's still ``animals'' planted around the lagoon with signs telling you who to look for. The monorail track is above, and you see the highway sign in the background.

Most of the animals appear on the ride after the sign announcing them, like Tucker the Tortoise, but there's signs all along the ride so some of them you have to look back the way you came to see.

The park is unafraid to have some of their fiberglass animals be political, rather than male!

There's Ally! We thought the jaw might move and I'm not sure we were ever sure we saw it do so.

There's a big dragon hidden in the mound that seems like should be Duke except it's a completely different purple altogether. The sign asks if you can spot Fred and Fanny Frog.

I think I found them! I wonder which one is Fanny.

Trivia: After the Civil War, around ten thousand Confederates migrated to the Amazon in a vague idea of creating a new cotton-plantation slave state. All but a few hundred soon fled back, with the diehards congregating in the town of Santarém, Pará, Brazil. Source: 1943: Uncovering the new world Columbus created, Charles C Mann. Wikipedia's essay on the Confederados says around twenty thousand US citizens entered Brazil from 1865 to 1885, but there's no way of knowing how many were these.

Currently Reading: Lost Popeye Zine Volume 87: Nonny the Equine Genius!, Ralph Stein, Bill Zaboly. Editor Stephanie Noelle.

In the absense of much very interesting going on around here --- how interested can you be in my reaching the end of the Paxlovid prescription? --- enjoy please a double dose of Dutch Wonderland pictures and the start of another big orbit-the-park ride.

Here's the Wonder House just rocking a bit. I'm sorry the picture doesn't have the full text of the message about now come in onc't.

We did not take a picture of ourselves at this My First Trip To Dutch Wonderland display since it was neither of ours first trip.

The Kiddie Whip ride. It's kind of weird that so many parks kept the Kiddie Whip rides going when the Adult Whip rides are almost all long gone; I wonder what in the economics of it makes the one so much more appealing than the other.

And now? On to the monorail ride! Don't worry, there'll soon be something joining all these rectangles in perspective and whisking us away at a slight elevation.

We got lucky and were put in the booth up front, just behind the operator (who was out talking with someone about something when I took this cabin photo).

Close-up of the control panel. There's a couple reminders of things like closing-door announcements affixed permanently to the dashboard.

And here we are, in motion!

Way down there is the bumper car ride and, past that, the honeycomb/bear flat ride from a couple days ago.

The sign to/from Exploration Island, seen from above!

Here we cross over the water to the part of the ride over Exploration Island, which has me wondering what the monorail went over before the current Exploration Island construction. Maybe I have photos from a similar ride from our 2010 trip. No way to know.

Here's one of the spirals of Kingdom Coaster, with the launch station in the background.

Kingdom Coaster in the foreground and the log flume in background. And more of Kingdom Coaster in the farther background.

Trivia: Washington crossed the Delaware in flatboats called Durhams, after Robert Durham, who developed the design in 1757 in Pennsylvania. The flat-bottomed boats could be as long as 65 feet and as wide as eight feet in the beam, with excellent cargo capacity, able to carry as much as twenty tons of iron or 150 barrels of flour on calm waters. Source: Wedding of the Waters: The Erie Canal and the Making of a Great Nation, Peter L Bernstein. (You can see why this kind of boat might be of interest in a book about canal-building.)

Currently Reading: Inspired Enterprise: How NASA, the Smithsonian, and the Aerospace Community Helped Launch Star Trek, Glen E Swanson.

In more other news, we've got a mouse. Not one of the authorized mice who're expected to be here and cared for and all that. But some wild mouse that bunnyhugger heard, and then saw, running across the floor apparently unaware that they're being incredibly obvious. We've had mice get into the house before and we know the rough procedure. bunnyhugger got out some of the live traps and went through the extremely fiddly process of getting them ready.

The one possible complication: what if this is a mother mouse? It's easy enough to relocate one to the garage, but getting the mouse pups with her would be a problem. But, no way to know until we catch them and check their underside. Also no way to know that it's just one mouse, and not several that bunnyhugger has seen one time each.

In the Dutch Wonderland pictures we approached Exploration Island, but have we explored it yet? No? Well, let's see if we don't fix that today.

Here's what you'll find on Exploration Island: dinosaurs!

Oh, yeah, I should specify, animatronic dinosaurs so just in case here's the fire extinguisher!

Exploration Island, as it is, isn't more than a dozen or so years old so these trees have to predate that. I don't know what the island was used for before this.

As ever, seeing dinosaur stuff these days mostly involves me learning there's all kinds of new names of dinosaurs I never heard of before with names I'm not going to remember.

Ankylosaur I know because a sound clip of an automated voice reading ``ankylosaur'' is used whenever the Greatest Generation podcast hosts realize they don't know how to say a word.

Now these guys I know. Animatronic Calvins!

Aw yeah, Stegosaurus, you can't have dinosaurs without these guys.

This one was neat because you maybe see the silvery panel on the right there? There's a bunch of buttons you can press that activate the connected gear, and so you actually make the dinosaur do things. You can get surprisingly lifelike movement with just a little practice!

I don't know the Shunosaurus but it looks like it's been ordered to stay in its little box there.

I know nothing of the Psittacosaurus but you can see the Turnpike ride behind them, and vice-versa.

Here you see a little better the Turnpike auto, and also a cow that's not animatronic but just a Turnpike prop.

The sign means both physically and emotionally touching the dinosaurs. Keep it professional.

Trivia: Gus Grissom and John Young's Gemini 3 was the last American crew not to wear the stars-and-stripes on their flight suits. Source: Gemini Flies! Unmanned Flights and the First Manned Mission, David J Shayler.

Currently Reading: Inspired Enterprise: How NASA, the Smithsonian, and the Aerospace Community Helped Launch Star Trek, Glen E Swanson.