So, little thing about my car. My brakes had started squealing, before our trip, the way they're supposed to when the brake pads and calipers are starting to wear out. So I got them replaced right before our trip. But there was a little squealing noise from the suspension while I was driving. Not much (bunnyhugger said she never noticed it), and it didn't last long once the car got up to speed, but it didn't go away either. So I took it back to the dealer to get it looked at. Annoyingly their brakes-and-suspension guy leaves before my workday ends so I had to leave the car to be looked at the next day.

They eventually worked out that there was some road debris in the suspension and cleaned that out and all was well. ... Which it was, until the suspension started to squeal again. And keep on squealing, not just when the car started but any time I was at low speeds. So I went back for more cleaning out or whatever it is they do, and more suspension groaning on the way back. They haven't been charging me for these re-cleanings, which is one of those small losses that keeps the customer from giving up on them and going out to somewhere else for good, but it's annoying to keep dealing with.

In the last go-round they concluded that my car really needs to replace the shields that protect the underside and the suspension. This seems plausible to me, and after work Wednesday I'll be dropping my car off for what I hope is the last round of this. It's never the last round of anything, though, is it?

Well, how about a fresh round of Cedar Point Halloweekends Friday pictures? We're not at the last round of those but we're closer than you think!

One of the day's Costume Contests, out by Kiddie Kingdom. How many Stitches do you see there? Are you sure?

Judging's done and the contestants are getting handshakes and maybe a stocker about their participation. I like the Jack Skellington's Dog there on stage. Also the face I accidentally captured of the kid in front who's not happy with, well, any of this.

And here's another Stitch, that I never got an even slightly good picture of. But always going to admire someone doing Four-Armed Stitch.

Here's bunnyhugger riding her rabbit on the Kiddie Kingdom Carousel.

I got on the rabbit beside her and took this photo, where she looks only very concerned by everything. Maybe from the Cerberus head beside her having passed out, face down in her egg and chips.

And here's the helicopters ride in the Kiddie Kingdom, including a view of the not-too-complicated control box. We keep figuring one year we'll come back to find the area renovated out of all recognition and it hasn't happened yet, precisely because we keep taking these just-in-case documentary pictures.

Trivia: One of the Sanskrit words for 'Monday' was 'Induvara', meaning 'of the moon'. Source: Mapping Time: The Calendar and its History, EG Richards.

Currently Reading: Knowing What We Know: The Transmission of Knowledge From Ancient Wisdom to Modern Magic, Simon Winchester.

Idlewild was not one of the parks we planned visiting and as such it's full of exceptions from the rest of our trip. We didn't see the Idlewild park mascot, for example. Unless you count that we did see Daniel Tiger putting on a show at sister park Dutch Wonderland, I mean. Nor did we buy a souvenir drink cup, even though the day was, yes, hot and muggy. Possibly they'd have let us use the Kennywood or Dutch Wonderland cups, but we just got cups of ice water and refilled them a couple times when the sun got to be too much.

The first thing we'd ride would be the carousel, Philadephia Toboggan Company #83 and one of the last ones they ever carved themselves. It's got three shield horses; we had a dim memory of them having even more. Well, there's some carousel out there that has five horses featuring the PTC Shield in the design; we just don't remember which it is. The carousel has two band organs, an Artizan (like Conneaut Lake Park had) and a Wurlitzer Caliola (like nobody? else has) and neither was running. They were using recorded music, and I don't know if that was just our bad luck this day (or season) or something worse. It's still looking good, it's still running fine. Just hope it'll be doing a bit more soon.

After the carousel we went looking for water and ran across a band, something we hadn't seen at an amusement park in weeks. Three people this time, two trumpeters and a drummer, and we hung out there a while listening. Then over to the Wild Mouse, a curiously well-travelled ride. It used to be at the Vienna Prater (as Speedy Gonzales) and then spent time in Alton Towers (as Alton Mouse) and how it ended up an hour east of Pittsburgh is a mystery to me. My recollection is it wasn't running the last time we were at Idlewild in 2015? 16? and so we were glad it was operating. The ride has a curious thing where its lift hill is tilted to the right, and the rumor is it was originally intended that the lift hill have a rotating cylinder covering it and making the ride up more of a fun disorienting experience. But it's not clear that this was ever installed and now it's just something to wonder at in the hot sun.

Thing that we were prepared for and the other two people in the car with us were maybe not: how hard it brakes. This Wild Mouse does not have brakes that ease you into stopping; the car stops moving and you lurch another four feet forward, getting your belly chopped in half by the lap bar. bunnyhugger and I were braced for it at least. We did our best to warn our train-mates.

The final thing we had to ride was Rollo Coaster, not seen since the accident and since the new trains promised a much less wild, much less fun experience. The queue for the ride had dwindled and this seemed like the best time to learn what they'd done to our friend. Some of our worst fears were unrealized. They still had the old-style lever brakes for releasing the ride, and for stopping it a minute or so later. It doesn't have the great feeling of wildness that it had when the train had no restraints but a grab bar, but the ride is still a good one. It's a good example of a terrain coaster, keeping mostly close to the ground as the terrain itself rises and falls. It also goes over The Bear House, built in 1931 and used for years to show off live bears, fed through a hole in the roof. In the annals of amusement parks with regrettable animal-display exhibits ``bears living under a roller coaster'' is one of them.

We rode the carousel again and thought we'd be hitting the road. And then wouldn't you know it, we passed by the stage where one of the live shows was going on, and the performers had tossed giant beach balls out to the about one-third-capacity crowd. We meant to stop only a moment and watch but ended up listening to the rest of the show, a quartet of young women trying to decide what to do for their big summer holiday. A fun bit is they used a prop of the front radiator grill and headlights of a Big Ol' Pontiac Something to present themselves in a car. It may not surprise you that as they foresee all sorts of possibilities --- camping, beachgoing, I think even a cruise ship --- ending in disaster they realize the perfect summer holiday is going to Idlewild, ``An unforgettable adventure''. And this is where we finally heard performers playing Katy Perry's ``Roar''. It is also where we heard them playing Lindsey Buckingham's ``Holiday Road'', which we're still not really ready to hear without wincing. Not their fault.

We thought about a ride on the Skooter, the bumper cars, although passed. Similarly we passed on riding The Spider, which I believe was disassembled the last times we were at the park, because we had something like six or seven hours of driving ahead of us and could only hope to be home reasonably soon after midnight.

And so, dear reader, that's what we did, although after one more carousel ride. We got in the car and drove home, not even stopping at Cedar Point on the way back. We got a lot of podcasts listened to, at least, including the exciting guest appearance of J W Friedman of retired bad-books podcast I Don't Even Own A Television on The Worst Bestsellers. It had been a long trip, a hot one, one that saw 1600 miles added to my car --- suspiciously close to how long our Upper Peninsula trip back in 2019 had been --- but quite a grand one.

More of Halloweekends Friday from our big trip last year. Hope you like.

The standoff between the keeper and the turkey in the petting zoo would not last long, but it would be notable.

Fortunately they came to a swift accord.

That is not to say the turkey knew what to make of the cerberus walking through the park.

bunnyhugger in the ceramics shop, which has from a lot of clearly hand-painted stuff that's been there maybe since Cedar Point was founded to ... well, you see the Halloween stuff here. What this implies for the woman who'd run the stand for the last 1350 years is not something we care to think hard about.

The Judy K is one of the more common of the five locomotive engines to run on the Cedar Point and Lake Erie Railroad. If I remember right this engine used to run a short industrial track in Lansing.

Another look at the Celebration Stage. The mausoleum area has a bunch of names that certainly aren't jokes. I assume they're connected to the park; maybe they're people in the show. Note the guy in the Charlie Brown parka on-stage, apparently checking gear or something.

Trivia: After Woodrow Wilson's October 1919 stroke, his attending neuropsychiatrist, Dr F X Dercum, refused to declare him disabled, largely motivated by Dercum's views of the need for Wilson to continue fighting for the Versailles Treaty and his low opinion of Vice President Thomas R Marshall, and also Dercum's view that being declared unable to serve as President would harm the patient. Source: One Heartbeat Away: Presidential Disability and Succession, Birch Bayh.

Currently Reading: Knowing What We Know: The Transmission of Knowledge From Ancient Wisdom to Modern Magic, Simon Winchester.

We got up and packed and faced what we figured to be a long day on the road. And figured to eat on the road, which ended up getting delayed as we started right out on the Pennsylvania Turnpike. The first rest area we came to just had a Roy Rogers so there wasn't anything to really eat there. We did get fountain drinks, though, at my first time buying anything at a Roy Rogers since the early 90s when they last had restaurants outside Turnpike service plazas. I got a Coke Zero with a shot of fruit punch so, if you're being generous about terms, I made a Roy Rogers at the Roy Rogers. This was not me trying to be funny; a bit of some fruit drink in your main fountain pop really makes it.

Anyway, a bit after this I pulled off at whatever the next exit was, because we needed gas and there was a Sheetz promised near the exit, and there we were. It happened that we had got off in Ligonier, Pennsylvania, which fact likely means nothing without this next: Ligonier is where Idlewild Park is. We'd been to Idlewild a couple times, enjoying the park that dates to 1878 and its 1930s(!) wooden roller coaster and its Mister Rogers Neighborhood-themed section and especially its fairy-tale dioramas walk-through area. But we hadn't been there since ... certainly not later than 2016, when an accident on Rollo Coaster shut it down and saw the vintage trains replaced with new ones. The old trains not only had no seat belts or individual lap restraints, they didn't have any restraints at all. The new train belts you in and lap-bars you in and even has blinders around the side so that the trees, which come very close to the car, are even less liable to whap you in the face. It's hard to imagine the ride being nearly so much fun without and we hadn't gone back to face it.

But still. Here we were. We couldn't spend the whole day there; it would push our return home until way too far past midnight. But we could drop in for a couple hours. It would be expensive; we didn't have season passes or coupons that would help any. And yet ... how often do we say we'd like to see Idlewild again, only we don't get around to it when we happen to be seeing Kennywood? And so bunnyhugger bought tickets online while also trying to let her phone navigate us to the park. I don't know why we didn't get my satellite navigator out of the glove compartment and let it do its job.

We got to the park --- it's just off the Lincoln Highway, like Dutch Wonderland --- and bunnyhugger showed her tiny phone with our tickets to the parking lot attendant. There isn't a separate gate admission, just the parking lot guy. I assume if you just walk up they ask what your problem is. I misunderstood the instructions about where to park and drove to the only lot we've ever used before which was also flagged as full, but I didn't know where the others were because I failed to pay attention to the big sign with an arrow. Fortunately, circling around found a spot big enough for my car and we could go into the park to use the bathroom.

And then right back out of the park, more or less, because adjacent to the park is the semi-separate Story Book Forest attraction. In the distant past they were separate admissions but now they don't bother. You just walk through a gigantic book --- repainted since our last visit --- and smile awkwardly at Mother Goose. There were more performers in the Story Book Forest than I remember before --- I'd remembered Mother Goose and the pirate-ship captain and I think there may have been another. This time around there were ones almost everywhere, including the Crooked Man (of the Crooked House), holding one of those folding rulers because that can always be at some additional weird and crooked angle. There was also a Goldilocks and a Mother Hubbard and I bought enough into the characters to feel like I was intruding by going around and inspecting their homes.

Unlike the last time, Mother Goose was not tossing peanuts out to a brave chipmunk making sorties into her little cottage.

I mentioned the pirate-ship captain. They're there for a little boat that's on a pond, and the captain gives you permission to board and look around the small deck and all. The captain also did a bit of talking with us and some stage magic, calling over someone who was kind of watching over the train playground equipment (the little engine that could? Maybe? That seems out of line with the fairy-tale/nursery-rhyme motifs of the place but they also have a Tom Sawyer raft so they're not perfectly consistent) to help out, lending his hat to make lollipops appear out of nowhere. The lollipops whose flavors we'd earlier given as our favorites, of course, so you know what kind of performance they're going for. I enjoyed this but also felt irrationally like I was forcing the actors to go through all this fuss. I suppose you don't go engaging with a childless couple, the male of whom has a lot of grey hair, if you don't like engaging that way, though.

The Story Book Forest seems to have a good bit of new signs, expanding some on the fairy tales and nursery rhymes presented. The little building that introduced us to the rhyme ``There was a jolly miller / Who lived on the river Dee // He worked and sang from morn' till night // No lark so blyth as he'' still looks like it must have been a snack stand, once upon a time, but it was boarded up and didn't look like it had ever been otherwise. They also still have the sign, ``Hickety Pickety My Fat Hen // She lays eggs for gentlemen'' which we have never seen anywhere but here. There was a chicken coop behind the sign, but no evidence of chickens, and that reminds me we didn't see goats near the billy goats gruff bridge either. We did see a couple little bits that were clearly left over, or anticipating, Halloween, like the word 'BOO' stuck on the wall next to nothing appropriate.

Near the end of the trail, just before the gift shop, was a slightly baffling feature we weren't sure we remembered: a fairy-tale style castle guarding mock Tudor-style buildings. Inside was a sword in the stone, and a fountain with a bronze Duke the Dutch Wonderland Dragon, who'd say encouraging things as you tried to pull it out. We could swear we remembered something having been there on our last visit but certainly not Duke (Dutch Wonderland wasn't yet a sister park to Idlewild back then). We turned out to be wrong about this. While there had been an Enchanted Castle at the end of the trail in the past it had been removed after the 1996 season. For all that the forest looked like it was unchanged, it's actually had a lot of refurbishment, including a lot of paving along the trail that I didn't notice. Well, that's accessibility for you; when it's there all you notice is that there's no problems.

We could plausibly have been satisfied just with the Story Book Forest visit. But there was still the amusement park, with an important carousel and two noteworthy roller coasters ... and who knows what else might have changed since Dollywood took the place over?

Photos now have reached Friday of our Halloweekends trip last year. I again promise to try keeping it to interesting shots but we'll see how long that lasts.

Guess who forgot to re-set his camera from ISO 3200 to a daytime setting and how long it took him to notice! But at least it gave this routine photo of entering the park a neat washed-out look.

Frontier Town by early, brilliant, light when you can see the trees' color.

Here's the Town Hall Museum, which survived the off-season, but who knows how long it'll keep doing that?

This is that animatronic pumpkin scarecrow-or-something that I always photograph by night instead, when it doesn't work. It's set up by the viewing area of the water rapids ride.

This is the back side of the animatronic where you can see the frame, mostly, but also some tarps.

A chicken holds court at the petting zoo.

Trivia: Kauffmann's, the Grand Depot department store of Pittsburgh, opened in 1871 primarily to serve the wealthier staff of the Jones & Laughlin Steel Corporation, providing morning coats and stiff shirt collars. They had strong sales of $21,585 for the first year. Source: The Grand Emporiums: The Illustrated History of America's Great Department Stores, Robert Hendrickson. Kaufmann's was bought by the May Company in 1946, and ended up part of the Macy's chain, with their traditional downtown location closing in 2015.

Currently Reading: Knowing What We Know: The Transmission of Knowledge From Ancient Wisdom to Modern Magic, Simon Winchester.

After getting back into HersheyPark bunnyhugger took her half-hour walk --- yes, added up she did far more than a half-hour walking in a day at the park like this, but she likes to have a continuous specific block for her exercise --- and I got on a ride she absolutely would not. This is the Hershey Kissing Tower, fifty years old this season. The tower's 330 feet, although riders only go up 250 feet, much like the Star Tower at California's Great America (which I rode while she took her walk, back in 2023) or Space Spiral that used to be at Cedar Point. It's got some lovely views of the park and the landscape outside, and yes, the windows are Hershey Kiss-shaped.

Reunited we together rode another 1970s ride and one you don't hardly see anymore. This is Coal Cracker --- it's in the western-themed section --- and it is a log flume. Not just that, though, it's that model of Arrow log flume ride where the launch station is a big rotating platform that you descend stairs to. A model of this was one of my favorite things at Great Adventure as a kid, maybe just for the relativistic thrill of stepping between the rotating and non-rotating sections. I believe it also has this little hill at the bottom of the big drop so that while you splash a photogenic bunch of water around it doesn't land back on you, making for a thrilling but not soaking ride.

After this, back to more roller coasters. Trailblazer, a mine ride a year older than the log flume (and equal in age to the mine ride at Great Adventure, also a childhood favorite). And looking over Jolly Rancher Remix, which up to 2021 had been known as Sidewinder. This is yet another Boomerang coaster, like The Bat at Canada's Wonderland, Boomerangs at Six Flags Mexico, Darien Lake, and Elitch Gardens, Sea Serpent at Morey's Piers, Zoomerang at Lake Compounce, and bunnyhugger does not enjoy the back-and-forth shuttle motion of any of them. We rode it in 2011, but since then it was re-themed from 'western' to 'candy'. Part of the gimmick is a tunnel that reports have it spray Jolly Rancher scents and weird scent mixes into, which must admit is interesting a concept. But the line was long (and it can't run a second train because of that whole 'collision' thing) and since we'd ridden it before it sank to the bottom of our informal schedule. And, dear reader, I regret to tell you that we never did get to it. However, it would be the only roller coaster we missed.

Somewhere around this time we ate, lured to a place that promised walking tacos made with a plant-based meat substitute. We had doubts, justified after several people in front of us had extremely long interactions trying to navigate the menu of a window that offered two different things with your choice of four toppings. Anyway they did not have the plant-based meat and looked suspicious of us for trying to claim such a thing ever existed. We got the meat- and plant-meat-free walking tacos which is also how I learned that Fritos makes bags specifically for walking taco preparation. Who knew?

More HersheyPark roller coasters. One that we rode near the log flume was Great Bear, this nice long ride that spends a good bit of its time over the water, and gets you nice views of the whole of The [Comet] Hollow. The ride has theming of Ursa Major and a neat ride sign of the constellation. And this got bunnyhugger to wonder: is this name a subtle joke? Because many roller coasters have been named Big Dipper, to the point that it's been British English terminology to say ``big dipper'' for a roller coaster. (You hear this in Peter Gabriel's ``Sledgehammer'' where a big dipper is going up and down.) This is also why kiddie coasters are called Little Dipper so often. To go from Big Dipper to Great Bear is not far. Wikipedia offers that the name also references the Hershey Bears minor-league hockey team, but nothing of a Big Dipper reference. If HersheyPark ever used to have a Big Dipper (or Little Dipper) the Roller Coaster Database doesn't know of it.

Night was setting in and we had a couple things yet to do. One was riding Fahrenheit, which had been the newest roller coaster in our 2011 visit. It has a vertical drop of, you guessed it, 97 degrees. (I suppose the extra 1.6 degrees would have been a little too much.) Others were Jolly Rancher Remix if we could get the chance, and another ride on the carousel so bunnyhugger could get pictures with her better camera, and then a night ride on Lightning Racer. I voted for Fahrenheit and it was looking like a good choice, another suspiciously-short-line for the ride.

Then the ride came to a halt.

Carrying on with Thursday of our big Halloweekends trip last year here:

The Giant Wheel, seen from on end. I also liek that it's nearly got the change in cabin colors balanced top-to-bottom.

Here's the late-afternoon sun and leaf colors and the track of ValRavn.

More of ValRavn and the diversity of autumn colors beneath it.

People walking off down the Iron Dragon midway, toward Millennium Force and the Frontier Trail and beyond that, Maverick.

Rougarou's coming into its own around the lagoon trees like this, too.

And past here is the Frontier Trail, more or less. Again, love the way the trees have turned here.

Trivia: The Hotel Hershey offered for high-end spa visitors [ as of the early 2000s when this book was written ] a whipped cocoa bath or a chocolate fondue body wrap. Source: Sweets: A History of Temptation, Tim Richardson.

Currently Reading: Lost Popeye Zine, Volume 70: Deucedly Odd Goings-On, Ralph Stein, Bill Zaboly. Editor Stephanie Noelle.