On Jun 17, 2022, GodsOnSafari wrote
(in article<
102c0631-e4da-4783...@googlegroups.com>):
> It's fine. I'm sure sometime I'll go back to get ramen at Avenue Cafe and run
> into you playing pinball too. I don't know when I'll have free time to do
> that, but that's my own fault.
I don´t know if I mentioned this before but I run the pinball league now so
if you are there on a Tuesday night and see someone giving directions to a
crowd at the pinball machines that´ll be me (or my assistant director, but
that´s my husband and we´re easy to tell apart).
> work and had to hustle back to EL. The thing is....what else is there to draw
> me there? It's not the food. The other coasters are all bad. The car ride -
> my favorite non-coaster there - is now a revamped kiddie land featuring most
> of the same rides as before.
I´m sorry they removed their car ride, but the improved kiddie area does
make sense for them. And I could never get that excited about the car ride
because it just drives itself. If the gas pedal doesn´t do anything, I
don´t feel like it´s a proper car ride. I miss Cedar Point having three
of the good kind.
What draws me to Michigan´s Adventure is that it´s far closer than Cedar
Point, it doesn´t require an exhausting all-day trip (I´m getting kind of
old to really enjoy getting home from CP at 2 or 3 am dog tired), and I´m
really not picky about roller coasters. I´ve said before, it´s a
blessing, like being a cheap drunk. Having any non-kiddie coaster and being
less than two hours away is going to be more than enough to draw me to a
place. The only thing that makes a coaster bad to me is if it´s so painful
I can´t take it, and the only coaster there that is on the cusp of that is
Wolverine Wildcat, even though I actually used to enjoy it quite a bit in the
2000s. (It´s really weird now, by the way, with the steel track only on the
first hill; it goes from so excessively smooth it doesn´t feel right, back
to being almost unbearably rough the rest of the ride.) I enjoy junior
woodens a lot generally, so I like Zach´s Zoomer and just wish it had full
sized trains so I could sit side by side with my riding partner. Shivering
Timbers is Shivering Timbers, of course, and the rest of the coasters I find
enjoyable enough to be worth riding. Actually, I´m pretty keen on Mad Mouse
too, but it´s just the horrible operations that hold it back since they put
the seatbelts on it and changed the loading process. It always used to be
good for one or two rides for me in the old days, but lately it´s either
down all day or has a ridiculous line. If not for that, I enjoy it. I like
wild mice.
When I said I had an acquired tolerance for Michigan´s Adventure, I was
referring to the fact that I used to go there a heck of a lot, back in the
early 2000s. My ex-husband and I had a few years, around 2001-2004, when we
would go there probably every other week in the summer. We would spend about
two hours riding everything multiple times, then go to Grand Haven afterward
and eat ice cream on the boardwalk. In those days there was never a line for
anything. We considered it a "busy day" when cars were past Mad Mouse
(and back then the first cars in would park right in front of the front gate
instead of wrapping around to the other side of the gate like they do now). I
never saw a day with an actual crowd until the mid-2000s. It was like having
free rein to just walk on and do whatever I wanted as soon as I wanted to for
a few hours. That made it really appealing as a very low stress, low key
summer activity. Now probably every time I go I have to tell my current
husband (who didn´t see it in the old days) how much I still miss what it
was like 15-20 years ago and he is remarkably tolerant of this (as he is with
most of my foibles). But I still have this fondness for the place that got
cemented back then and that´s probably part of what keeps me going back
even though it´s a qualitatively different experience now.
> they've still made some nice additions. Even in the arcade, where they gutted
> the classic games, that came with a modernization of their payment system.
Yeah, the end of the last sad pinball games at Cedar Point is another one of
my less favorite moves in recent years.
> The heart of the park are "big iron rides" and anyone
> who goes to Cedar Point is overwhelmingly likely to be drawn in by coasters
> and big flat rides. There's this fascination people have everywhere with
> trying to do "Disney things" with hyper immersive experiences and games, and
> at somewhere like Cedar Point, it's not gonna work that well.
I think there´s a good bit of room between being narrowly focused on
coasters and being Disney. My earliest memories of Cedar Point are of riding
Earthquake, the Mill Race, and the Western Cruise with my parents when I was
very young. They weren´t roller coaster people then (or now), but they
still enjoyed being at an amusement park. As you said, people don´t
necessarily want live actors and a "plot" on Snake River Expedition. (I
could do without that myself.) They want to enjoy a boat ride around the
lagoon, though. I feel like that´s the gap between Disney and a pure thrill
park and I´m happy to see them take up a little more room there.
[Regarding my self-described `forgiving´ attitude]
> Lots of people are. I remember before the pandemic when Pointbuzz had a
> thread in which members chastized each other for not volunteering hours at
> Cedar Point to help them with their staffing issues in the fall.
I´m glad I missed that. I read the Pointbuzz forums intermittently, but
when I do I sometimes wish I hadn't. Believe me, I´d never say something
like that. When I say that I´m forgiving, I should clarify what I mean by
that. I don´t forgive the corporation in any literal or moral sense. I´m
quite ready to criticize them, even if one could argue it´s toothless when
I still give them money. But I am certainly not one of those people who rush
to defend park ownership no matter what, and in fact that behavior by
enthusiasts drives me crazy. It´s not just enthusiasts, of course -
there´s a big streak in American culture of thinking a business can do no
wrong as long as they´re not overtly breaking laws (and maybe not then
either) - but enthusiasts have a special brand of it. I think it´s a
combination of kissing up, and the fear that acknowledging bad behavior by
park ownership might disrupt their hobby in some way.
No, when I say I´m forgiving, what I mean is just that I´m usually pretty
good at focusing on things I did enjoy or things that did go well, so I am
able to get to the end of a day with a lot of objectively disappointing or
frustrating stuff happening and still think, "I had a good time," and go
back again. In other words, it doesn´t take much for me to feel like I had
a worthwhile time at a park. I just wanted to make sure you didn´t mistake
my attitude for one of apologism toward the parks on a moral plane.