After our visit to Dutch Wonderland concluded --- including a visit to the gift shop that took longer than we expected; we thought hard about the various plushes on offer --- we had another park to get to. We could get to Hershey Park and if everything we were assured about their sneak-preview ticket plan was accurate and true we could get there for a couple hours and increase our chances of riding all the roller coasters. Hershey has fourteen roller coasters, five of them new since our last visit and one significantly re-themed. And we planned our big day to be the 4th of July. Would that be a crushingly busy day? Or would it be a ghost town, as (for example) one Six Flags Great Adventure visit was? No way to guess, but more time seemed the wise course especially if it didn't cost anything.

Heading out on the Lincoln Highway --- incidentally the only time we saw a Wawa; I offered to stop and get something but we'd already eaten and I think we even had some pop left in our souvenir cup --- I got to worry about exactly what you'd expect me to worry about: what if we got to Hershey Park early? Which is a silly worry on several counts, that you can just hang out in the car a couple minutes and that the people taking your admission aren't jerks, they'd surely point out if we were using an all-day ticket five minutes before we could get a day and two hours at the park. In any case I didn't need to worry. Between how long after Dutch Wonderland's closing it took for us to actually leave the place, and how far it was to Hershey, and what a long, twisty path of small-town roads you end up on if you're taking the satellite navigator seriously, and that the final turnoff from the highway into the park takes you on a long enough approach road that I started to worry we had missed something before we even got to the parking lot, we had less than the allotted two hours when we got to the park.

I grabbed what seemed like a good spot next to the Hershey Stadium, a football stadium that looks like something from a 1930s movie about going to college. I like the style. But it meant we had a longer walk than we actually needed; as I'd learn on the walk in --- and would learn from following the parking lot traffic agents the next morning --- there were spaces much closer to Chocolate World and to the amusement park. We would once again not get to Chocolate World; maybe someday if we spend another day or two in the area. But we would get to see oddities like a statue for what I take to be the Milton Hershey School's mascot, the Spartans. It looks like Sparty, but in chocolate, and Chocolate Sparty was something we would glance at and then smile to each other about for the whole of our trip.

Our tickets --- on our phones, not printed out like decent people --- were accepted without problem so far, despite my worrying that if bunnyhugger and I both used the ticket on page one of our two-page PDF it might complicate things. I don't know whether we managed to pick opposite tickets or if the buy-N-tickets-at-once generates a QR code that says the same one can be used up to N times. Probably that. Now we just had to worry that something would go wrong with admissions the next day. It would not.

First thing we would do is ride the Carrousel (as they style it), of course, which is right up by the front of the park. It was moved recently, part of the park's installing of its big Candy-monium ride, although I couldn't tell you from where to where. Somehow, my normally freakishly good geographic memory --- good enough that I could draw you a tolerable map of Festyland, an amusement park we spent seven hours in back in 2015 --- failed me completely with Hershey. I had no concept of how things in the park fitted together, and never would get any, and that would lead us to a terrible fate, yes. But that's a tale for later.

The carousel --- Philadelphia Toboggan Company #47, built 1919 and moved to the park in 1945 --- is a lovely one, in excellent shape and well-painted and with a platform gleaming in nice varnished wood. The ride is a bit slow; I think it was running about three rpm. The band organ was playing Beatles tunes. Not exclusively, but of the four songs we heard while in the vicinity three were Beatles and one was the Beach Boys. (At this remove I couldn't swear to which songs, but I think two of them were When I'm Sixty-Four and California Girls. I note that musicnotes.com has organ arrangements for Only A Northern Song; It's All Too Much; Hello, Goodbye; Strawberry Fields Forever; Being for the Benefit of Mr Kite; Your Mother Should Know; and It's All Too Much. Your Mother Should Know sounds plausible as one of the tunes.)

As our ride came to an end we felt the welcome smell of cooler air rushing in, the tease of a storm front maybe taking away some of the excessive heat and humidity of the weather. It would not, but it would send a lot of gusty winds our way, almost as good. But then came the thing that could wreck all our hopes of riding anything.

There was thunder. All the rides would shut down until the storm passed.

I bring you in photographs now back to a familiar place, Cedar Point early in Halloweekends last year. Will I get all my Halloweekends pictures from 2024 done before Halloweekends 2025 arrives? No.

Here's our old friend Troika Troika Troika. maXair is the big pendulum ride behind it.

Caught someone walking into the sunset over our sequicentennial brick.

And here's the Coliseum dressed up for Halloweekends.

The sun had just got to that level where it makes the skyline look like it's burst into flame. Top Thrill 2's reverse tower adds a lot to the scene.

Here people walk to the sun as if drawn by an irresistible force. (Really it's just that's the way the midway is laid out.)

And here's a show on stage. I imagine they were playing music and daring the audience to be scared or something.

Trivia: In planning its ``Ideal Section'' for what a model strip of what highways should be, the Lincoln Highway Association in 1921 decided: it should have a right of way at least 100 feet wide, and a paved width of 40 feet, allowing two ten-foot-wide lanes each direction, flanked by five-foot grass shoulders and gravel sidewalks. Curves should be avoided; those that were unavoidable should be banked with a radius no less than 1000 feet, so cars could safely drive them at 35 mph and trucks at 10. There should be no roadside ditches and no advertising signs. Source: The Big Roads: The Untold Story of the Engineers, Visionaries, and Trailblazers Who Created the American Superhighways, Earl Swift.

Currently Reading: Threads of Life: A History of the World Through the Eye of a Needle, Clare Hunter.