lilfluff

Wednesday was the day of our trip most hit by storms; we were out there in the midst of one that, if it didn't send an alert message to everyone's phones, deserved to. This would be our trip to Mount Olympus Water and Theme Park, formerly Big Chief Carts and Coasters. Mount Olympus is both an amusement park and a growing hotel empire in the Wisconsin Dells, a point of mixed emotions. On the one hand, it's taking over every motel in an area that used to have a billion different motels; on the other, it's probably attractive to families that they can have one familiar name and trust that the experience staying at Mount Olympus Motel Building 72 is not going to be appreciably worse than that at Motel Building 2. As I've asked before, why can't things only have good sides without the bad?

Anyway we decided to take our chances and eat at the park, knowing this meant we'd get fries or pizza (it would be fries). But that might be fine since Mount Olympus Park is a small one as these go. There's four wooden coasters there, but past that very few rides, or at least adult rides. (They don't even have a carousel!) Kids have more options, including a bunch of rides in an indoor warehouse-style building. They also have a surprisingly modest ticket price, which we understood as soon as we drove up to the parking lot and saw that was forty bucks. They're clearly expecting you to park at the hotel and take a shuttle (or walk) over and since we were staying at ... well, an IHG-owned hotel ... we had no such benefit. But at least we knew now where they get you.

We knew also that rain was to come, early to mid-afternoon, and last maybe an hour or two. This would take a chunk out of the day, so our priorities were to get on every coaster we could as fast as we could and hope we beat the storm. This turned out to be pretty doable. The first coaster we reached, once we made our way in from the parking lot, was Zeus --- by the way, do you get the theme of the park yet? We have to credit them, they go in for the Greek Gods theme, with the rides having reasonable names like Zeus and Cyclops and Hades 360 (formerly Hades) and the buildings put together in a Vaguely Ancient Greek style. I might sound dismissive her and don't intend to; it's genuinely nice that they do try fitting things to the theme. This goes down to fine details like the warning about offloading unsecured junk from your pocket before going on a ride being about how Zeus is feeling cranky today and you might lose anything that you don't put in a locker or leave with a non-rider.

Anyway we hurried to the roller coasters; nicely for us, two of them were just past the entrance. The coasters were our favorite kinds if we couldn't have antiques: wooden, for one, and built to use the hilly terrain of the Dells; the park is a little more vertical than Kennywood is. Zeus happened to be the first that we got on, and Hades 360 the second. Hades 360 picked up the number in a 2010's renovation that added some steel track to what had been a wooden coaster. This enabled it to add a corkscrew twist in the track, and an overbanked turn, things that are a lot of fun but tax a wood structure too much. Hades 360 also has an exciting tunnel; the track goes underneath the parking lot we used to emerge in this small peak out near the edge of the lot, rising like a little mountain next to the highway. A tunnel is great to start with, and moreso on a ferociously hot day where it's nothing but cool air, although it is also an extremely noisy tunnel. But a good long tunnel and poking up in a spot visually unconnected to the park? That's wonderfully dramatic and evoked the fun that Ravine Flyer II's leap across a Pennsylvania state highway does. We knew now which would be our favorite ride at this park, though we'd have to wait to ride two more coasters to say we'd had a fair judgement.

We also, without knowing, reached bunnyhugger's 350th distinct roller coaster. We knew that barring incredible catastrophe we would reach that small milestone this trip, but we had thought we'd reach it at our next park. (The coaster counting web site had a lag between her entering new rides the night before and showing the total, throwing us off.)

Both Zeus and Hades surprised us by not being brutally rough, difficult rides. We'd been led to expect they were rattly things and found they were not. Hades 360 was extreme --- we wouldn't have re-ridden it right away even if we could --- but hardly outside reason. People are prone to exaggerate how rough wooden roller coasters are, and also how rough (and dangerous) any ride at a park not owned by a big chain is, though. Also it did look to me like a good number of pieces of wood had been replaced recently so perhaps we're the beneficiaries of a bad reputation and recent retracking. Hard to know.

Our next ride was on Cyclops, the oldest of the coasters at the park (if the Roller Coaster Database isn't missing anything, the first one they had); it had a lot of the feel of Hoosier Hurricane which, what do you know, was built by the same people about the same time. (Hoosier Hurricane is a trifle smaller and faster.) Really fun ride and we'd get onto this again after --- well, that's to be discussed later.

The last of the roller coasters we'd ride for the first time was Pegasus the park has a steel kiddie coaster but we're too large for that one. Pegasus is presented as a family rather than an extreme coaster, and it is smaller and slower than the others. It was also the coaster to have the most brutally long, slow-moving line. None of the other coasters had much if any line so we didn't know why this, although my guess is that as the family coaster it attracts people afraid of, like, the wooden coaster that tips you upside-down. We spent a lot of time in the line and giving thanks for the moments we were in the shade, before getting a ride on a coaster that was the most jerky and rattle-y of any at the park. It's a pleasant ride --- it takes a lot for a wooden coaster to displease us --- but it was an anticlimax to be the last of our new coasters for the day.

With the storms rolling in --- we could see and smell them --- we hurried back to the bigger coasters to get re-rides in, just in case the park were closed the rest of the day or something. We went to Zeus first, so far as I remember arbitrarily; I think we might have got a back-seat ride this time. We then went to Hades and found people walking back out of the line. At first this seemed to be because of some maintenance problem and that got resolved soon enough we counted ourselves lucky. But then they made the dread announcement: because there was lightning too nearby, they had to close the ride.

The rain was coming.

I ask you now to imagine it being December and chilly and time for the Potter Park Zoo's Wonderland of Lights and our getting there the first chance we could get, which was dangerously close to the last night they were running it, because they never run it after Christmas day anymore. Got it? Here we go:

First, a picture of the night sky, since we got there around sunset and the sky was being wonderful for us.

Here's some of the trees up front by the entrance in a great setting.

And here's the portal ring you can use to step through into the dimension where you're a Rankin/Bass stop-motion animated character.

This is eternal photographic favorite the wall of rainbow lights. There wasn't so much snow this year so we didn't get that nice effect of puddles of light underneath.

And here ... uh ... there's supposed to be a Jabberwocky there, I think? Maybe we could get someone to check on that please?

More of the pathways through the zoo. We'd had a little bit of snow at least, and some melt, so we get that nice damp cement making for great reflections.

Trivia: Before the voyage on the Endeavour which would bring James Cook to Australia in 1770, James Douglas, president of the Royal Society (sponsor of the expedition), gave Cook a vade mecum (a reference book) with the instructions that should he encounter inhabitants of any lands discovered, ``they are the natural and in the strictest sense of the word, the legal possessors of the several Regions they inhabit. No European nation has a right to occupy any part of their country, or settle among them without their voluntary consent. Conquest over such people can give no just title; because they could never be the aggressors.'' Source: Land: How the Hunger for Ownership Shaped the Modern World, Simon Winchester.

Currently Reading: Growing Up in Alphabet City: The Unexpected Letterform Art of Michael Doret, Michael Doret.