Category: Family

Will turns 8 on September 1, and both Annette and I (okay, mostly me) completely endorse the idea of at least a of week or two on either side of the actual birthday date as the “birthday month.” As part of that celebration, we took Will and a friend of his to the Cedar Point theme park (instead of a birthday party, and now instead of next week, because school starts for him.)

I am not much of a fan of such places for a variety of different reasons, not the least of which is that this particular theme park is known for its many roller coasters. Everywhere at the park, I was constantly reminded that Cedar Point is known as “The roller coast,” because it’s right there on Lake Erie. Get it? And it’s a pretty accurate slogan. For example, they have one called “drag racer” something. It hits a 120 MPH in about 100 yards, goes straight up about 20 stories high, and then comes straight down again. They have about about a half-dozen or more coasters that go close to that fast and/or that require you to stand up and/or that twist and turn and turn you over a half-dozen times. And then they also have a fair number of rides which just drop you from some bizarre height. Ick.

I have never enjoyed such rides. For years, people have tried to convince me that I should enjoy such things, but I never have. To me, riding a roller coaster at a theme park is like compressing and magnifying all the worst things about flying, and then, just to add to the insult, you have to pay a lot of money and wait in line a long time. “How do you know you wouldn’t like it if you don’t try?” people used to ask me. So I tried riding roller coasters and it turns out I was right. Then I would go to other theme parks with other roller coasters and people would try to talk me into riding again. “Oh, ride this roller coaster,” people would say, “this one is different.” I tried it, and it was not. So now I simply refuse. I think you reach a certain age– I’ve decided that that age for me was 35– at which point you no longer have to try things if you don’t want to. Therefore, no more roller coasters– or at least big ones– for me.

Fortunately, Will and his friend are both too young to go on the crazy coasters and Will, taking after his father I suppose, was paricularly keen on not going on anything too scary. This made for some tensions with his slightly more adventurous friend, but all was well because we convinced Will to take at least a chance on a few of the less than baby rides.

Highlights for me? Well, I liked the bumper cars and the ferris wheel okay, but most of my fun was watching Will and his friend. Will and friend rode just about everything in their age group at the place: kiddie bumper cars, those cars you drive around yourself on a track, various swing things that go around, etc. I rode with Will and his friend on the “Gemini Junior,” which is a kiddie roller coaster about my speed.

We all went on a log flume ride that was pretty fun, but then I decided to “opt out” of the “Thunder Canyon” water rapids ride. This is one of those things where you sit in a boat that goes through a “rapids” that is pretty tame but that tends to get you kind of wet. At Cedar Point, their version gets you REALLY wet, which we figured out as we saw patrons exiting the ride looking like they had taken a shower fully dressed. I decided I didn’t want to be soaking wet, so I took the bags and headed toward the observation area. I managed to get this picture:

You’ll notice that Annette doesn’t really see what’s coming, but Will and friend do. Right after this, the boats pass under waterfalls that soak riders to the bone. So, at the end of the ride, I was able to get this picture:

I’m not sure you can tell with this shot, but they were all dang wet, and all of them pretty much stayed wet until we got home and they got changed about 5 hours later. I have never been happier to miss out on an experience.

Anyway, a good time for one and all, and probably easier and more fun than having an actual birthday party. If you want to see all of the decent digital pictures from the day, check out my Cedar Point set on Flickr.

I’ve been meaning to post some about our trip to Niagara Falls for a couple of days now, but it’s still been busy around here with the in-laws and such. Anyway:

Annette and I had a two night/three day getaway to Niagara Falls while Annette’s parents watched Will and Sophie. Interestingly, Sophie warmed up to the strangers pretty quickly. Hopefully, the same will happen when my parents come to watch Will and Sophie at the end of the month….

Niagara Falls was a lot of fun, but also a lot of money. The main attraction is pretty impressive, one of those things it’s worth seeing live and in person at least once in your life. I’ve never been much of a fan of video cameras, but this is one situation where having a video camera would have been pretty handy because you just can’t capture the motion or the sound of the water in still images.

There’s two basic ways to get the “falls experience” (though there’s a package deal that includes a walk along a section of rapids and a tour of a butterfly conservatory, I guess a building with a bunch of butterflies– maybe if we go back with Will, we’ll give that a shot). The most famous is the “Maid of the Mist” boat ride, which, as you can tell from the picture, takes you into the mist of the falls on the Canadian side.

Slightly less famous is the “Behind the Falls” attraction, which takes you to tunnels literally behind the waterfall and also to an observation platform right at the base of the falls (which is where I’m standing). We did the “Behind the Falls” thing first and decided that that was enough. Besides, neither one of us was in the mood to wait in another line and we didn’t feel like being bounced around in the boat, either. Though, for the record, I want to point out that I was willing to do the “Maid of the Mist” ride, despite my lack of enjoyment of boats.

Anyway, there was a lot of fun stuff for us at Niagara Falls. The park around the falls was quite lovely, we had a great hotel room with a spectacular view, we had a lot of fun at one of the big casinos, and on our drive out of town, we had a chance to go through the wine country and Niagra-on-the-Lake, which reminded me of Ashland in some ways.

But man, there’s a lot of tourist-trap crap there! It may be because we had just spent nearly two weeks being tourists out west, but there just seemed to be no end to the opportunities and obligations to spend money. Just about every bill included about 20% worth of tax, more or less wiping out the value difference between the American and Canadian dollars, and everything cost too much money to begin with. You get a couple blocks away from the falls and you run into a strip of arcades, haunted houses, wax museums, etc.– we went into the “Ripley’s Believe It Or Not Museum.” Again, maybe this would be fun with Will, but it didn’t take much of this to hurt our heads.

As I’m typing this, I’m happily sitting in my living room after watching The Wizard of Oz on Turner Movie Classics (followed by a 13 minute a silent version that was made in 1910), thinking about Dorothy’s famous words, “there’s no place like home.â€? Ah yes….

Anyway, a quick recap of the last couple of days of our western adventure:

After a start later than we would have preferred, we toured through Badlands National Park. Annette and I both remember our last trip through the park quite vividly. It was 1996, on our way out to my first tenure-track job at Southern Oregon, and we drove through the park from Wall, SD very early in the morning. It was a spooky and ethereal drive with odd colors against the sand/rock formations and birds that kept dive-bombing us and getting smacked by the windshield of the car.

This time, not as much, but it was still pretty cool. Will liked a ranger’s lesson on fossils and the fossil trail (notice him studying the model of a fossil under the plastic dome along the trail in the photo) and the views through the park were still pretty cool.

And then it was to Wall Drug. For me, it was the perfect way to end the trip: a kitschy tourist trap that has risen to the distinction of “historic� destination. I’m guessing that a good half of the people reading this message have “dug� Wall Drug at one point or another, and I’m here to tell you that it certainly hasn’t changed much since you’ve been there. I do think there are a lot fewer billboards than there used to be.

Anyway, it was fun, though by the time we got there, Annette and Will were both sick of me taking pictures of them, which is why you won’t see much of them in the pictures I have of Wall Drug on Flickr (part of the whole trip group). Except for this picture:

After that, it was drive drive drive drive. South Dakota is a big-assed state with not a whole lot there, and even going in the low 80s pretty much the whole way, it took us about six hours before we were through it all. We stopped in Albert Lea, Minnesota for the night last night, and then got up first thing and came into town tonight. And here I am.

Just a few of the things I learned from this trip:

• I am feeling way WAY out of shape and I’m looking forward to getting back into a regular workout plan sometime very soon.
• It is surprisingly easy to get Internet access. All three of the hotels we stayed in had it in our rooms, and it was easy enough to get at the YMCA camp, too.
• Altitude can really mess with you a lot more than you might think.
• I think snowglobes aren’t as popular as they once were; I was only able to find four ones that I thought were cheap enough to justify getting.
• If we can ever get back into decent shape and deal with the altitude, I’d love to spend some time hiking around the Rockies in the summer.
• I have a fun family and a lot of cool nephews and brothers-in-law and sisters and parents and such.

I would have liked to have been on the road by now, but considering the day we had yesterday, I suppose it’s reasonable that all of us are a little slow moving this morning. Let me tell ya: we did the Black Hills yesterday, did it as much as it could possibly be done, wrung it dry, and a good time was had by one and all.

I’m not sure why– maybe because we did so much– but I don’t have a lot of scenic photos to post here. Oh well; you’ve seen most of the things not in the pictures.

After toast and doughnuts in the hotel, we headed off to Mount Rushmore with a first stop in the touristy-junk town of Keystone. Lots of gift shops and rock shops and such; Will spent some of his own money, carefully choosing some taffy.

Here’s Will and Annette on the street at Keystone.

Then on to the star attraction, Mount Rushmore. I don’t have any good pictures of Rushmore, at least on the digital camera, and, as much as I like taking pictures, I thought about not taking any at all. I mean, haven’t all of us seen Mount Rushmore enough, even if you haven’t actually been there?

The last time I was here (which was in 1996 when Annette and I were moving out to Oregon from Bowling Green), we only stopped at Rushmore for about 15-20 minutes, long enough to park, fight the big crowds on the main viewing platform, and have a full-frontal view of the four heads. This time around, we took the hike around a trail that takes you by the artists’ studio and many other viewing sites. That was pretty cool, and we managed to get some exercise, too.

From Rushmore it was on to the Crazy Horse Memorial, the never-to-end family business mountain carving project. It’s been going on for around 75 years, and I don’t think there’s any way that they’ll finish it in the next 75 years. Regardless, it’s still a pretty impressive site, a memorial for Native American peoples and the work of a very stubborn family who have refused government assistance.

Here’s Will standing by a cool display of glass beads in the museum part of things.

Rushmore has been done for a long time obviously, so that’s all about product. Crazy Horse is all about evolving process. Annette is certain that the progress on the mountain has been noticeable, but don’t ask me to tell you the difference between what we saw in ’96 and now. Well, okay. the face is done. But the cool part about Crazy Horse is the idea of it, and also seeing the process evolve, with the visitor center buildings being added on to in any which way. It’ll be interesting to see this thing in another 10 years.

Then it was lunch at the Mount Rushmore Brew Pub in Hill City, which was slow service but good food and very good beer and it was raining and hailing out, so it was a good time to sit around inside. Funny story: Will and Annette ordered sweet potato fries, and high school kid waitress and the young groovy couple sitting a few tables away were both fascinated by the idea that one would eat something like that.

Then it was on to Reptile Gardens, which is a private zoo sort of thing just off of the road that features a lot of (guess what?) reptiles. They had a lot of snakes and such that I hadn’t seen in other zoos before, including komodo dragons and (what they claimed was) the largest salt water crocodile in the Western Hemisphere, an 18 or so footer named Maniac. Let me tell ya, that was one big assed crocodile. They had prairie dogs and giant tortoises (in the old days, they apparently let the kids ride them), and we saw a pretty good snake handling show.

Oh yeah– they also had these trained chickens who would do stuff like play basketball (as the one in the picture is doing at the top of the page), or play tic-tac-toe or give you answers to a series of yes or no questions. It was all skinner box kind of stuff– the chickens peck at a target and then they get a reward– but it was pretty funny, and no, I don’t think it was all that cruel. They had a sign explaining the care that they give the chickens, and they pointed out that these chickens actually live a “full lifeâ€? (in other words, they aren’t dinner).

Then we managed to get kind of lost around Rapid City, which actually wasn’t that bad because we got lost in the good part of town. My impressions of Rapid City improved a great deal.

Then we went to the Black Hills Caverns, one of the many cave tours in the Black Hills. This was Annette’s idea, but Will and I liked it a lot too. The thing that was most, well, cute about the whole thing was the “mom-and-pop� nature of the operation. For example, our tour guide (and Annette and Will and I were the only people on the tour) was a high school student from Sturgis who told us stories about bike week and living in the Black Hills in between her rehearsed tour banter.

Then it was time for mini golf (always fun, of course) and then for later dinner at a place called Boston Pizza, which is actually a Canadian chain and has as much to do with Boston as Outback Steakhouse has to do with Australia.

Whew. That was a long day.

Now it’s time to get ready for the road.