vovat | Dorney After Dark (Reply)

On the last Friday in September, we did a Halloween event, which was the haunted stuff at Creamy Acres that we do every year. It's a hayride plus a few walkthroughs, and they insist that you do the hayride first, even though that would probably make for a better cool-down.

See?
I didn't notice any major changes since last time, but it's not like I commit all this to memory. I did think about how, within the context of the fantasy, haunted hayrides are kind of weird. You're riding in this wagon, and the driver insists on constantly stopping where scary things can threaten you and sometimes climb on with you. Is the driver supposed to be in on it, or do they not even enter into the fiction? It's also worth noting that most of the hayrides I've been on in recent years didn't have any hay. The one in Delaware last year was an exception, but that one was during the day and not haunted. When we were in the gift shop, there were three cats just kind of hanging around. They didn't seem to be particularly bothered by all the strange people, although they did run if someone got too close.

A buff-colored cat was sitting on a box that was pretty much the same color he was.

I already wrote about the Oz event I saw at the Groliers Club a week ago, so I'll skip ahead to Thursday, and the Kevin Geeks Out at the Nitehawk Cinema in Williamsburg. I have to say the one in Prospect Park is easier for me to get to. This was the Spooky Spectacular, so presentations were horror-themed.

It started with a supercut of scenes from the Nightmare on Elm Street films involving Freddy Krueger's tongue. Kevin Maher and Joe Dator, who had collaborated on the book Santa Doesn't Need Your Help, did sort of a follow-up with a story of Dracula getting testicular cancer. Other presentations included Adam Howard on what media scared him as a kid, Gwendolyn Baily on how to enjoy Halloween when you have mental illness, Tenebrous Kate on foreign adaptations of Dracula, an animated horror short from Wally Chung involving elk and trolls in the mountains, Twiggs Gorey on Latin horror figures, and a burlesque routine by Persé Fanny based on It. The Kindest Cut was a Halloween episode of Walker: Texas Ranger, and Kevin pointed out afterwards that the pentagram they kept showing in it looked a lot like the Texas Ranger badge.

This weekend, we went to two different amusement parks, Knoebels in Elysburg, Pennsylvania, and Dorney Park in Allentown. We did that same two-day trip last year, but this was the first time we went to either for the Halloween season. Most parks come up with their own name for the fall activities; Knoebels used Hallo-Fun and Dorney Halloween Haunt. I thought about how it seems pretty common nowadays to parse the name of the holiday as "hallo" and "ween," when it derives from "hallow evening." But Beth said "Hallow-Fun" would make it sound too religious, and it's not like it really matters anyway.

Before we went to the park, we stopped at a nearby coffee shop in a converted church, which was surprisingly twee for an area with so much Republican propaganda.

They had a little museum and a music store, although the latter was closed that day.

Knoebels was surprisingly crowded, and Beth said she overheard someone say they'd been there over sixty times and hardly ever seen it like that. There was a really long line for the train, which had Halloween decorations set up, mostly a lot of skeletons. We rode on it once in the daytime and once at night, so I do have pictures, but not of everything being lit up.

The thing is, aside from that ride, it seemed like the lines were mostly shorter after dark. The Phoenix, the last thing we rode, also had some spooky stuff in its tunnel, which had a jack o' lantern face on its mouth as well. They have a ride called the Cosmotron, and their mascot is named Kosmo, so why isn't the ride name spelled with a K? I guess that's just a coincidence. I did think it worth noting that, both last year and on Saturday, they played Justin Bieber while the ride was running. The carousel had a mix of spooky songs for the band organ, but it seemed pretty short, as we kept hearing "Purple People Eater" over and over again.

At Dorney, we rode most of the rides they had, skipping a few that were basically just the same as at other parks, and still left about an hour before they closed.

We rode Possessed, the roller coaster that goes back and forth along two tracks, for the first time. There's a pirate ship outside the ride, but I don't know that the ride itself is pirate themed.

The lines in the daytime were very short, and while it got more crowded at night due to the haunted attractions, it still wasn't that bad. There were a few areas that had fog and employees in costumes, but they also closed a few of the rides that had been running earlier. Dorney is a small park that kind of seems bigger than it is because it has so many dead ends and paths that don't just go straight through like you might expect. That was even worse with the haunted areas set up along some of the paths. I think it was also the first time I'd seen a Ferris Wheel with seatbelts. I wonder if something happened on it in the recent past.