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blueeowynBucket
So we enjoyed a nice breakfast at the hotel, packed up, and headed out. Muskegon is a small town with some very nice old buildings to look at as you drive down the road. We were driving along on a fairly major road and I notice some buckets in the road ... large buckets ... the kind you get 5 gallons of spackling compound in. One of them is in the lane to our left (standing up) and one in our lane (lying down rocking gently side to side). I see these as fairly major obstacles but Java just keeps driving and saying in a nice calm voice 'hey look, there is a bucket in the road' (or something to that effect). My internal dialog is going something along the lines of (yes! There is a BUCKET in the ROAD! In OUR LANE! Are you planning to slow down???? Swerve???? Do ANYTHING????!??!?!??!!!). However, after the soda bottle, I didn't want to over-react. Then BOOM we pulverize the bucket at around 45 or 50 mph (I wasn't driving so I don't know for sure). I do know that the bucket was no longer a bucket ... there were fragments of former bucket flying all sorts of directions. Java said something along the lines of 'What was THAT?!?' to which I answer 'A bucket in our lane'. That is when I realized that Java had only seen one of the buckets (he was busy trying to see if the one to the left contained anything). And I became rather hysterical with laughter ... completely and totally out of control. 'Here I thought you were so calm, cool, and collected about the bucket in our lane and you never even saw it, you were talking about the other one. However since I thought you were talking about this one, I didn't point it out ... but you didn't see it.' Lots of repetitions but I was howling, having trouble breathing, tears streaming from my eyes ... the whole nine yards. The bucket extended the crack in the plastic panel on the bumper (it had already been cracked by me hooking it on a cabinet and Christi mis-judging a curb), it pushed it around, popped a gasket loose and made a bit of a mess. The word 'bucket' for the rest of the vacation was more or less guaranteed to give me the major giggles. It still does sometimes.
Michigan's Adventure http://www.miadventure.com/
Michigan's Adventure is a beautiful park with lots of flowers even before you get in. They have no metal detectors and some of the most enthusiastic hand-dryers I have ever used. Rumor has it that the park was originally owned by the people who still own Indiana Beach (or also owned Indiana Beach) but was then purchased by Cedar Fair. The dry portion of the park is sort of horse-shoe shaped with the entrance on one branch (I'm calling it right) of the shoe (along the Shivering Timbers), there is a water park that you exit into from the bottom left of the shoe, stuff goes up the left branch and there is a ride (train) that creates a bar for the shoe (closes the top). In the middle of the shoe is a good sized lake with some very large fish.
As you enter the parking lot a HUGE wooden roller coaster runs freely along side your car (faster than we were driving and it was on its return leg). Then you see the Wild Mouse, park and go in. The people were very helpful about how to get our passes working even though they didn't have the scanner, it worked very smoothly. Parking wasn't too bad either (price or location).
We decided to start with the Michigan Wolverine. This coaster is reminiscent of Phoenix at Knoebels. The ride queue had some graffiti (which was surprising given how nice the people in the area seem to be). We took front seat (of course) and there is some nice air on this baby. Very smooth, quick and nimble. The 3 bench cars exhibit a lot more obvious flex and it is an interesting sensation to go into a tunnel with the car wiggling around you (just like Phoenix).
Next we went to visit the big coaster of the park. Shivering Timbers a CCI monster whose goal in life is AIR with the secondary goal of SPEED. Both goals are well achieved. Poor Java was looking at the park until I said "Shiny" looking at the track ahead, there was a wow from beside me and a whoop as the train took off running. Lots of bunny hops, double ups, big hops, little hops, nicely banked turnaround and then off and running again. The weird feature(?) of this ride is right after the turnaround when you are screaming forward at a quick clip and are near the ground it banks left then right without changing direction for no obvious reason other than to throw you left and right (I learned later that this is called the Travers Shuffle from a feature that Harry Travers put in his coasters) ... personally I would have preferred a hop. After coming back through the structure you race through a nice helix and back to the station. Wahooo. When you have ridden Shivering Timbers you know without a doubt that you have been on a ride.
To recover from this, we headed to the flume. It has a nice view of the park and has most of it up high so you can enjoy the view (most flumes take you up, drop you, run you around some curves, up higher and then the big drop, this one took you fairly high, gave an itty-bitty drop, ran you around curves waaaay up in the sky, then dropped you).
Our next stop was the Wild Mouse (from the rear the sign for the Wild Mouse looks like a collection of giant flip-flops). The nice feature of this one was the fairly extensive gardens in the middle of the ride. Flowers, trees, shrubs, etc. all nicely landscaped and trimmed. This mouse also had some nice banking so the turns were more swoopy and less thuding against the sides of the car. The mouse cars were very cute. The stapling by the ride op was not cute.
Then we went to the Corkscrew which has a nicely themed entrance (piece of scale replica loop that you go through). Unfortunately, it is a typical Arrow looper which means that I find it rough and uncomfortable. You do get a nice view of the baby go-carts from it. We later walked over to get a better look at the baby go-carts and they are NOT tracked (well beyond the normal tracking for a go-cart) and there are those little kids ... maybe 2-4 years old driving them around having a fine time.
After a lunch break (and the obligatory drooling by me at the vintage cars in front of the restaurant) we headed to the antique car ride which wasn't wide enough for both of us so we had separate cars. The steering was non-existent in my 50s style sports car but I was amused to have a sound-track piped in of music. The track also has several bill-boards scattered throughout which are amusing (advertising local attractions and some other Cedar Fair attractions). Then we wandered over to Zachs Zoomer and both get the giggles at the Zoom! painted on the back of the train (we call it getting the Zooms when the cats go tearing around the house singly or together ... look at each other and comment Zoom!). The ride was slightly rough but it was nice and basically a clone of the Beastie/Giggles Coaster at KI or Scooby/Ghoster Coaster at KD. We stopped by the skeeball place and Java got a 340 on the machine (unfortunately the ticket dispenser wasn't working right not that we needed a prize. We tried to feed the fish but they didn't seem too interested in eating though one did follow us back and forth for awhile.
We continued around the lake and took a quick ride on the Swan Boats which really aren't very nimble in the handling department but were fun (and we did manage to avoid the fountains). We watched the Shoot-the-Chute but it was too cold to get soaked (upper 60s). We also watched the White Water Canyon which was delightfully done, very nice path, good use of waterfalls on the turn out of the station, very nicely set-up guns to soak people with and what looked to be a nice ride throughout. However, it was cold enough I was wearing a jacket part of the time ... not a good time to get soaked.
We decided to catch the miniature train back to the Shivering Timbers area. You can tell they recently re-did the tracks so that it can act as a people mover from the Canyon area to the Timbers area because the white gravel on the old path is still fairly visible. The train ride was nice but somewhat boring ... more gardens and/or figures would be a nice touch though we did see an Oriole right next to the train. So we rode the Wildcat again and Shivering Timbers and decided to play mini-golf. There is a cute course near the kiddie go-carts and we had not played much on this trip and we both enjoy it. Java won by 2 so it was a close game.
Out to the car to get the camera and we stopped by the carousel for pictures (and rides). I have not been able to get information on this carousel (it isn't on the National Carousel Association Census) but I suspect it is a metal or fiber-glass replica. The paint jobs are exquisite with little scenes on many of the trappings. We then started hunting in earnest for the kiddie coaster and finally found it (at the bend of the horseshoe). It is a small, tire propelled type coaster and was cute. Then as we were running out of time we headed briskly to Shivering Timbers for a final ride (final ride of the day as it turned out). Somewhere in the late afternoon I did do some shopping and found a wonderfully cute T-shirt (the Peanuts crowd coming down a hill on a coaster) which meant that I could get a 2007 Michigan's Adventure shirt (with the Peanuts crowd) for $5. WOOT! Unfortunately, I couldn't find post-cards. On our way out we stopped at Guest Relations with comments (mostly good, the only bad was the stapling and lack of post-cards). We later received a nice letter from the park thanking us for our comments and included a 3-D postcard of Shivering Timbers.
Craig's Cruisers http://www.craigscruisers.com/
Once we were on the road again, we were happily heading down the road and discussing options for the evening (dinner, possible movie, games) when I saw a mini-golf course off to the right and pointed it out. So, we decided to hunt for it (hey, I can now say I've been to Wyoming ... Michigan). With a lot of help from the Michigan Map and only a few wrong turnings by me (I thought we were going south when we were going north); we found Craig's Cruisers which is a good sized family entertainment complex.
They have 2 mini-golf courses, a kiddie go cart track, an adult one, an indoor one, bumper boats, bumper cars (boats on wheels), climbing wall, games, buffet, etc.. So, we got the "buffet & 2 activities for $12" option (most mini-golf seems to be in the $5-$9 range/person). We have been talking about go-carts but tend to not do them in the parks (we pay to get in and ride, it seems strange to pay to ride again ... besides which a lot of the parks courses don't look that much fun.
So, we got some food and went to play mini golf. We chose the western course because it looked less crowded. There was a family of 4.2 in front of us and the two boys were having a lot of fun. They decided to let us jump ahead of them (which was very nice of them) and kept us from having the next group breathing down our neck. I had one of the best mini-golf games ever for me. I had minimal cases of "Eowyning" holes (unlike poor Java) and won the game by 4 strokes (Go Me!).
We wandered through the arcade and saw an amazing display of Dance Dance Revolution where the young man was getting combos of over 80 (the highest I saw was a 120 combo) and his feet were flying. Then we got seconds on the food (you have 3 hours to go in and out of the food area) while watching more SpongeBob (more interesting to us than the baseball game).
Then it was off to the indoor Go Carts. The floor is a lot like a bumper car floor so they slide some but it feels a lot like a very fast and nimble bumper car that happens to have a variable gas pedal and also has breaks. Zoom! One kid blew by me early on the first lap but didn't get very far ahead of me, I kept almost passing him on this one turn but I was trying so hard to avoid bumping him that I was losing position. I finally got good position and he bumped me and his friend ended up passing me. Oh well, it was amazingly fun. These are electric so they don't stink and they get a good head of steam going.
Then it was dessert (none of the food was memorable) and time to hit the road again
So we enjoyed a nice breakfast at the hotel, packed up, and headed out. Muskegon is a small town with some very nice old buildings to look at as you drive down the road. We were driving along on a fairly major road and I notice some buckets in the road ... large buckets ... the kind you get 5 gallons of spackling compound in. One of them is in the lane to our left (standing up) and one in our lane (lying down rocking gently side to side). I see these as fairly major obstacles but Java just keeps driving and saying in a nice calm voice 'hey look, there is a bucket in the road' (or something to that effect). My internal dialog is going something along the lines of (yes! There is a BUCKET in the ROAD! In OUR LANE! Are you planning to slow down???? Swerve???? Do ANYTHING????!??!?!??!!!). However, after the soda bottle, I didn't want to over-react. Then BOOM we pulverize the bucket at around 45 or 50 mph (I wasn't driving so I don't know for sure). I do know that the bucket was no longer a bucket ... there were fragments of former bucket flying all sorts of directions. Java said something along the lines of 'What was THAT?!?' to which I answer 'A bucket in our lane'. That is when I realized that Java had only seen one of the buckets (he was busy trying to see if the one to the left contained anything). And I became rather hysterical with laughter ... completely and totally out of control. 'Here I thought you were so calm, cool, and collected about the bucket in our lane and you never even saw it, you were talking about the other one. However since I thought you were talking about this one, I didn't point it out ... but you didn't see it.' Lots of repetitions but I was howling, having trouble breathing, tears streaming from my eyes ... the whole nine yards. The bucket extended the crack in the plastic panel on the bumper (it had already been cracked by me hooking it on a cabinet and Christi mis-judging a curb), it pushed it around, popped a gasket loose and made a bit of a mess. The word 'bucket' for the rest of the vacation was more or less guaranteed to give me the major giggles. It still does sometimes.
Michigan's Adventure http://www.miadventure.com/
Michigan's Adventure is a beautiful park with lots of flowers even before you get in. They have no metal detectors and some of the most enthusiastic hand-dryers I have ever used. Rumor has it that the park was originally owned by the people who still own Indiana Beach (or also owned Indiana Beach) but was then purchased by Cedar Fair. The dry portion of the park is sort of horse-shoe shaped with the entrance on one branch (I'm calling it right) of the shoe (along the Shivering Timbers), there is a water park that you exit into from the bottom left of the shoe, stuff goes up the left branch and there is a ride (train) that creates a bar for the shoe (closes the top). In the middle of the shoe is a good sized lake with some very large fish.
As you enter the parking lot a HUGE wooden roller coaster runs freely along side your car (faster than we were driving and it was on its return leg). Then you see the Wild Mouse, park and go in. The people were very helpful about how to get our passes working even though they didn't have the scanner, it worked very smoothly. Parking wasn't too bad either (price or location).
We decided to start with the Michigan Wolverine. This coaster is reminiscent of Phoenix at Knoebels. The ride queue had some graffiti (which was surprising given how nice the people in the area seem to be). We took front seat (of course) and there is some nice air on this baby. Very smooth, quick and nimble. The 3 bench cars exhibit a lot more obvious flex and it is an interesting sensation to go into a tunnel with the car wiggling around you (just like Phoenix).
Next we went to visit the big coaster of the park. Shivering Timbers a CCI monster whose goal in life is AIR with the secondary goal of SPEED. Both goals are well achieved. Poor Java was looking at the park until I said "Shiny" looking at the track ahead, there was a wow from beside me and a whoop as the train took off running. Lots of bunny hops, double ups, big hops, little hops, nicely banked turnaround and then off and running again. The weird feature(?) of this ride is right after the turnaround when you are screaming forward at a quick clip and are near the ground it banks left then right without changing direction for no obvious reason other than to throw you left and right (I learned later that this is called the Travers Shuffle from a feature that Harry Travers put in his coasters) ... personally I would have preferred a hop. After coming back through the structure you race through a nice helix and back to the station. Wahooo. When you have ridden Shivering Timbers you know without a doubt that you have been on a ride.
To recover from this, we headed to the flume. It has a nice view of the park and has most of it up high so you can enjoy the view (most flumes take you up, drop you, run you around some curves, up higher and then the big drop, this one took you fairly high, gave an itty-bitty drop, ran you around curves waaaay up in the sky, then dropped you).
Our next stop was the Wild Mouse (from the rear the sign for the Wild Mouse looks like a collection of giant flip-flops). The nice feature of this one was the fairly extensive gardens in the middle of the ride. Flowers, trees, shrubs, etc. all nicely landscaped and trimmed. This mouse also had some nice banking so the turns were more swoopy and less thuding against the sides of the car. The mouse cars were very cute. The stapling by the ride op was not cute.
Then we went to the Corkscrew which has a nicely themed entrance (piece of scale replica loop that you go through). Unfortunately, it is a typical Arrow looper which means that I find it rough and uncomfortable. You do get a nice view of the baby go-carts from it. We later walked over to get a better look at the baby go-carts and they are NOT tracked (well beyond the normal tracking for a go-cart) and there are those little kids ... maybe 2-4 years old driving them around having a fine time.
After a lunch break (and the obligatory drooling by me at the vintage cars in front of the restaurant) we headed to the antique car ride which wasn't wide enough for both of us so we had separate cars. The steering was non-existent in my 50s style sports car but I was amused to have a sound-track piped in of music. The track also has several bill-boards scattered throughout which are amusing (advertising local attractions and some other Cedar Fair attractions). Then we wandered over to Zachs Zoomer and both get the giggles at the Zoom! painted on the back of the train (we call it getting the Zooms when the cats go tearing around the house singly or together ... look at each other and comment Zoom!). The ride was slightly rough but it was nice and basically a clone of the Beastie/Giggles Coaster at KI or Scooby/Ghoster Coaster at KD. We stopped by the skeeball place and Java got a 340 on the machine (unfortunately the ticket dispenser wasn't working right not that we needed a prize. We tried to feed the fish but they didn't seem too interested in eating though one did follow us back and forth for awhile.
We continued around the lake and took a quick ride on the Swan Boats which really aren't very nimble in the handling department but were fun (and we did manage to avoid the fountains). We watched the Shoot-the-Chute but it was too cold to get soaked (upper 60s). We also watched the White Water Canyon which was delightfully done, very nice path, good use of waterfalls on the turn out of the station, very nicely set-up guns to soak people with and what looked to be a nice ride throughout. However, it was cold enough I was wearing a jacket part of the time ... not a good time to get soaked.
We decided to catch the miniature train back to the Shivering Timbers area. You can tell they recently re-did the tracks so that it can act as a people mover from the Canyon area to the Timbers area because the white gravel on the old path is still fairly visible. The train ride was nice but somewhat boring ... more gardens and/or figures would be a nice touch though we did see an Oriole right next to the train. So we rode the Wildcat again and Shivering Timbers and decided to play mini-golf. There is a cute course near the kiddie go-carts and we had not played much on this trip and we both enjoy it. Java won by 2 so it was a close game.
Out to the car to get the camera and we stopped by the carousel for pictures (and rides). I have not been able to get information on this carousel (it isn't on the National Carousel Association Census) but I suspect it is a metal or fiber-glass replica. The paint jobs are exquisite with little scenes on many of the trappings. We then started hunting in earnest for the kiddie coaster and finally found it (at the bend of the horseshoe). It is a small, tire propelled type coaster and was cute. Then as we were running out of time we headed briskly to Shivering Timbers for a final ride (final ride of the day as it turned out). Somewhere in the late afternoon I did do some shopping and found a wonderfully cute T-shirt (the Peanuts crowd coming down a hill on a coaster) which meant that I could get a 2007 Michigan's Adventure shirt (with the Peanuts crowd) for $5. WOOT! Unfortunately, I couldn't find post-cards. On our way out we stopped at Guest Relations with comments (mostly good, the only bad was the stapling and lack of post-cards). We later received a nice letter from the park thanking us for our comments and included a 3-D postcard of Shivering Timbers.
Craig's Cruisers http://www.craigscruisers.com/
Once we were on the road again, we were happily heading down the road and discussing options for the evening (dinner, possible movie, games) when I saw a mini-golf course off to the right and pointed it out. So, we decided to hunt for it (hey, I can now say I've been to Wyoming ... Michigan). With a lot of help from the Michigan Map and only a few wrong turnings by me (I thought we were going south when we were going north); we found Craig's Cruisers which is a good sized family entertainment complex.
They have 2 mini-golf courses, a kiddie go cart track, an adult one, an indoor one, bumper boats, bumper cars (boats on wheels), climbing wall, games, buffet, etc.. So, we got the "buffet & 2 activities for $12" option (most mini-golf seems to be in the $5-$9 range/person). We have been talking about go-carts but tend to not do them in the parks (we pay to get in and ride, it seems strange to pay to ride again ... besides which a lot of the parks courses don't look that much fun.
So, we got some food and went to play mini golf. We chose the western course because it looked less crowded. There was a family of 4.2 in front of us and the two boys were having a lot of fun. They decided to let us jump ahead of them (which was very nice of them) and kept us from having the next group breathing down our neck. I had one of the best mini-golf games ever for me. I had minimal cases of "Eowyning" holes (unlike poor Java) and won the game by 4 strokes (Go Me!).
We wandered through the arcade and saw an amazing display of Dance Dance Revolution where the young man was getting combos of over 80 (the highest I saw was a 120 combo) and his feet were flying. Then we got seconds on the food (you have 3 hours to go in and out of the food area) while watching more SpongeBob (more interesting to us than the baseball game).
Then it was off to the indoor Go Carts. The floor is a lot like a bumper car floor so they slide some but it feels a lot like a very fast and nimble bumper car that happens to have a variable gas pedal and also has breaks. Zoom! One kid blew by me early on the first lap but didn't get very far ahead of me, I kept almost passing him on this one turn but I was trying so hard to avoid bumping him that I was losing position. I finally got good position and he bumped me and his friend ended up passing me. Oh well, it was amazingly fun. These are electric so they don't stink and they get a good head of steam going.
Then it was dessert (none of the food was memorable) and time to hit the road again