A week ago, on Saturday morning, we were in a hotel room in Western Pennsylvania discussing the comparative usage and etymology of the phrases “fraidy cat” and “scaredy cat,” having discovered that Beth and I would use either term, but the kids had only heard of the latter. The reason for this was that we were on our way to HalloWeekends at Cedar Point (having picked North up at school on Friday afternoon and driven most of the way there the day before) and as we were preparing to hit the road and drive the last few hours, Beth was considering buying one of the necklaces with cats on them that let scare actors know you don’t want to be scared. She speculated it was supposed to evoke the idea of “fraidy cat” and the kids were surprised by the term, which sent us down a pre-breakfast googling rabbit hole.
The trip was a long time in the making. When Noah graduated from high school in 2019, he asked if we could go to Cedar Point that summer, but North was in a play and had a couple day camps and we had another trip planned and we couldn’t fit it in, and you can probably guess why we didn’t go to any amusement parks in 2020 or 2021. It’s a lot easier to get to Hershey Park from where we live, so when we did go to one in 2022, that’s where we went.
But Noah doesn’t ask for much, so it had been bothering me for a long time that we never granted his wish. And then when North got covid this summer and missed a camp field trip to Hershey Park we decided a fall visit to an amusement park was in order. As always, it made more sense to go to Hershey Park. It’s only a couple hours away and Cedar Point is in Ohio, nine to ten hours away. But it’s always going to be that far away, and we’ve been to Hershey Park in the Dark, but not Halloweekends, so we decided to road trip to Ohio over Columbus/Indigenous People’s Day weekend.
I’m glad we did it. It was a lot of fun, long drive and all. We arrived at the park mid-afternoon Saturday and stayed until the evening and then all of Sunday, too. We stayed at the Hotel Breakers, which is a stately early twentieth-century hotel right next to the park and on the shore of Lake Erie. (You can see it in the background of the first picture.) Cedar Point is the amusement park of Beth’s childhood and her family used to stay at this hotel and she really loves it. We got a suite with two beds in one room and a fold-out couch in another, so Noah was able to close the doors between the rooms and have his own space at night. Being so close to the park allowed us to go back to the room in ones and twos as people wanted, which was convenient because the kids wanted to stay longer than we did both nights.
The hotel went all out when it came to lobby decorations. There were spiderwebs on the chandeliers, skeletons riding the carousel horses that usually reside there, life-size figures in various spooky tableaux, and It’s The Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown was playing on a continuous loop on a television. Right outside the front entrance there were witch legs sticking out of planters.
The park was also nicely decorated. There were giant collages made of pumpkins and different colored squashes– my favorite was the skull—and all sorts of skeletons and monsters, both statues and animated, talking ones. We all liked the big ogre that sang “Ogreface” to the tune of “Poker Face.”
North used a loaner wheelchair because they didn’t feel up to hours of walking. It works just like at Hershey Park. You get a pass that allows you and your party to go to the front of the ride lines and then they make a note of when you’re allowed to go to the next ride (based on the length of the line you skipped). It was easier pushing them around Cedar Point, which is flat, than Hershey Park, which is a little hillier, but even so by the second day my arms were sore.
Over the course of one and a half days, in different combinations, we rode all kinds of rides—many coasters, a mine ride, a Ferris wheel, swings, a train that goes through a village of skeletons (this is a permanent feature of the park—it’s not for Halloween), and one of those tower rides that drops you from a great height. This last one is called the Power Tower and it’s 240 feet high. North was the only one who wanted to ride it. Together the kids rode much scarier coasters than I ever have, but Beth said that’s because in my youth there weren’t coasters with the cars hanging off the sides of the track or with so many inversions. I do want to note, as I do whenever we go to any amusement park, that in 1989, the week before my college graduation, when it was the tallest coaster in the world (205 feet), I rode the Magnum at Cedar Point. It is far from the tallest now and I would never ride it.
While we were in line for the Blue Streak, which at 78 feet is the smallest wooden coaster in the park and right at my limit, I was explaining to Noah that in my experience, the years from my mid-teens to early twenties marked the peak (pun intended) of my roller coaster bravery. So when the ride was over and a middle-aged woman in the row in front of me asked her friend, “Why is this ride so much scarier than it used to be?” and I relayed the comment to Noah, he laughed.
We had minor mishaps on two rides. On the Wild Mouse, a small coaster with cars that spin on the tracks (think of it like a teacup ride that also goes up and down), North’s car got stuck on the track, still spinning, and it was a while before they could get off, quite dizzy. On the Ferris Wheel, there was no malfunction, but we misjudged how cold it would be up there after dark. In the daytime it had been in the mid-fifties, and I was warm enough in my hoodie with two layers underneath. I enjoyed the first two rotations of the wheel and the lovely view of the all the lit-up rides and the shimmering surface of the lake, but during the third rotation we were stopped for a long time near the top and we were all freezing, especially Noah who was only wearing a t-shirt under his denim jacket. So we when we got to the bottom we were all aghast when it started back up again for a fourth and final spin, again with long stops.
After that, Beth lent Noah her fleece jacket, hat, and gloves, so he could stay in the park with North to do some of the haunted mazes and outdoor scare zones, while Beth and I retreated to the hotel to rest and relax after a long day. (She may have mentioned once or twice that she told everyone it was going to be cold and to dress warmly.)
On Sunday we did fewer rides and took in some shows. We saw a short musical murder mystery play called Wake the Dead. The premise is that it’s the funeral of the victim and his four potential heirs are expecting to find out who will inherit, but instead each is accused of his murder and must mount a defense in song. In the end the audience votes and then the guilty party (who presumably varies from show to show) sings again. It was fun and featured an actor who did a spirited version of Meatloaf’s “Hot Patootie/Bless My Soul.”
Next, we attended a recitation of “The Tell-Tale Heart,” with a brief frame narrative in which the murderous narrator is about to be executed for his crime and then sets out to explain himself to the witnesses to the execution. I’m not sure the extra bit added much. The story stands alone and the actor who recited it did a nicely creepy job.
After the second show, we split up because the indoor mazes opened at five and the kids wanted to do more (the outdoor fright zones weren’t open on Sundays). Beth was not interested, being the self-described fraidy cat in the family, but I stayed with the kids for two mazes. The first was a tour of a haunted house with members of a paranormal society leading you through it. Just a few steps in I got North’s wheelchair stuck in a doorway and North said, “Noah is better at this,” and I handed it over to him. He was very good at maneuvering it through narrow spaces, even when the lights went out and it was not at all clear to me which way to turn. I walked behind him and held onto the hem of his jacket. Later I told Beth that there were so many people jumping out at you it made it less scary, because there was no suspense. You were pretty much always expecting it if it had been thirty seconds or more since the last one. The second maze was a dance club run by vampires. It was called Orpheus, so I thought it was a nice touch that “Don’t look back” was spray-painted on the wall in two places. There were more mazes, but by that time I’d had enough so I left the kids and went back to the hotel.
Beth had already eaten dinner, but I hadn’t so I invited her to join me on the beach while I ate half an apple, plus a cheese stick and a latte I got at the Starbucks in the lobby. (Finding diabetic-friendly vegetarian food in the park was kind of a challenge so I carried food with me.) Cedar Point and Lake Erie hold a lot of childhood memories for Beth, but it’s also very near Oberlin and we went to the park once or twice and to the lake many times in college, so it has nostalgic early relationship vibes for us, too. We didn’t stay too long, though, because it was cold out and we wanted to go inside and soak in the hot tub while we waited for the kids to come back. That was nice, as after over 24,000 steps that day, my feet were sore.
On Monday morning Beth and I took separate walks on the beach. It was lovely down there. There was a big flock on seagulls near the water and the remnants of the sunrise in the sky. I would have liked to walk longer, but we had a nine-plus-hour drive ahead of us, so I said my goodbyes to the beautiful lobby and lake, and we hit the road, back to work and school and the routines of the week.