We had a pug meetup,
a halloween party,
a trip to Frick park…
and some funny Penelope photos from tha car ride home.
Ever since installing Photoshop CS I haven’t been able to view thumbnails in Windows Explorer like I could with Photoshop 7. Here is a fix.
Info from Mike Golding.
Thats it! Its a shame Adobe stopped supporting this and want you to use their file browser instead, which is cumbersome compared to Windows Explorer.
Footers are in and a building has been constructed for the air compressors.
The Phoenix Phall Phunfest is a halloween event held at Knoebels Amusement park in Elysburg, PA in conjunction with the Covered Bridge Festival.
We planned to camp Friday and Saturday night, enjoying the festival Saturday but our plans were spoiled by the weather. We arrived Friday evening at around 7:30 to find the rain coming down just as hard here as it had been all the way accross PA. After arranging to upgrade to a platform site we began setting up our tent in the rain. Its making cold just thinking about it. We got the tent up and attempted to throw a tarp over the top, but our new for 2005 tent was too big for it to cover completlely. This worked out to be the biggest mistake of the trip besides not cancelling the Friday portion of the trip. After some beers and boredom we tried to sleep but awoke to wet pillows, wet shirts and spoiled spirits. Our tent had puddles along the sides and every non water friendly piece of clothing or blanket was wet. Yuck!
After a long, wet night, we awoke and dicussed our options and luckily found a Hampton Inn 14 miles from the park. The hotel was clean, easy to find and had a good continental breakfast in the morning.
So we took our tent down, cleaned up and headed out to Cracker Barrel for breakfast. Mmmm.
We wanted to check out the Covered Bridge Festival before the Phunphest and had about…8 hours to kill. Hmm. Monica wanted to get a water wicking shirt to go along with her new pants and had convinced me to do the same so we headed out to find a sporting goods store. After digging around a mall and finding nothing we moved along to Insert town name and found an outdoor store. We both found what we wanted, thermal drying underware. These things are great! With the new thermals, hiking socks and rain coat I was dry and warm the entire rainy evening.
A movie was on our list of things to do, and we saw Flightplan. Good thriller movie that kept us both guessing.
After the movie we checked into the hotel to clean up and change into our new clothes. While changing Monica commented on the opening at the front of my pants and reffered to it as a “cute hole for your little pee pee.” I had a laugh and said, little is not a word any man wants used to describe that. Anyways, we changed and headed to the event.
After roaming the booths at the Covered Bridge Festival we purchased our tickets and headed into the park for Phun!
Our first ride of the evening was Phoenix. I was really curious what my opinion would be this time after riding four world class woodies this summer, and it hasn’t changed. Phoenix is still my favorite wooden coaster. While the rides all evening were not as out of control as they were last summer they were still a blast.
The tunnel had a number of black light graffiti paintings, strobe lights and fog early in the evening. Touches like this made this event really special and put a smile on our faces all night.
The ride itself was dark, and the out section over the Antique Cars had fog at the bottom of the hills leftover from the Haunted car ride. The ride is so smooth from the middle bench it almost feels like a B&M! Airtime was mild, but the smiles were extreme.
We wanted to get on the Haunted Mansion before it closed for the evening, so we headed there next and had a fun ride. The Haunted Mansion is sensory overload from the second you go in till you are done. Lots of scares and good times.
After the Haunted Mansion we wanted to use our free pizza coupons. This was our first time eating at Cesari’s and I have to say the hype was warrented. The cheese slices were really good, the sauce was sweet, very similar to NYC style and the crust was fresh.
The Twister queue was all done up as well, including a ride op dressed as Michael Myers walking slowly around the platform checking restraints and never coming out of character as well as Halloween music playing from underneath the platform.
The ride itself again was not as out of control as I recall, but still was really great. The first drop, turn around, drop, double helix was as intenseas it was smooth. Great!
Heading down the exit ramp held another surprise, a garbage can had a trigger that would cause the lid to pop open with lots of noise and light. It really scared the crap out of Monica and I. Details like this made the night really special and worth the suffering we were put through the night before.
I have heard the stories, knew that these were the #1 rated bumper cars and knew they packed a punch. Holy crap were they fun. Monica and I have never had as much fun, nor been as scared as we were on these bumper cars.
Our ride cycle was stopped as soon as we started, the ride operator, whom everyone seemed to know, said “You have all done this before, turn around and go the other way” and started up the ride again. Lots of big hits, spin outs and laughter insued. Everyone in queue was cheering when a big hit was given. All in all, great times.
The amount of work they put into this was staggering, it was an entire dark ride outdoors with numerous scares throughout the ride. While the line was long, it was well worth it. A number of the ride operators were in costume and character, including this guy who struck up a vampire conversation with Monica.
While the camping wash out was really dissapointing, the Phun Phest was worth all the cold and wetness we suffered through the previous night. The attention to detail was great, and made the event so much fun. After one PPP, we are planning on making it an annual trip.
I have been looking for a nice (easy?) way to display my photography, whether it is art or my latest trip. After installing a number of products including Gallery I decided to stick with Flickr and use FAlbum to get the photos into my website template. While I am still working out the design, so far it is working out pretty well.
614 Hampton Avenue Pittsburgh, PA 15221
rsvp to halloween@eightdotthree.net, 412.600.7697 or leave a comment.
