While there was no Disneyland or Disneyworld or Disney whatever (I never remember which is which, which seems to really upsets people who like Disneyland. Or World. Whichever.), Pennsylvania has its own amazing theme park in Lancaster county called Dutch Wonderland.
Before you get confused, the Pennsylvania Dutch people are not, in fact, Dutch. They were German (Deutsch or Deitsch, which was the dialect spoken) immigrants from the 1600s and 1700s that settled most of southern PA, and only a percentage of them were Anabaptist (present day Amish). I’m German/Austrian via a pair of great-grandparents, but they didn’t head to the states until a little over 100 years ago (or so said Ancestry,com that one time I could afford to use it).
Aside from the location, the Amish branding of Dutch Wonderland was more than a little strange and haphazard, but I guess that’s to be expected from a small amusement park built by a potato farmer in 1963. The front of the park was a false stone “castle” wall at the entrance that if I remember correctly took you through the gift shop– castles and gift shops being famously Amish..?
There were things like the “Silo Slide,” which was a small silo that you (you being a child of age 4 to 8) climbed up steps inside and then went down on a slide that wrapped around the outside. There was also “The Old Woman Who Lived In A Shoe Slide” which was smaller, and the “Giant Slide” which was, as you guessed, a bit bigger. So, a lot of slides.
One attraction was the “Dutch Wonder House” where you sat on a bench inside a tiny house and the house rotated like a reverse porch swing around. This one could be disorienting, and I don’t think my mom liked it very much. My mom enjoyed riding the “Sky Ride” which was just a ski lift type deal that you could hop on and off around the park, or just stay on it and cruise the whole park around however many times you wanted to.
My mom and I also loved this simulator ride they had called the “Astroliner” that had different movies/scenarios it would play (I assume they were all space themed) while shaking and bouncing around to whatever was happening on screen. I have a very vivid memory of my mom and I finding one of these scenes to be just the funniest/most hilarious thing we had ever seen. It was something about being on a spaceship and then crashing to Earth and chasing some alien thing. We went on that ride three or four times that trip and would just come out giggling.
At the time, the park was surrounded by pasture, cows lazily chewing grass a few yards from little kids on log flumes. There was also a fake cow you could milk water out of. You could bring your own food and sit at the plentiful picnic tables. I’ve been to Disneyland since and it was not nearly as fun.
I also got to go to Sesame Place, but only once when Grandpa was still alive (probably because he paid for it), so I only have vague memories of things like posing in a bathtub with Ernie and his rubber ducky. My mom loved Bert and Ernie. My third or fourth Halloween she dressed me up as Ernie and she was Bert. Mom was very positive about Sesame Street and PBS in general, and so was/am I. Also, Muppets. We were a Muppet family.
I don’t have a single bad memory from these places because dad wasn’t there. When I was little, I was always so hurt by how my dad never came to my recitals or my art shows, never wanted to see my straight A report card or asked about my day. I didn’t notice how much better we were without him.
The amount of energy my mother poured into being “okay” for me was nearly endless. She tried so hard to be “normal” and have us do “normal” things. At home she cried a lot, but out in the world, she was always on. Always friendly. Always making jokes. She used her silliness to mask her pain and make sure others around her weren’t uncomfortable. We call that emotional labor, now.
But also, my mom was just weird and silly because she was a fun person when she wasn’t being tormented, and thank fuck for that. Mom and I had fun together. And while the rest of the world is currently drowning in irony, I am grateful to have learned how to genuinely enjoy things and sometimes be able to communicate with others without several layers of nihilism and snark.