Shoo Fly!

One of the best coaster places in the U.S. is easily Cedar Point in Sandusky, Ohio, right on beautiful Lake Erie. What you might know about Cedar Point is that if you go there, you will experience one of the biggest and best selections of coasters in the country. What you might not know is that if you visit there in early June to mid-July (like I did my first time), you will also get to experience these pesky little creatures call mayflies. Mayflies, also called fishflies, are an aquatic insect that looks a lot like a dragonfly and live and breed on the bottom of the lake. Then in the late spring, they hatch, and apparently have this massive, annual swarm to the shoreline. And when I say swarm, I mean literally SURGE in epic amounts! Every building, car and structure that is outdoors is covered in them. They form dense, moving clouds around every light with a buzzing that at first sounds like rain. They manage to get inside of buildings and cars when doors and windows briefly open, and there's little you can do to escape them. Even our hotel room had a few crashing with us for the night. If you're out touring the park after dark, you will be ducking from, swiping at and dodging these things all night long. And when you ride a coaster? Better keep your mouth closed! For a newbie to this kind of creature invasion, it's really like something out of an Alfred Hitchcock movie. Yet despite how horrifying this seemed to an outsider, surprisingly the locals seem pretty unfazed by it. The staff and ride operators, for whom I had complete sympathy for, responded as if these were nothing more than a mild nuisance. Fortunately, that is true as other than being annoying, mayflies are harmless to humans. They are mostly active from evening to dawn leaving your daytime relatively safe, and they have a brief life span of 24-48 hours. Come morning, you will see millions of them clinging quietly to whatever they landed on the previous night along with piles and piles of little corpses of those whose short lifecycle has expired. After the initial shock of the first day/night dealing with these insects, we became more like the locals: accepting and enduring of their presence with a focus on having fun. We were even fortunate enough to have it rain lightly one night, which significantly subdued their activity.

So go ahead and plan your trip to Cedar Point because it is a park well worth visiting. Millenium Force, Top Thrill Dragster and Magnum XL are waiting for you! But if you go in the late spring, you might want to prepare for some company.