It’s been quite a while since my last coaster park. The past week break has been filled with awesome people and lots of good times. Plus 11 hours of driving to get to San Francisco from Portland. Thankfully I had my good friend Nick along for the ride so it went much quicker than a normal drive.
Yesterday I had the pleasure of getting featured at USAToday.com. If you’ve come from USA Today, thanks for joining us here!
Unfortunately, somebody found an exploit on this site as well as my other site RidiculouslyExtraordinary, which caused some problems. The contact form didn’t work right, comments were messed up, and PHP errors were running rampant. There was nothing I could do from the road. Not that I’d really know what to do anyway. Thanks to Norcross it was all fixed and running smoothly sometime around 4am EST. :)
San Francisco last night was cold. I expected it to be cold today as well so I wore a hoodie and jeans to Six Flags. Bad move. Vallejo, CA was on fire! Which is a blessing and a curse. Blessing because I like to sweat. Curse because the park was packed. After waiting for 45 minutes to ride Medusa, a fun coaster with lots of twists, twirls, and turns (hence the name!) I decided I needed to do something.
I found the charm. It was hiding somewhere between the Super Pretzels and the frozen lemonade. Note: I hid it again so if you come here you’ll have to do your own Sherlock Holmesery to find it. Anyway: No more lines!
I headed to Kong and went through an interesting experience. They had to measure me to make sure I wasn’t too tall to go on the ride. I could tell it would be a close call so I slouched a bit and passed inspection. Which made me a bit paranoid. During the whole ride I felt like my feet were going to hit something. I don’t know if this was in my head or if my feet were legitimately really close to hitting something. I’ll go with the latter because it makes me sound tough.
As I was walking to V2: Vertical Velocity (which I had already gone on at Six Flags Great America) I passed Cobra. It was a kiddie ride, but looked like it might be fun. So I smushed my legs into a seat and experience a ride I would have been thrilled with if it was 25 years ago.
V2 was a slightly different experience than the other V2. It felt slower, but there was more twisting going up one of the spears. Fun ride. But again, like I’ve mentioned before, I would be less-than-pleased if I had to wait 30-60 minutes to ride it.
How To Piss Off A 12 Year Old
The lone wooden coaster at Discovery Kingdom is Roar. I headed up the Exit to secure my front-of-line spot and waited. The way this top-secret access works is that I go up the Exit and the attendants call me to get on the ride before they let the people who were waiting in the regular line. As you can expect, this can cause some trouble. Especially when you go for the front seat where a loud-mouth 12 year old girl and her friends were next in line.
As I was walking up to it I said “Sorry, I gotta do this.” That didn’t go over well and loud mouth gave me some choice words fit for … well … fit for me. ;) I was actually quite impressed with her phrasing, but hey, I did get the last laugh as my car pulled away and she was still waiting.
Next I went on Pandemonium which is a kiddie ride very similar to the Fairly Odd Coaster at Nick Universe. It made me dizzy and I remembered why I don’t like carnival-type spin-spin-spin rides.
Unfortunately Boomerang (a small but fun looking coaster) was closed down for repairs today. If closed down for repairs means it was closed and there was absolutely nobody working on it. :)
Tomorrow I head to California’s Great America, a short 1 hour drive from San Francisco. If you want to meet up just get in touch!
