To regrets, now, from our short couple hours at Six Flags America on our anniversary. In the Mardis Gras area was Ragin' Cajun, which looked like a good roller coaster 299 to me. It's a spinning wild mouse, the same model as Exterminator at Kennywood, and Ratón Loco at La Feria, and the Crazy Mouse at DelGrosso's. Only difference from the day before is that this coaster was outdoors, with no props, and that it had no line at all. The cars have an alligator theme, rather than mouse or rat.
Did I say it was a spinning wild mouse? Because it was more spinny than that. It was a SPINNING wild mouse, starting very early on in the ride. This was great, to start with; if you're going to give us a spinning ride it's only fair that it really spins. The ride, however, took it too far. It was more loco than Ratón Loco, itself a ride so spinny that ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
bunnyhugger had cried out theatrically from it. There was no crying out theatrically this time. There was crying out in actual pain, as she slammed into the restraints, leaving her with several bruises including one on the head that she still, over a month later, has. I got a bit nauseous on the ride and had to stop and get some water to recover; the heat and humidity were surely part of that, but the ride coming with its own artificial gravity was more. bunnyhugger would check on her bruises every day for a while after the ride, and when we saw it either not operating or running empty cars (test cycles, perhaps, or just attract mode after not drawing riders) she cursed it, ``good''. We did not ride it again.
After recombobulating ourselves, though, I took out the now sweat-dampened 8.5x11 paper with '300' that I'd brought from Michigan. And made our way to The Wild One, which still bears the centennial badge logo on it. The queue --- empty, when we got up there --- has a number of signs about the ride's history. When built it was the tallest roller coaster in the world, if you accept this as the same ride known as Giant Coaster from 1917 to 1985. (Giant Coaster is the first entry Wikipedia has for the category of record-holding roller coaster height. I did some digging in the Roller Coaster Database and there's so many roller coasters that don't have height data it's not possible to give a definitive answer of what the tallest coaster before this was.) It's also got a nice old-fashioned hand-painted-style ``Please remain seated, seatbelt fastened - Keep all hands, arms, and legs inside the train at all time'' sign.
I hurried to the front seat --- nobody was competing for that --- and a picture from bunnyhugger with the '300' sign. I hoped we weren't taking so much time with this as to annoy the ride operators but I have to figure they've seen this a lot and probably would have been willing to take a picture of the two of us if we'd asked, but we would never dare ask for something like that. bunnyhugger did notice other people getting seats in the middle and asked if there's maybe a reason for this that we should pay attention to? No matter. It's not true that front seat --- or back seat --- is always the best, but given a completely free choice I'll probably take the front until I know better from my own experience.
The coaster is basically an out-and-back, doing just what the description says, with a helix at the end to burn off a little more speed rather than waste it braking harder. It's a classic design, and with its left turn to the lift hill and coming back to a helix surprisingly like Shivering Timbers at Michigan's Adventure. Lovely ride and any park should be proud to have it. It did leave me wondering how the heck this ride could ever have been a side-friction coaster, the style of ride built before 1920 when wheels underneath the track made it possible for trains to go faster and the hills to be wilder.
And the answer is ... I don't know in detail, but the answer is that it's not the same ride. Giant Coaster had a bunch of redesigns, including after a 1932 fire destroyed part of it, which is when it changed from side-friction to upstop-wheels. And again in 1963 after another fire destroyed the station, part of the lift hill, and the helix. Even after relocating, with some rebuilding, at Six Flags America the redesigning didn't stop. In 1997 the helix (lost after 1963, rebuilt after the move) was redesigned again.
But we'd still ride it again, and we did that day, getting a backseat ride in too.
But that wasn't all we would do. We did step back from the more intense rides and, back by the carousel, went on the Minutemen Motors, the antique-car ride. As traditional, bunnyhugger drove. The path started out looking quite good, overgrown with plants, but it emerged into just a big swath of lawn near the parking lot and the back side of the entrance midway. Pleasant but could have been more.
By now it was about 7 pm and the end of the park's day. We did check the main gift shops, looking vainly for some Wild One merchandise. They didn't have any. And it wasn't just that we were looking in the wrong place; someone in the roller coasters Reddit confirmed that the park just doesn't have ride shirts, except for some reason this former-stand-up coaster named Firebird. Disappointing. I guess we'll have to get a bootleg sometime.
That, though, was our roller coaster anniversary, and my milestone coaster, all in one. We still had a full day at the park --- and six more roller coasters --- planned.
Done with the Gourd-geous Gourds now; what else was going on at Michigan's Adventure?
While Michigan's Adventure has closed the petting zoo it only built a couple years ago they did open it for Trick-or-Treating with skeletons to look at.
Also I guess they had a singing group on the goat bridge.
Here's some giant spiders and their webs set up underneath the goat bridge.
And here's a simple ring of ghosts set up near where the miniature horses and such were.
Here's a couple gryphon skeletons in, I think, the end of the goat enclosure.
And here's skeletons of some unicorns with Bone-ear-tis.
Trivia: Tea was introduced to Japan in the 9th century, but did not become popular until it was reintroduced in 1171 by a Japanese Zen scholar. Source: Tea: Addiction, Exploitation, and Empire, Roy Moxham.
Currently Reading: The Invention of Scarcity: Malthus and the Margins of History, Deborah Valenze. Picked up from the university library because I was a viral toot on Mastodon about how the eBook version was no longer for sale.
