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After we ate we went to Steel Vengeance, figuring to ride if the incredibly popular roller coaster had a line of an hour or less. The sign promised an unbelievable line. It claimed the wait was fifteen minutes.
Clearly impossible --- Iron Dragon, a vastly less popular ride with greater capacity, has been suffering half-hour waits this season --- but we figured to go in and see just how bad it was. And we kept walking through queue sections to find there weren't people there. It might actually be a fifteen-minute wait. Until we hit the pause.
Steel Vengeance, as an RMC Conversion from the Mean Streak roller coaster, has a lot of wild moves. Spirals, sharp banks, all taken at great speeds. This is a problem for dingbats who figure they can take their cell phones out. It's even a problem for people who leave their stuff in normal mortal pockets. Someone like me, wearing cargo shorts, which snap closed or (as my pants that day offered) have velcro closures, are safe against stuff falling out by mistake (WATCH THIS SPACE), but you can't expect everyone to be wearing cargo shorts for some reason. So the current plan, trying to get everything out of pockets securely without making people spend too much time on the launch platform fussing around with bins is to have lockers. These are put in a part of the queue that I believe used to be exclusively the Fast Pass queue. They're free; you enter your birthdate and pick some image from their set and they assign a locker to put everything in. Then you rejoin the queue and go through a metal detector, show the person at the metal detector that you have a belt buckle, and then you rejoin what were formerly the Fast Pass and Regular Pass queues to get on the ride.
Still, the astounding thing is that we got to walk right up to a spot on the final stairs leading to the station. That is, we were one ride cycle away, or as we put it, ``a real Mean Streak queue here''; in its old incarnation Mean Streak just didn't get long waits. We had somehow picked a day when Steel Vengeance was essentially a walk-on ride.
It's a great ride. It pains us to say anything good about a roller coaster that killed a wooden coaster, but they made a great steel coaster out of it, quite some consolation. (The supports are wooden, largely the same ones Mean Streak had --- expanded, even; the initial hill is taller and steeper than Mean Streak's was --- but it's the track, not what holds up the track, that makes a wood coaster.) It feels wild, ready to go out of control; it's just breathtaking, in all the best ways.
We exited, surprised that we didn't pass the lockers again to retrieve our stuff. It turns out there's a separate queue that you use to go in, to get stuff out of the other side of your locker. This explains the question I'd had about how they keep people retrieving their stuff from having to wait through what's normally an hours-long queue.
And, given that we had all but walked on, we thought, why not ride again and not worry about getting our stuff just yet? So we did and this time we did not almost walk on. We got up to the station as they were about to close the gates and the operator told us to hurry and we can get in row two (or whichever it was). That's right: not just a walk-on but a ``hurry up and jump on'' ride, and that for a seat almost up front.
We couldn't leave it at that. We went around for a third ride as long as Steel Vengeance was offering us that. This is almost as incredible as Michigan's Adventure's Mad Mouse being re-ridable; we had to take that chance. So we did, not getting another walk-on --- who could hope for that much good riding? --- but only having to wait the one train. Which turned out well. Steel Vengeance has three trains, each given a different name, and with this we were able to ride all three in a single day. Heck, in a single half-hour.
At this, though, we finally had our fill. It is a wild and fun ride and also a bit exhausting to ride too many times in a row. Three was a good break; it's as much as we could hope for from a season. We discovered the little side queue and got our things out of our locker, satisfied that whatever else happened the rest of the day we'd gotten to do the incredible.
Let's explore some more attractions at Sylvan Beach, now.
Center post of Sylvan Beach Amusement Park's carousel, the Theel machine that's from ... we dont know. It's imaginable that the '56' to start the serial number is year of manufacture but I have no reason to believe that.
The north end of the park has the Laffland dark ride, and the giant slide here. And then it just reaches its end, with this Lake House restaurant; there's a sandy beach behind it, towards the sun.
One of the cars for the Laffland ride.
Sylvan Beach Amusement Park is ungated; here's a nice broad stretch of grass between the park and the road leading up to it. The pizza place we got lunch from is across the road. Laffland is off screen, to the left, a fair bit.
Oh, and then we saw one of these, in that open grassy area!
The rabbit was doing their best to eat the whole lawn, although someone came and sat down on the lawn and apparently scared the poor animal off.
Trivia: In October 1942 the War Production Board prohibited the manufacture of new telephone sets, effective mid-November, except for military use. Source: Telephone: The First Hundred Years, John Brooks.
Currently Reading: The Adventures of Little Archie, Volume 2, Editor Victor Gorelick.
