Amusement Parks

 Recently myself, my brother and his family went down to King’s Dominion, an amusement park (aka “theme park”) for the first time in ages.  We all had a great time – the crowds were almost nonexistent and the weather cooperated beautifully.  The kids were more into the more sedate rides, whereas I was more into the roller coasters.  

I’m not really a theme park kind of guy.  I manage to get to them on average about every 10 years, but I do enjoy them while I’m there.  I went from being terrified of roller coasters as a kid to aggressively seeking out the nastiest ones as an “adult”.  However, the topsy-turvy rides that spin you up and down and around, which we find in the midway portions of most themes parks and which serve as the main rides at temporary carnivals and county fairs (e.g. Montgomery County Fair) really don’t do much for me except offend my stomach without exciting my brain or challenging my heart.  As with so many other topics I’ve covered, I’ll try to make this less an exhaustive analysis and more a reflection based on personal experiences.  

Coney Island and the Cyclone.  9/11 and the Empire State Building, among so many other attractions of New York City in general and Manhattan in particular, get most of the attention and spotlight, so it’s easy to forget or overlook that the city has a beach with a boardwalk – which dates back to the turn of the century, a time at which Copacabana and Ipanema in Rio de Janeiro were wild, desolate, undeveloped beaches.  Granted, it’s cold in winter and isn’t really “open” year round as a practical matter, but during the summer it’s a legitimate beach.  The amusement parks have changed over the years, and Astroland itself is due to close soon.   

But my favorite part, the Cyclone, will remain indefinitely.  This is one of the earliest roller coasters in the country.  It’s so old (built in 1927) that my father (born in 1928) had experiences riding on it as a kid himself.  We managed to enjoy it during summer of 1988.  Its modest size is very misleading.  It is very fast (90 mph) and very intense, one of the best roller coasters ever, which is even more impressive when you consider how old it is and how much competition it has by now.  I strongly recommend anyone visiting NYC to stop by Coney Island and experience the Cyclone.  

King’s Dominion.  This is the park I’ve been to most often and with which I’m most familiar.  It’s about 15 minutes north of Richmond, Virginia, and has been there since the mid-70s; in fact, we went there shortly after it opened up and went a few times as kids growing up in the late 70s before moving to Paris, France in 1979.  It features a miniature Eiffel Tower which provides a spectacular panorama of the park itself and the still-largely-undeveloped surrounding areas.  The Lion Country Safari, which started out with us driving through in cars, then upgraded to a safer (!) monorail, is long gone; however, certain parts of the park (near the Volcano coaster) still have the safari/tiki motif to them.  The Hanna-Barbera theme is also still present, somewhat: while Yogi’s Cave is now simply Treasure Cave, the Scooby Doo Roller Coaster is still alive and well.  Remarkably, it’s rated a 4 on the park’s scale of excitement (5 being the nastiest and 1 being the most sedate and boring).  In the 90s the park turned into Paramount’s King’s Dominion and added Klingons and Romulans to the mix, but this too is gone.  Likewise, the Wayne’s World theme is gone, except for a wooden roller coaster known as the Hurler, a close competitor to the Grizzly (though I still think the Cyclone is better than either of those).   The Dominator is the nastiest Class 5 ride, but it was nastier because it banged my ears against the cushion more than the loops and speed.   KD also has the bumper cars, the concession stands, the midway (three tosses for an oversized stuffed animal), the caricaturist, the “olde tyme” antique novelty portrait studio (still no ‘60s-70s version) and so on.  I recall as a kid throwing a tantrum so my parents would buy me the Davy Crockett raccoon hat from a concession in the Old Virginia part of the park, near the log plume ride.  This is a park where our enjoyment as adults is severely twisted by our recollections of the park as kids.    

Busch Gardens.  This is close to Williamsburg, Virginia, southeast of Richmond.  We went there exactly once, some time in the early 80s.  The “deal” is that the park is separated into sections each of which reflects a different part of Old Europe: England, Scotland, Ireland, France, Italy and Germany (what? No Switzerland?  No Austria?  No Belgium?).  At the time we went, the Big Bad Wolf was the new roller coaster, but it was closed for repair; the Loch Ness Monster was the baddest ride available and I remember it well – another one that goes upside down, however briefly.  The German section doesn’t have anything related to that business from 1939-45, but it does have an Oktoberfest hall.  

Hershey Park.  Somewhere in Pennsylvania. We went there once as kids.  I remember a corkscrew coaster which was pretty wild.  Some coasters will loop upside down, but they do so going straight ahead.   You end up being upside down for about a nanosecond and don’t really sense anything.  The nastier ones will loop at an angle, which really messes you up.  The highlight of this park was the museum where they show Kisses being made, and we got inflatable pillows (plastic) of Hershey Bar and Reese Peanut Butter Cups – one of which ended up a victim of our lawn mower.  

Six Flags Great Escapes.  Up in upstate New York near Glens Falls.  I went there with my cousins in July 1998 (about the time France whupped Brazil’s ass in the World Cup).              The top ride there was the Comet.  Oddly, this was originally called the Cyclone, but is not the Coney Island coaster.  It’s a huge, wooden coaster which is extremely fierce and aggressive.  When I agreed to go on it, my cousins were incredulous.  To me, it looked nothing worse than the Rebel Yell from King’s Dominion, which for all its impressive height is fairly dull: it just goes up and down, turns 180, and then goes up and down back to the beginning.  This one does far more than that one.  Years later was I watching a documentary on roller coasters, which featured this one, describing it as the world’s tallest, fastest, baddest wooden roller coaster.  Here I am thinking, “man, I have GOT to ride this thing.” After following the documentary’s trail of the ride’s origin and transplant to Canada, etc. they finally revealed that it ended up at Six Flags Great Escapes…I HAD BEEN ON IT!  D’oh!             

I also went on the Screamin’ Demon and the Boomerang – the latter is very short, but goes backwards for its second half.  That is a very unpleasant sensation for a roller coaster, the closest thing to making you hurl you can imagine, far worse than even going upside down, even at an angle.  I remember my dad telling me how, as nasty and fast as many of these coasters are, including the Cyclone, none of them will take you backwards.  It’s bad enough that occasionally – VERY rarely – someone dies on a roller coaster, usually because the “You! Out of the gene pool!!” dumbass does something idiotic like standing up; but having the damn thing go backwards is a recipe for a carload of broken necks and dead riders.  The Boomerang didn’t really do a whole lot EXCEPT go up for a short distance and then come back, backwards, which as a spectator standing off to the side doesn’t look like much – especially compared to such obviously nasty rides like the Screamin’ Demon or the Comet.  But when you’re on this thing going backwards, you want the ride to end as soon as possible.

Asterix Park.  I’ve never been to Euro Disney, which opened up long after I left Paris for the last time in 1990.  For that matter, I have never been to Disneyland or Disney World, as I’ve never visited Florida or California.  The Asterix Park is located just north of Paris, and is extremely well done.  It has the usual array of different types of rides, including a Roman rapids white water thing and a crazy, aggressive steel roller coaster, the Boudurix, named after the shy but spoiled kid in Asterix and the Normans who – along with Cacofonix the Bard – taught the Vikings the meaning of fear.  With Euro Disney now open, I don’t know how strongly I can recommend this park (if it even survived the competition) but I certainly enjoyed it, and it is definitely FRENCH.  

Jardin D’Acclimatation.  Though not quite as impressive as the Asterix Park or King’s Dominion, this was an excellent source of entertainment for my brother and I growing up as kids from 1979-84.  It’s located in Neuilly, just west of Paris.  It had a huge playground, even a wading pool, a house of mirrors, bumper cars, a small roller coaster, a go kart track (which we loved), a midway, and our favorite, an arcade full of (almost) state of the art video games – including Phoenix and Lock’n’Chase.  For some reason we could never figure out, the video arcades in Paris proper were all off-limits to minors (“interdit au moins 18 ans”).  I can see the porno/peep show places having that prohibition, but an ARCADE??  So our parents had to accompany us to them.  The arcade at the Jardin, however, had no such restriction, so we were free to go there whenever we wanted.   

Montgomery County Fair.  Although not a theme park, per se, this merits an honorable mention.  Every August, the fair came to Gaithersburg.  When we were kids, our dad took us.  The fair had its usual “throw you around and make you puke” rides, the cotton candy and other concessions, midway, the booths for the local fire dept., various barns full of animals (cows, pigs, sheep, goats, etc.) smelling like animal poop.  They would often have some other “main attraction”.  A few years ago my dad and I went and saw a demolition derby – complete with Maryland State Trooper giving breathalyzer tests to the drivers (???) – which was lots of fun.  More recently the attraction was a monster truck rally which we HEARD but did not watch.