More about Six Flags (more flags, more fun!)

We've discovered all kinds of crazy things about the roller coasters we were on since we went on Saturday.

As Josh said earlier, I hadn't been on a roller coaster since that Silverwood trip the summer after my freshman year of college, and Josh hadn't been on one since he went to Six Flags over Georgia when he was 16. Scott, Nick, Josh and I were the main riders; Michele couldn't ride much, being 5 months along, and Stacy wasn't feeling up to anything too crazy, so they took Kairi to ride the kid rides for a while.

Anyway, we tried to find a nice little roller coaster to warm up on... we chose the Colossus, which is an old-school, wooden-frame one—a good, easy warm-up, right? SHEESH, the thing has some crazy drops in it. Nothing upside down, but I must confess that I closed my eyes lots more than I meant to originally. We have since learned that when this coaster premiered, when our parents were just younger than we are now, it was the equivalent of what the Goliath is now (see below)—are you brave enough?? Huh, huh?? But when we were there on Saturday, Scott shrugged and said, "Let's do this one first... start off with a nice easy one." :-D

Here are the other coasters we rode:

Batman. This one was our favorite, hands down—you're hanging from the track on this one, feet dangling, but you're sitting on a seat and you're strapped in really well. (And when you pull down on your harness, you feel yourself being pulled securely back against your seat. I told Scott that, as wimpy as it is, one of my favorite things about a roller coaster is when you close your eyes and feel how secure your harness is. He rolled his eyes at me. :-) ) This ride is all loopy, but it was so smooth and so fast. We wanted to go on it again, but didn't have time.

The Gold Rusher. This was actually the very first roller coaster to open at this park, so it was pretty tame, but that's part of the reason we liked it. :-) It has the shortest height allowance, so there were lots of kids on it, yelling lots. Josh and I rode it twice, and the second time I recorded some video on our camera—I wish I could've done this in the daytime, because you could see things better, but this was a fun ride in the dark. You go through lots of brush, so we had no idea where we were going next.

The Viper. This was one that I felt like I should've had more fun on... maybe it would've been more fun a second time. (We can ask Josh, he rode it twice.) There were 7 loops, including two ridiculously huge ones, and you were sitting down inside a car. It was lots jerkier than Batman, though, and by the time I got on this one it was dark, so I had less of an idea of how high we were starting—which was both good and bad, I guess. :-D (Wikipedia tells me now that Viper holds the world record for highest vertical loop—14 stories from top to bottom. I thought that one seemed to take longer than the others. I'm glad I didn't know it was 14 stories before I got on... I probably still would've ridden it, but I would've been even more nervous.) However, as we walked past it again on our way out of the park, we were very impressed with ourselves—that is NOT a short roller coaster.

The Revolution. This was the first roller coaster with steel 360-degree loops in the world; Wikipedia says that when the ride was built, there wasn't any brush around. However, now there are huge trees everywhere, and you pass two other rides, and at one point you swing out of the trees and it seems like you're going to hit the big carousel in the middle of the park (but of course you don't). This one was kind of jerky, too, but I liked it quite a bit—I kept my eyes open the whole time (after that first awful drop).

After that one, I was pretty much done, but Josh bravely went with Scott on two others:

Scream. All four of us wanted to go on this one earlier in the day, but the line was huge. So it ended up being just Scott and Josh at the end of the night, because Nick wasn't feeling well and I wasn't feeling well when I thought of climbing on another roller coaster. :-D This one, Josh says, was like Batman, but longer and more intense. And had fewer handholds to cling to. From the ground, it looks like one big never-ending corkscrew—here's Wikipedia's entry for it: "Floorless coaches riding above the rails traverse seven inversions on 3,985-feet of track." Yeah, crazy.

Goliath. I almost had a harder time waiting for Josh to get off of this one than I had while ratcheting up some of the ones I rode... it makes my stomach hurt to think about it. :-D This one is the biggest drop in the park—255 feet, into a tunnel. Josh says that he had his eyes closed for the beginning of the drop, and kept waiting to pull up, and finally opened his eyes—"Nope, we're still falling!" I forget how many stories that is, but as Josh said, it's about the same as 2 Kimball Towers (for those of you who know how freaking tall that building is...). Anyway, finally you pull up in a tunnel, and then they send you around a loop and back up for another almost-free-fall, only 150 feet that time. Josh was very brave to go with Scott, I thought. And I'm really glad he came down intact. :-D

All in all, it was a really good day. Very intense (I think my blood pressure has gone up just writing about it), but so fun to be with our good friends, and fun to prove to ourselves that we are still brave enough to ride roller coasters. :-)




Here are the boys, while we waited in line for Batman. (45 minutes, and it was worth it.)




Here are the girls and Nick, while we waited for Josh and Scott to ride Goliath. (You should've see Josh and Scott's hair when they got off, by the way—it looked like they'd been running their hands through it, and leaving it straight up. I guess 85 mph winds will do that, huh.)





And here are Josh and Geneil, with their happy-vacation-day faces. :-)