As revealed in my article for Bucket List Publication’s online magazine this week (Top Thrills at Cedar Point), I recently got to spend the day with some great friends at the ‘Roller Coaster Capital of the World’… Cedar Point amusement park, in Sandusky, Ohio.
It was fantastic! Especially since we got to enter the park a full three hours before they let anyone else in, and four hours before the gates were opened to the general public, thanks to our friend Ali (she of pine mouth fame).
The original plan was as follows:
1) Run around like crazy things in the morning, going on as many roller coasters as possible before the park opens to the riffraff (just kidding);
2) With a few rides already in our pocket, slow the pace down in the afternoon, lining up for our thrills as you would normally expect in a place as popular as Cedar Point;
3) Round off the day with a visit to Famous Dave’s BBQ restaurant in the evening.
Well, Part 1 worked out beautifully. We rode 10 times on eight coasters between 9 am and 1pm.. Sweet! But thereafter, things started to diverge from the plan.
I’m sure some people can ride roller coaster after roller coaster, one after another, all day and all night, without complaint. My brother, Bisckits, claims to be one of them. And before last Saturday, I’d have said the same about myself. But to be honest, after 10 rides in just four hours, most of our party was beginning to feel some adverse effects, to a greater or lesser extent, from being thrown around like a rag doll all morning.
Who knew that all that lining up at amusement parks actually has a purpose? Turns out, it gives your stomach time to recover from all that side-to-side, round-and-round, upside-down abuse it’s forced to endure on roller coasters!
In any case, we decided to give ourselves a bit of a break, and move our rendezvous with Famous Dave’s up to lunchtime. After a meal fit for a king, that saw Bisckits covered in spicy BBQ sauce (as usual), we returned to the day’s mission.
Only to discover, our hearts still weren’t really in it. We gently wandered around the park, still laughing at the morning’s exploits. We stopped and got one of those ‘Ye Olde Cowboys’ photos taken. We considered joining the queue for this coaster or that coaster. But in the end, we all came to the same conclusion….
We really didn’t need to. We’d already had a fantastic day. And no one had the urge to join the masses in line. We’d already got our roller coaster fix for the day, so why spoil it?
So it seems you can get enough of a good thing, after all.
The pine mouth seems to be clearing up, thank you for your concern 🙂
Phew! We were all getting a bit worried!
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Sometimes I actually kind of like the line-ups too: kids (of all ages) are super excited, you can eavesdrop on funny conversations, and I guess it *does* give you time to recover in between being shaken around on the last ride!
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