SFNE/Lake Compounce/Quassy/Playland
No, in my precious few remaining weeks of unemployment and irresponsibility, I was determined to pack in as much rail-riding fun as humanly possible. The choice of where to go next was a simple one. I'd blasted through Millennium Force and SFA's S:ROS, declaring these wonderful creations the world's best rides, but all I ever heard was, "Try SFNE's Superman." Okay, if that's the way you're gonna be, off I go! And on the way back we'd hit some of the smaller stuff too, just to wind down from the thousand or so times we were going to hop on the Intamin beauty.
Good thing for rush hour traffic, because it gave me an excellent excuse to not wake up early on Thursday to begin the drive from central Jersey to Agawam, MA. Well rested and ready for fun, we set out at around 9:30 AM. The weather was overcast, but pleasant. The wind was at our backs. The check was in the mail. All was right with the world. The three hour drive went by like a pack of Twinkies. And before we knew it, the infamous Riverside Cyclone stood intimidatingly (new word!) to our left. Through its white wooden lattice-work, though, stood Superman, calmly, quietly, no doubt comfortable with its own power to terrify and enthrall.
We parked. Way over there on the other side of the road. They let us in free of charge with the SFGAdv parking pass ("Is that a parking pass?" "Yes." "Okay, go ahead.") We took the tram to the bridge. We walked over the bridge to the entrance. Anticipation building. The whole day ahead of us. Life is good.
Do you ever see something so at odds with everything you know the universe to be about, something so brutally offensive and mind-numbing that you just smile as soon as you see it, smile like a prisoner in some comic hell created just for you? I started smiling, just like that, when I saw this sign:
Son of a bitch.
Needless to say, we did not set out from there with the best of attitudes. All of a sudden the pleasant day seemed a drab, miserable gray. None of this was helped out by the fact that from wherever you stand in this park, there's Superman, over there in the background, tall and mighty, beautiful and mysterious. And closed. All of the good luck we'd had on all of the previous trips came back to bite us in the ass in a big way, right here. Oh well. There's still some stuff to do here, let's make the best of it.
So we tried. Here are the results:
Thunderbolt (+3) - What a creative name for a roller coaster, he snarled. But anyway, with only one ride on this, and from the middle, no less, it's hard to get a real fix on what this one's about. From everything I saw and felt though, it seemed to be a woodie of classic style, smoother than you'd think, and with several possibilities for good, old-fashioned pop-you-outta-your-seat air. Next time I go back, I'll be more thorough. Next time. When that damn red and blue ride is operating. Extra credit for playing non-stop Led Zeppelin in the queue line. Not just Stairway either, some great, obscure stuff.
Flashback (+1.5) - The boomerangs all get +1 from me, you know that. Except this one I like better for some reason. It was smooth and comfy, and by the time it was over, it didn't feel like the chore that these rides have started to become.
Mind Eraser (+3) - The SLC layout and experience might be starting to lose a little something for me after the six billionth time this year. Nothing particularly wrong with this one, perhaps a little rougher than normal, but nearly identical in every way to the one at SFA, except not as good scenery. The double corkscrew thing is still a blast, with killer foot-choppers. And with apologies to Dave Barry, "Killer Foot-Choppers" is a good name for a band.
Cyclone (?) - See, we got there, but the line was fairly long, and they were only running one train, and that train wasn't making it around the track more than once every five minutes or so. What's the deal, man? Are they running an amusement park or an internment camp up there? How about putting another train on? How about moving faster than the speed of gum? At this point it was getting late enough where we were concerned about having enough time at Lake Compounce, our second and last stop for the day, so we got the hell outta there and vowed to give it another shot the next day, if Superman was open.
Which it wasn't.
Earlier, we'd tried a couple of the flat rides there, to kill some of the pain. The Time Warp was uneventful, causing neither discomfort nor thrills. The Nightwing ride, however, was something else. I am relatively new and inexperienced in the realm of the flat ride (or for the general public, spin-n-puke rides). I only rode the Enterprise for the first time in my life a couple of weeks ago in Myrtle Beach. That was a very unusual experience for me, because rather than fighting nausea and trying to keep a strained grimace off of my face as I thought I might have to, I found the Enterprise to be a calm, enjoyable, even relaxing ride. I even did it twice in a row, that's how much I liked it. So then there's the Nightwing, which is essentially an Enterprise that has you lying forward, on your stomach, rather than sitting back on your ass, you lazy bum. I thought this would be more thrilling and scary than the old Enterprise, but it really wasn't. It was just a lot of fun. Same relaxing sort of looping motion, just better views and a feeling closer to flying than any other ride of this sort is likely to give you. I liked it. It's got a good beat, and you can dance to it.
Off to Lake Compounce, in an effort to forget about the disappointments of earlier. We arrived ten minutes before five o'clock, and waited outside the gates for the clock to strike the top of the hour so we could get the discounted evening rate. I'm not going to say that nobody was there, but the crowds were very light, and every ride was a walk-on, except for Boulder Dash, where you might have had to wait one turn. This is the way everything should be.
What a beautiful place this is! And it has the best looking entrance to any park ever. As soon as you walk in, your whole field of view is taken up by Wildcat's lift hill superimposed on the forested mountain (or mountainy forest) beyond. Good deal! Obviously, the key to this place for us was going to be Boulder Dash, so we planned the three hours we had remaining around it. The schedule was like this: Boulder Dash once (because the suspense was killing us), then the other coasters, then Ghost Hunt, then back to Boulder Dash for the rest of the day. This worked perfectly. The other rides took up the first hour, and then nothing but constant re-riding on BD for two straight hours. Here's the deal:
Wildcat (+2) - When we arrived at the station, there was nobody there except for a couple of ride-ops obviously going stir-crazy from being stuck on a forgotten ride with nobody in the park. One of them was wielding the measuring stick and insisting that he was Darth Maul. I chose not to confront him about this assertion, lest he indeed was Darth Maul. Rode this once in the front, then once in the back. Switching to the back brought to light an interesting method of getting around this park's obvious policy of making their ride ops sticklers for the rules: Don't listen to them. We got out of the front, and asked "Can we just get back on in the back?" and he said, "No, you have to walk around." So I said, "Nah," and we got in the back, and they happily sent us on our way. I began to suspect that he was not, in fact, Darth Maul. Otherwise he probably would have been more forceful. From the front, this was a pleasant little ride. Some fun hops out and back, no great shakes (hmm, poor choice of words), but a good ol' ride. The back was significantly worse, as the train seemed to shake down the track like the track itself had speed bumps every two feet. This may have been due to the fact that nobody else was in the train, but the fact remains that it was seriously uncomfortable, almost the whole way around. After that, I decided not to ride it again, and simply cherish the memory of the more enjoyable front-seat ride.
Zoomerang (+1.5) - Boy, what a good mood I must have been in! Two boomerangs in one day, and they both break through the +1 barrier! This again felt smoother and more fun than I remember these rides being. I swear, going backwards through the loop on these babies is the most intense inversion in the coaster business. I black out. My fingers get tingly. And I feel a little nauseous. Yeah, baby!
Ghost Hunt was fun. I normally don't care for haunted house rides, but as we approached the station, I noted with much glee, "Oooh, you get guns!" I do like shooting things. So I had fun on this. But let's get serious here...
Boulder Dash (+5) - Um, okay.
This ride isn't perfect. First of all, the springs on the lap bars are so loose that they kept ratcheting themselves down halfway through the ride, occasionally to the point of groin-stapling, no matter how I tried to wedge my leg underneath them. That sucked. Also, as someone pointed out, the trick-track section is less than stellar. It's the same "half-trick" that Villain sports, but is placed towards the end, the slowest part of the ride, so it just sort of leans you gently to one side and back. Uhh. And some other stuff too, I'm sure.
Know what? Who the fork cares.
Going up the mountain on the lift hill, with trees and rocks and nature on every side, and the pungent smell of greased roller coaster all around, is one of the most sublime moments in the coaster universe. Then you sweep around for the first, curving drop back down the mountain. This drop is good, but not great. And that's the last part of the stunning 2:05 ride that is anything less than phenomenal, all the way around until you hit the brakes.
I remember standing in the station the first time, watching the train go up the hill, waiting for it to come around. I had seen the track from the entrance, and from that vantage point, it looks almost exactly like a nicely landscaped mine train ride. So in my mind I guess I sort of expected to see the train come around after the drop and sort of roll along its way through the trees above our heads.
You don't see the train for more than two seconds. And so I added to my list of sights that actually made me a little scared to go on a ride. ("1. MF's first hill. 2. BD's first turn.") This sucker is fast. I remember thinking, as I took my first (and second, and third, and...) ride, coming around that turn and leading into the next, "This sucker is fast." And it zooms up, and down, and left, and right, with the mountain flora, so meticulously conserved, seemingly inches from your person. It has air everywhere you look, and not satisfied with getting you up out of your seat, it also gets you left out of your seat, and right out of your seat, leaving you frantically flailing around trying to find something to hold on to, or else you're definitely gonna fly right out. And then there's this one little bunny hop, the only one on the ride which doesn't give you any air, no matter how much you try. It's almost a shock going over that one, when you find you're still safely in the train. Then it hits the next hill. A grand, swooping hill that blasts you into the sky, out of the trees and into the open, with nothing but green and granite on your right and the park and the lake to your left, and you're flying outta there, the PTC below you a vague memory. This is so great, I can't see straight.
So, that's about the first 1/3 of the ride. And it doesn't let up from there. Every time you think you've hit the turnaround, you haven't. There's another hill, and another air-injected turn, and by the way, if you have the wherewithal for such things, try to notice the scenery that you're laying waste to at 60 miles per hour. It's gorgeous.
Ah, the turnaround, finally. But it's dropping at the same time. The most wicked, thrilling turnaround I've yet experienced. And now you're going really fast for the trip back, which also never, ever ends. I cannot even begin to remember the layout of this track. After 11 times, I was getting better at guessing what the next section of track was like, but now, two days removed, it's all a blur. Finally, back in the station, nothing but cheers and applause and the sweet exhiliration that draws us all to this hobby.
Absolutely wonderful.
We finished up with a front-seat ride, on the very last train of the day. And I wondered if Superman being closed was really all that bad luck after all.
By the way, I should mention that, before that last train departed, I heard the oddest, dumbest, most obnoxious thing that I've ever heard a ride op say. There were a couple more enthusiast-types who had also been riding constantly, and had just gotten out of the second-to-last train. So, I saw them leaving and yelled across the platform, "C'mon, get in! Last train!" They looked at the man on the microphone and asked, "Can we get back in?" This is what he said: "You're not really supposed to, but you can ask her [pointing to a manager-type]." Fine. But then he added, "If it was up to me, no." What does that mean? If there were no rules, and he got to choose whether people could get back onto a half-empty train, he would say "no"? Perhaps just a brain-fart in the midst of such commotion, or he was in a bad mood, but I've never heard anyone in that context say "If it was up to me, no." It wasn't said in a mean way, which makes it all the more odd. Just very matter-of-fact. A temporary attack of a-hole-itis, I suppose.
They were let on the train, of course. Like I said, just don't listen to 'em.
Stopped for rest at a Super 8, then went on our merry way, trying to get home on the Friday before July 4th. This was not a good idea. But that's a story for another time. On the way back, we stopped at Quassy Amusement Park in Middlebury, CT, a small park of little consequence. The pedal-boats were fun, though they would have been more fun if you didn't have to pedal them. The petting zoo had four or five pathetic little animals that you just wanted to put out of their misery. There was one coaster of note:
Monster Roller Coaster (0) - A larger version of the Mad Mouse found at Lakemont (and others), featuring the same rusty, rickety steel construction, the same rough, uncomfortable ride, but this one had the fear factor and additional height to almost border on being fun for a moment.
The place gets serious bonus points, though, for having a fully functioning, 25-cent Hard Drivin' game in the arcade. I love that game.
One last stop before hitting the two-plus-hour backup (!) at the GW bridge, at Playland in Rye. A lovely little park with clean, delightful midways and some decent flat rides including a steeplechase, and a little bitty space shot ride, which I always like. There were two coasters to speak of:
Hurricane (0) - A wicked little steel contraption with some of the most evil, steepest, scariest turns I've experienced. Would have gotten a higher rating if it were not for the horrendous beating that the rigid, narrow lapbars inflict during all of those wild turns. The ride is hazardous to your health.
Dragon Coaster (+1) - A completely cool layout for a wooden coaster, which I would describe as a triple out-and-back, but with one of the trips being in a totally different direction from the other two. Without question, this was the mildest roller coaster I've ever been on. Brakes at the crest of every hill ensure that the ride will be palatable to even the most timid riders. I stopped putting my hands up about halfway through when I realized that there just wasn't any point to it. By itself, this quality isn't necessarily a negative, but when you notice the variety of neat little dips and turns and other elements which would probably provide plenty of thrills and air and all the other stuff us hard-core folk enjoy, it's impossible to not wonder "what if..." A beautiful construction though, no doubt. Go on the ferris wheel just so you can enjoy the sight of this thing.
After this, it was an incredibly painful moving-parking-lot of a drive back home, at which point we decided to swing down to SFGAdv, the home park, just to reacquaint ourselves. Others have mentioned Rolling Thunder's new racing mode, which was nice to see, even though the track is as neglected and disappointing as always. Viper's drop is still great. The rest of it still sucks. GASM was more fun than I remember it being. And one last ride on Medusa from the front, in the dark of night.
I spoke about how Batman: Knight Flight was superior to Medusa because of the scenery. But Medusa does one thing which Batman can't. On Batman, at night, at the top of the hill, you still see the lake, you still see the ferris wheel, you still see the midway. It's all very pretty. Now, on Medusa at night, as you come over the top, you see something far more amazing: nothing. I actually had to catch my breath when I stared into that tremendous black pool of thorough, utter oblivion. Of course, then the ride took off, which was fun, too.
So, that's it. Next?
I wasn't done yet.
"The Superman ride is closed today. We apologize for blah blah blah."
The friend I was with walked right past it, and wondered why I was standing twenty feet behind him with a glassy, dead stare on my face. The Superman ride is closed. "The Superman ride". As if they'd call the Mona Lisa "the girl painting". The Superman ride is closed.