Worlds (and Worlds) of Fun!

And then some.

I'm so not a Disney Dad, but this is something I've wanted to do forever. Back before Mo started having seizures, I used to take the girls to Jeepers when I could. Tame rides, inside a shopping mall rides, but the kids dug it, and I would fold myself into the rides as well.

The first neurologist who saw Mo after that, and this was five years ago or so, said no more amusement park rides.

For other in competences we fired him, but for that, I'd be tempted to hunt him down and break his kneecaps. Because when I mentioned it to her most recent neurologist, the doc looked at me like I'd expressed faith in magnetism, and said that there is nothing conclusive in the literature linking thrill rides with seizures.

Stress lowers your threshold if you have epilepsy, and positive stress is still stress. People seize around events like weddings more than they do about grocery shopping, for instance.

Those of you (both of you) who were reading this stuff I write back in February know that Mo’s seizure threshold was seriously jeopardized when I promised her a return to >Jeeper’s for her birthday and a bunch of assholes closed it down and soaped the windows without clearing it with me first.

So Saturday, we lived the dream. The weather was perfect, so perfect I’d have believed we were in Anaheim if I had seen any anthropomorphic mice. We started tame, the Fjord Fairlane, basically a set of chairs on ropes that go around. Then I took Mo to the Mamba.

Her first real coaster, a proper roller coater you could never put in a mall. Not even Mall of America. I hadn’t been to Worlds of Fun since the days I worried Reagan would draft me and send me to Nicaragua, so I’d never been on this one. The bad ride in my day was the Orient Express, which was unfortunately dismantled last year. I don’t mind them adding new rides (the flagship one now is an inverted deal call the Patriot, where your feet dangle as you do loops on the wrong side of the track). Awesome to have new kicks, but to me, you add rides, you don’t replace them. I want the Zambezi Zinger, the Shish-Boomer, the Scream Roller and most of all the Disoriented Express back, damnit!

The other thing I noticed
The line was pretty bad for the Mamba. Not as bad as at the Patriot or the Spinning Dragon, new rides are always two kites and a bottle rocket to wait for. (Yes, Fancy Dirt, I’m winking at you.)

But still, plenty of teenagers making out in the line ahead of us, and I wasn’t sure if Mo could hold it together for twenty minutes like that.

She did, but it was more like forty minutes. The line moved pretty good until someone blew chunks. They had to shut it down to clean off about four seats splattered with something off-white. I wondered if I should have taken a slot towards the front of the trains instead of the tail. I picked the rear because it seems to whip you a bit harder. Might be a myth, but it’s not as far out as magnetism, right?

Front seats can be cool too, because when you’re getting dropped down that first hill, you’re already about vertical before the chain lets go, which is a scare of its own. Plus, if someone vomits, you don’t get a 70 mph puke pie to the face.

So then they took the Mamba down to put a third train on. I’d never seen this done before, always wondered. I mean, now that I’ve seen it, it’s pretty obvious.

But that was still more time the line wasn’t moving. Mo was about to pop a gasket, but she did amazingly well. I think she knew she was about to get the 9-year-old equivalent of that first rail of blow at a frat house during rush week.

Boy howdy. You’d think being 275 pounds or so would keep your ass in contact with a seat. Turns out, it also takes bars, belts, restraints. The Mamba starts with a 205 foot drop, and it’s easily the fastest coaster I’ve ever been on. At one point, when I was going through one of those turns that look like the support beams are going to decapitate me, I looked over to Mo. She looked like this was the best test drive ever, and Dad should totally buy this car.

I even bought a chump picture. $8 for a fucking 5x7, and it’s not even a good print?

Still, her maiden voyage. We did the Timber Wolf later, Em’s first big coaster. So I got a shot of her. She lacks Mo’s Zen when it comes to near death experiences. In fairness, being an actual wooden coaster, the Timber Wolf is a very rough ride, one that may seriously send me back to the chiropractor. Plus, it’s loud, it sounds like it’s flinging itself to splinters while you ride it. When it was over, I asked Mo, roller coaster or no-thank-you?

“Roller coaster. ROLLER COASTER!!!”

So we did the Boomerang. This ride is pretty cool, and in its way economical. The thing that was awesome about he Orient Express was the loops. The Boomerang has about the same loops but without the straight-aways. Plus, as the name implies, you go forward then backward, and if a reverse loop doesn’t scare you, then you must be my youngest daughter.

We did tamer things too. The Hexapus (they say it’s an Octopus, but I counted, and it has SIX arms), the Flying Dutchman (I was glad to see that angry Dutch people haven’t forced a name change in these political times), the train just like the zoo has, a merry-go-round, etc.

I really wanted to do the Rip Chord. It’s the best hybrid between bungee jumping and skydiving I’ve ever seen, but it’s $25 extra, plus a long line, plus I’m not sure they let nine year old kids on with their freaky looking Dads who want to explain that its therapeutic in a way...

It was almost a perfect day. We got off the Viking Voyager (which I always think of as the Nestee Plunge), and my 18 month old nephew wandered off. My first reaction was, of course not, he’s right THERE. But he wasn’t. Or there, or there. Half an hour, halfway across the park, we finally hooked up with the kid and the Security people who found us equally hard to locate.
was all the high school boys who had popped $80 for giant stuffed animals their dates were then obligated to cart around. Yes, it’s a great big frog with googly eyes, but she doesn’t think it’s significant, I wanted to tell these boys. That, and buy a tube of Clearasil!

But then, it wasn’t’ their $80, it was Dad’s, so they wouldn’t have understood what I was talking about...