Up, Down, and Around, and Around, and Around

Saturday was Cedar Point day. I’m sure it goes without saying that visiting Cedar Point is to be taken very, very seriously.

There was a great deal of thought and planning that went into getting ready for the day. Park opens at 10am, so we were in the parking lot by 9:30am and in an eager crowd at the gate moments after that.

Oh the coasters we rode! Let me see what I can remember:

Millenium Force: Very new and very smooth! It does the typical thing where it starts on a big up and then a big down, which leads right into another big swoop up. I wouldn’t say I blacked out so much as everything went kind of black, like when you stand up too quickly after crouching down and you get dizzy and lose your vision for a moment. I’ll stop there because I can tell I’m worrying you. It was a pretty fun coaster.

Maverick: Not regarded as one of the big-time coasters, my strongest recollection about this one is that it is pretty aggressive and the signs to remove earrings are not overly cautious; my head felt like it was getting knocked back and forth side to side a lot. I thought it was surprisingly good given that there was almost no line for it.

Top Thrill Dragster: This one is just plain ridiculous. It is only ~20 seconds long and it goes like this: from a dead stop, you accelerate to 120 mph in 4 seconds, then you go up a sheer vertical to a height of about 400 feet, where you go up and over the top to come down a sheer twisting vertical, and then you stop. Like I said, it’s quick. The acceleration is the highlight: I’m not sure how to describe what it feels like to accelerate so fast except that I almost felt like I was actually moving backwards.

Mean Streak: One of the oldest coasters at the park, it’s big, wooden and aptly named. The experience of riding it is like being in a really long car crash, like if you were in every car in the Blues Brothers mall scene. Brutal. Each of the eight people in our group walked on feeling fine and got off the ride with a headache, a nasty scowl and lumbar trauma.

Magnum XL200: This one was good, I think. This was where they all started to blur together. It’s possible I had a concussion by this point.