Matt McIrvin's Freaky Alternate Reality

Almost three years ago, I imagined some coaster trips I could take if I ever decided to do a solo vacation like the nutty coaster enthusiasts I see online.

Theirs are often far more ambitious than this--they must be both younger than me and in possession of a lot of free time and money.

But as you can see, the one I did earlier this summer is basically the one I described up top as "the eastern Pennsylvania trip": Hersheypark, Knoebels and Dorney, with Connecticut's Quassy as an en-route bonus visit. It worked out great! It might actually have been slightly more than is ideal for me at this stage in my life, but I had tremendous fun.

The "western Pennsylvania trip" would have to be shorter since Lakemont is basically gone as a coaster destination. But Kennywood and Waldameer still might be a great one-two punch.

I'm mulling over a version of the New York/New Jersey one for the future: some subset of Rye Playland (which I passed by on this year's trip), Nickelodeon Universe, Six Flags Great Adventure and the Jersey shore parks. I don't think I'd do all of those in one trip. I'd leave out Coney Island; it is best done instead as a side quest on a visit to New York City, since it's best accessed by public transit.

But the new development is that my daughter has gotten into wooden coasters and really really wants to go to Holiday World someday. Holiday World has no major airport near it--the closest are probably Louisville and Indianapolis. If I went there with her, I'd be tempted to fly into Louisville and also hit Kentucky Kingdom, and, heck, if we're renting a car, why not go the other direction too and visit Kings Island (where she could ride The Beast, the Racer and Mystic Timbers)? Maybe use Cincinnati as the airport base instead? But that's probably too much.

On Thursday, having had a nice breakfast at the hotel in Danville and driven in over those winding rural roads, I parked a bit closer in and then spent a little time figuring out where to go to convert my online purchase into a wristband (a "Ride Pass Building" roughly in the center of the park--this was the first I'd seen it, having bought my paper ticket book the previous day at one of many small ticket kiosks). Then I went to ride Impulse, the park's largest steel coaster. Here's CoasterForce's POV:



This looks a lot like a Gerstlauer Eurofighter, like Untamed at Canobie Lake Park. In fact it's by Zierer, who evidently joined Intamin, Mack, Zamperla and others in making a Eurofighter-like model. These compact loopers with, usually, small individual cars and vertical lifts make a lot of sense for small parks: their capacity can be low, but it's not a big problem at a place like Canobie or Knoebels. They usually have a beyond-vertical drop, but Impulse's is merely vertical. That didn't make a lot of difference to me. What I noticed was that the inversions felt tighter and more forceful than the ones I was used to on Untamed. Since the restraints are lapbar-only, there wasn't a headbanging issue with tight transitions. But it's a ride with some intensity. It actually has four inversions in its small layout, since the cobra roll it opens with incorporates two, then there's a tight loop and a roll before the final helix.

Since Impulse had multiple cars, they were handling loose objects with a plastic bin system like Flying Turns. The ride was an absolute walk-on when I rode it; there weren't a lot of people waiting. I thought it was pretty fun.

Unfortunately, the next coaster I wanted to ride, the dark ride/coaster hybrid Black Diamond, was down for the day. So was one of the rides I most wanted to get on this trip, the Knoebels skyride, which goes some distance up a mountainside like the one that Lake Compounce used to have. That was the biggest disappointment of the whole trip. I'd forgone riding the skyride on Wednesday thinking I'd get it on this day, but it was not to be.

I did, however, have a fun time doing lots of other things. Knoebels has two small, quirky free museums on site, a museum of the area's mining history, and of the history of carousels and carousel animals. I rode the park's Grand Carousel, one of the few that actually has a brass-ring dispenser (I was riding one of the moving horses on the interior and did not try going for the ring, like Coaster Crusader in the video below, but a lot of teenagers were doing that). The Grand Carousel uses a genuine antique band organ, but they actually have quite a collection of these apart from the Carousel, some of which are in operation.



Knoebels has one of the best flumes I've ever ridden, a Hopkins flume that actually has two large drops, making excellent use of the beautiful wooded setting. Canobie Coaster rides it here:



I sampled some of the park's food offerings: burgers and ice cream, but also pizza. I'd been craving pizza for half the week because for some reason the pizza stands at Quassy and Hersheypark were all out of operation--nobody would sell me the stuff. But Knoebels had it! It was a sort of thick pan pizza, pretty good.

I also re-rode all of the park's wooden coasters, making sure to get Phoenix and Twister in the back row this time. There, Phoenix finally gave me the wild buzzbar ejector air that it's known for. I've heard that according to a member of the Knoebels family, the best row is actually the third row from the front, but I haven't ridden that one. The re-rides didn't change my assessment, however, that Twister is actually my favorite in the park.

Knoebels is a charming and unique place that I thoroughly recommend. It didn't have the biggest coasters of the trip, but its collection includes some that are rightly considered unique thrills and are well worth a visit.

I knew I wasn't going to be able to sustain a pace like the one I'd maintained for my first full day at Hersheypark. That was why I scheduled two days. Hersheypark is really two parks for me: It's one of the wildest coaster parks in the United States, but it's also the park I probably loved most as a kid in the 1970s and 1980s. My family's most common summer vacation was a yearly road trip from northern Virginia up into the Poconos, to visit my mother's family who lived there. Hersheypark was along the way and on some, though not all, of these trips, we'd stop there. I think once we even did two days, like I was doing on this trip.

In those days, Hersheypark had a lot that wasn't super intense: many transportation and observation rides, some of which are gone now. They had two very different skyrides: a Von Roll bucket ride that went from what is now Founder's Way to what was then the back of the park, now Kissing Tower Hill; and a little chairlift-style ride over Spring Creek that the other one passed directly over. There was a spectacular Waagner-Biro double Ferris wheel called the Giant Wheel, in the former Carrousel Circle around where Balloon Flite and Starship America are now. This had two wheels on the ends of a seesaw-like beam, so that one could be going high in the air while the other was loading and unloading on the ground. Those three were easily my favorite childhood rides in the park, but they're all gone. I think they auctioned off the cars from the little skyride on eBay, in case you want one in your garden. My sister remembers losing a sandal on it.

Other big, mild rides are still there, and I wanted to revisit some of them. But my first order of business was to ride Skyrush, the last tick mark on my Hersheypark cred-crawl agenda. Refreshed by a night's sleep, I was game for it, and the park seemed to be filling up with school field-trip groups so I needed to hurry. Here's XtremeCoasters Network's POV, which is recent enough to show the current look of the ride, and shows the whole of the insanely fast cable lift:



Skyrush does not mess around. It's an Intamin hypercoaster with a layout similar to Intimidator 305/Pantherian at Kings Dominion, though not as large or as notorious for making riders black out. Still, it's probably too intense for a lot of the general public who are generally OK with big coasters. The whole point of the layout, with a gigantic first drop leading into a tangle of relatively low hills (and no inversions), is to absolutely hurl you with the most intense ejector airtime you will ever feel. There's also a famous "kink" in the first drop where the radius of curvature seems to tighten a bit, just to start with the negative-G hurling before you're even all the way through that drop.

So that people do not die from this process, the ride's lap restraints have to be pretty secure and a bit tight. This has made Skyrush a polarizing ride. For the first decade and change of its existence, it had restraints that were reported to be quite painful and got it the nickname "Thighcrush". Now it has new ones that are not so painful... but some people complain that the ride was somehow made less intense by them. You can't win. Anyway, I only know the new ones.

Hilariously, before they gave Skyrush the new restraints, they modified it to give you a little break from the lap bar tightness: when you're on the brake run waiting to return to the station (the two trains often stack), all the lap restraints suddenly loosen a click, with an audible bang. They kept that with the new trains and I think it's because it's frickin' terrifying, one last little jump scare.

It also has an unusual seating arrangement: the seats are four across, wider than Pantherian, and the outside seats are floorless, mounted in a wing arrangement lower down than the middle ones. I've heard complaints about excessive vibration in these wing seats. I rode in a right-side wing seat, and to me this shake was barely detectable and silly to complain about. This ride absolutely wowed me and at most other parks, even big packed ones, it would be far and away the 800-pound gorilla of the park. But Skyrush is at Hersheypark, and this level of intensity only makes it the third craziest ride in the park, behind Wildcat's Revenge and Storm Runner. Still, I think it's great and has an oddball quality to it that makes it worth seeking out.

Low-energy day

Having done that, for the rest of my day, I didn't really have a detailed agenda. I wanted some free time to just bum around and explore, and get to the parts of the park I remembered from childhood that I hadn't gotten to on my 2011 visit. One of these was Kissing Tower Hill (formerly Tower Plaza), the former back of the park and maybe the most unchanged corner of it since the 1970s. QuietPlaces has a Kissing Tower POV that shows the vibe:



This is an observation tower, with a cylindrical deck that slowly rises and descends while rotating, with Hershey's Kiss-shaped windows. Regrettably the only person I'd do any kissing with was not with me on this trip, but the views were good. I rode this when it was pretty new, and it's the same a half-century later, though there are more rides down there to gawk at. This area is also where the Twin Turnpikes cars depart from, another classic ride that I didn't do on this day but did see running.

Not far away is Coal Cracker, Hersheypark's flume, which has the distinction of being the first ride with any kind of thrill aspect at all that I ever rode. Hersheypark's official POV for once doesn't cover the audio with music:



This is an Arrow flume, with most of the course high up in the air. The main drop of about 50 feet doesn't actually get you all that wet, and instead concentrates on thrills: there's a little airtime hump at the bottom of the drop, so you sort of ride high in the water when you hit the bottom.

For some reason, I loved Coal Cracker when I was a kid even though I was terrified to go on anything else with comparable intensity. Riding it now, I think that part of it is the psychological lulling effect of its peculiar loading station. It's a giant, very slow-moving turntable, similar to the one used by the dark ride over at Chocolate World; you descend into the middle of it via staircase and get in the boats as they creep around the edges. The design of it hides any thrilling element of the ride and makes Coal Cracker seem like the slowest boat ride in the world.

Annoyingly, it also makes it impossible for there to be any kind of bag drop in the station, so for me, riding this involved a long trek to stash my stuff in the locker I'd rented way back by the waterpark--though, honestly, with the chin strap on my hat I'd have been fine at least wearing it with my sunglasses.

Loose items

Which reminds me that Hersheypark merits an aside on loose-article policies. Coal Cracker is unusual for a major ride: for the most part, they're really good about this. All the roller coasters I rode have bag drops on the platform, and, for several of them, there are *free* single-use lockers near the entrance that you can use for the duration of your ride. These work by having you enter a PIN and remember your locker number. They'll give you 2 hours of use for free, which end immediately when you open the locker, so the point is for you to use this for the duration of a ride.

There's a bank of these ride lockers near the entrances for Skyrush and sooperdooperLooper, so those coasters are listed as having ride lockers--but, really, you could use this same bank easily for Comet and even for Coal Cracker if you can climb the hill fast enough. I only realized this belatedly, but it could have saved me some time. It seemed like a lot of people were just leaving their bags in a big pile near the entrance for Coal Cracker, but I wasn't willing to do that.

There's another bank at the entrance to Candymonium, which I did use, and a third apparently near Reese's Cupfusion, the shooting dark ride, which I think you could feasibly use for Fahrenheit (I didn't ride Reese's or Fahrenheit on this trip; I did get Fahrenheit back in 2011).

Wildcat's Revenge takes it to the next level: it has free double-sided ride lockers in the queue itself, just before you get to the station. These are a great innovation. You define a PIN and put your loose items in before getting on the ride, and then after getting off, you open the other side of the locker from the exit lanes. It helps a lot with crowd flow.

If you're only interested in the big coasters, and aren't doing the waterpark, you could probably get away with not renting an all-day locker. I did, just for convenience, but the for-pay rentals are not moveable and the one I rented was back by the waterpark, where most of them are. So it was some distance from a lot of the rides I rode.

There's a small bank of all-day rental lockers right by the park entrance, but I don't recommend bothering with that one. The all-day rentals work by dispensing a wristband from a special kiosk, with a bar code that you scan to open the locker. At that front bank, there's only one wristband-dispensing kiosk and it gets mobbed at opening with people who are all trying to figure out the system. The lockers back by the waterpark are far more numerous and there are several kiosks you can use.

ZooAmerica

Hersheypark has a little zoo connected to it, called ZooAmerica, which I made a point of checking out on this second day. If you want, you can actually just buy admission to the zoo for a much lower fee, but Hersheypark admission also gets you in via a connecting bridge. They stamp your hand on the way in so you can get back into Hersheypark.

It's devoted to animals of North America, and, frankly, is not a very impressive zoo. There are some nice displays of antelopes and birds particularly, and the guides are enthusiastic. Not many people were in there. I remembered going in there and liking it as a kid, and I think a valuable purpose of it is that it provides a quiet, uncrowded place to bring little kids or people who are overstimulated, for a break from the crowds and cacophony of Hersheypark.

Last ride

I couldn't leave Hersheypark without giving Wildcat's Revenge another go. On my first ride I wasn't even at the point of being able to put my hands in the air. Here's XtremeCoasters Network's POV, which includes a bit of off-ride footage:



Yeah, this is the best ride at the park. This time I was able to commit to enjoying its wildness. It just tosses you around every which way, mixing up extreme airtime with snappy whippy inversions, for a more varied menu of thrills than Skyrush. One thing it does have that my beloved Wicked Cyclone doesn't is a pre-lift section of little hills before you even hit the chain lift. That's always fun, though it's not something RMC invented.

Wildcat's Revenge is definitely better if you loosen up a bit and let yourself get yanked by the airtime, and by this point, I was warmed up to the point that I could do it. I'd momentarily pay for that attitude days later, but that's foreshadowing.

By this point I'd realized that there was a BBQ joint in the park, the Spring Creek Smokehouse, down in the Pioneer Frontier area across from Trailblazer's helix. So I went there for dinner. It was pricey but really good. I saw a discussion on Reddit noting that this spot is only covered by the highest tier of Hersheypark's meal plan, and among season-pass holders it seems to be the main reason to buy that tier.

So that was Hersheypark. I thoroughly enjoyed my couple of days there. I hope they can resolve their labor issues without too much disruption and that they pay their staff what they deserve, because it's a great place to be.

I'm back from actually doing the vacation I'd idly dreamed of for some time as "the Eastern Pennsylvania trip": a week mostly devoted to Hersheypark, Knoebels and Dorney.

First I had to get there, and since the drive to eastern PA goes past some other parks, I had several options for a park visit to break up the monotony, the ones most directly on the way being Six Flags New England, Lake Compounce and Quassy. Of those, the one I hadn't been to already was Quassy in Middlebury, Connecticut, and the place is so tiny that it seemed right for a brief visit en route. I thought of this as a sort of appetizer.

Quassy is a pretty little park on a lake that has a number of small flat rides, a tiny SBF Visa spinning coaster, and one real thrill ride of note, a Gravity Group junior wooden coaster called Wooden Warrior. This was actually the first one of these that Gravity Group made. While I wouldn't have chosen the sort of cigar-store-Indian theming in the signage, the ride itself is great, an airtime-filled small coaster similar to Story Land's Roar-O-Saurus. People have told me that Roar-O-Saurus has gotten rough since I rode it, but Wooden Warrior tracks quite smoothly and is fantastically re-rideable and fun. I rode it four times. Here's Canobie Coaster's POV:



There's one spot in the layout that kind of boggles me: on the last turnaround before returning to the station, the track gets REALLY close to a path to a men's restroom, to the point that I wondered how it could exist. Maybe they calculated the clearance to the last millimeter? I wouldn't want to do any experiments to find out.

I also checked out the park's carousel and its cute miniature train, which goes around Wooden Warrior and offers great views of it. Then it was on down the road.

I was kind of on the clock, since I wanted to take advantage of an ingenious perk that Hersheypark offers its guests. If you buy a one- or two-day ticket, you can visit the park during the last two hours of operation the evening before you start using your ticket. Not only is admission free during the "Preview Plan" hours, parking is too, which is a huge thing, since Hersheypark's parking is not cheap. I suspect Hersheypark knows that the parking lot and the park itself are usually starting to clear out during this time, so the Preview Plan can turn that excess capacity into an enticement.

I got to Hershey with plenty of time and actually checked into my hotel first. I arrived a bit late because I had the details slightly wrong and thought Preview Plan was only active during the last hour and a half (I think this had been the case in the past). I was also a little slow dealing with the vast parking lot, which was confusing because all the orange cones and such were mostly distributed to lead people out of the park at that hour, not into it. But, on what I was thinking of as the zeroth day of my trip, that was enough time to get my first ride on the most magnificent coaster of the entire vacation, the RMC IBox conversion Wildcat's Revenge:



That official Hersheypark POV is fun since it seems to have been taken when landscaping of the area wasn't quite done yet. Anyway, like my Massachusetts fave Wicked Cyclone, this is Rocky Mountain Construction's reimagining of an old wooden coaster that had gotten rough, in this case the GCI coaster Wildcat. It is relentless, alternating powerful airtime and whippy inversions without giving you a breather. It was designed by Joe Draves, the successor to RMC's former chief madman Alan Schilke. While it feels more powerful than Wicked Cyclone, I think it doesn't have quite as extreme a sense of absurd derangement, so it doesn't take the #1 spot for me. But it's definitely top three and Draves is definitely a worthy heir.

I initially had it ranked lower, just on the basis of this first ride. I had a nice conversation with a fellow enthusiast I met in line who rode with me, but I think I wasn't quite ready for a ride this intense on Day Zero and I had my body tensed up a little too much to fully enjoy it. I'd change my mind later.

So earlier this year, I put together plans for something I've been dreaming of for a while, my first real roller-coaster road trip in early June, this one of parks in eastern Pennsylvania: Hersheypark, Knoebels and Dorney, with a possible visit to another park along the way.

But it turns out Hersheypark has been in fraught negotiations with some of its workers over a new union contract, with some threat of a strike that could affect my visit. Whether the park is open or not, I have no intention of crossing a picket line, so it's had me thinking about contingency plans.

If they'd gone on strike by now, I had a plan in my back pocket to maybe shorten my hotel reservation in Hershey, book a couple of nights in Pittsburgh and replace the Hersheypark part of the trip entirely with a much longer-distance excursion to Kennywood. That's a park I've been interested in visiting for a long time, but it's way more driving than I'd planned on doing for this trip, and I didn't really like that part of the plan at all.

It sounds, though, as if the credible threat of a strike has brought Hershey Entertainment back to the negotiating table, and it might not happen at all. For now, I'm sticking to my original plans and thinking about less-ambitious things I can do for a couple of days in the area if the Hersheypark part of my trip evaporates anyway at the last minute. Dutch Wonderland? The Pennsylvania Railroad Museum? There's plenty of stuff to see.

I'd definitely go up to Knoebels a little early and spend more time there than I was originally planning--I might do that regardless, on a day I'd been planning as non-park; the place looks utterly charming. As for Dorney, I've got a full day scheduled there but I kind of doubt it is a two-day park.

I managed to do more roller-coaster-riding over the past 12 months that I'd done in any prior year, riding, I think, something like 17 total and 13 that were new to me. That includes my first two rides of 2026, at Universal Singapore on January 2.

But I've never done a coaster trip, in the coaster-enthusiast sense. Since my family are not fanatics for this stuff, it'd have to be a solo vacation (or with some other group). I'd mulled over some possibilities here in the past.

Well, I'm going to do it early this summer: the option I'd been thinking of as "the eastern Pennsylvania road trip". 3 days on and around Hersheypark (2-day ticket, with an additional non-park day to poke around the area and take my time moving on), 1 at Knoebels, 1 at Dorney Park. I will probably briefly hit Quassy on the way there, and maybe some park or attraction to be named later (Rye Playland? An alpine coaster? Something entirely different?) on the way back, if I'm feeling ambitious. I'm timing it all to avoid World Cup interference, though I think I'm well away from the places that will be worst affected.

This is a modest plan as coaster-freak tours go, but I'm no spring chicken and my endurance is limited. It may make 2026 a bigger year than 2025 all on its own.

We spent the past week in Denmark, split between a couple of days in Aarhus (the biggest city in Jutland, the European mainland part) and a few in Copenhagen. Honestly, one of the main reasons I even suggested going to Denmark was to experience Copenhagen's world-famous urban amusement park, Tivoli Gardens, and its amazing bucket-list coaster Rutschebanen, a side-friction coaster built in 1914.

We'd had a stretch goal of also visiting Aarhus's amusement park Tivoli Friheden on the afternoon of our arrival there, but between bad weather and exhaustion that did not happen. We did spend the following sunny day at Aarhus's amazing historical reconstruction park Den Gamle By. That reminded me a bit of Colonial Williamsburg, but with a broader sweep, with restored buildings ranging from the 16th century to the 21st (there's a surprisingly big section of early-1970s streets, businesses and apartments, including a hippie commune and an electronics shop full of glorious analog hi-fi equipment, and a little section recreating for posterity a street from the 2010s with a dying Blockbuster Video). There are also several historical museums within the park. Highly, highly recommended.

The weather in a Danish autumn is at least as mercurial as in New England and you just have to work around it. We went to indoor attractions (mostly art museums) on the rainy days and hit Copenhagen's Tivoli on a relatively good one, which started out sunny with a little drizzle later. It was the beginning of Tivoli's Halloween event, so they were open late, but the weather got worse as the afternoon went on and we were getting tired, so we didn't stay super late. We're not big on Halloween haunts (I think they converted the funhouse to one; I'd like to hit it during the summer season) but the pumpkiny decor everywhere was beautiful.

I went directly to Rutschebanen and found it not yet operating, though there were workers milling about on the ride so that was a promising sign. Given that we didn't hit Tivoli Friheden, there was an opportunity for Rutschebanen to be my 40th cred, but, eh, that kind of numerological pickiness doesn't rule me. Instead, we decided to hit some rides that both of us could enjoy: the 70-year-old cast-iron Ferris wheel, the gorgeous, colorful bumper cars (which have a long, chaotic cycle), and my actual 40th cred, the powered Mack family coaster Mælkevejen (here is Amuseaholics' POV):



This is a fairly new ride that packs more force than you'd expect. It's a long ride, since they give you THREE laps around the course, and the layout is long enough that at an American park they probably would have probably gotten away with one lap. There is whimsical space-rocket theming about a transit service circling the Milky Way. It's a bunch of turns and helixes, all elevated enough that you get nice views of the park and the surrounding neighborhood, but we both got off a little dizzy.

Rutschebanen was still down so we went on the ride underneath it, an adorable dark boat ride called Minen (here's Attractions Magazine's ride-through):



This has a Ghost Hunt-style target-shooting element that I think was added after the fact, but it's not scored and isn't really the main focus of the ride. It's all about the cute funny-animal animatronics. We got multiple rides on this one.

I was steeling myself for Rutschebanen to never get running (this kind of disappointment is part of being a coaster fan), but, nah, they got this eleventy-one-year-old classic going before too long and I indeed got three rides on it that day. Here's CoasterForce's POV:



Rutschebanen (that just means Roller Coaster) is currently the second-oldest operating coaster in the world (since Lakemont's Leap-The-Dips has not been running lately and has an uncertain future). It is a side-friction coaster, that is, one that runs in a kind of trough with road wheels and side wheels that keep it centered on the track, but no upstop wheels keeping it from flying away. This is how log flumes still work during the drop, but full-fledged roller coasters with this mechanic are quite rare today. It has manually operated brakes worked by an operator who rides on the train, on a sort of jump seat at the head of the second car, with basically no restraint as far as I can tell. The operators participate in the lap bar inspection and then just jump on there and go.

The wildness of the ride you get depends on the brakeman's hand. I've heard stories of night rides where they let loose and allow tremendous ejector air. I did get some little airtime pops on my rides, but I wonder if these ejector tales are somewhat embellished, simply because it's hard for me to imagine how that would work. Since not ALL of the train is experiencing negative g-force at the same time, I can see how there could be such a thing without upstop wheels, but I don't get how the brakeman doesn't fly off--they don't have the loose lap bars that the riders have. Maybe they just hang on tight. It's a special job requiring a lot of training. They do wear hearing protection against the noise of the ride all day long.

The ride does provide powerful lateral forces on the turns, particularly in the dark section toward the end, which made me think of Space Mountain though this ride is 60 years older than Space Mountain.

This is a coaster that was partly blown up by Nazi saboteurs during World War II to break the morale of the Danish people--and was, according to the ACE plaque at least, prioritized for reconstruction in the midst of wartime to preserve said morale. That's how important this thing is. And, yes, I can see it.

The park's highest-thrill coaster, Dæmonen, didn't get running until the late afternoon, when I took a ride on it. It's a remarkably miniaturized B&M floorless looper with three inversions, shot here by Attraction Source:



You get fantastic views of downtown Copenhagen from this coaster, which is probably why it opens not with a big drop but with a turn and helix off the lift hill (kind of like Hersheypark's Great Bear). There's a modest drop into the vertical loop, then an Immelmann and a roll, and that's basically it. It's got some good positive g-force and whip to it; I'd rate it below SFNE's Batman: The Dark Knight for thrills, but that's not really the point here; the remarkable thing is just that they managed to fit it into Tivoli Gardens. It's a decent ride in a wonderful setting.

This was the one ride where I had to wait in a substantial line, probably in part because it opened so late, but it also has some capacity and operations issues that I think are caused by the site constraints. Riders exiting Dæmonen have to leave the station on the same side they came in (possibly after retrieving their stashed goods from the bins on the far side), which creates some crowd-flow issues. The ops have to tell entering riders to stay put for a few seconds after the air gates open, to give the previous riders a better opportunity to clear the area. I don't quite understand why the air gates can't just open later, but that's what I saw happening. I guess it's designed so that the exit gate can't open earlier.

That domed building you can see from the top of the lift is Ny Carlsberg Glyptoteket, an art museum housing the collection of brewery heir Carl Jacobsen, a 19th-century gentleman with a highly focused obsession with classical statuary (particularly Roman) and anything resembling classical statuary. There's a spot in there, among the crumbled statues of gods, emperors and hippopotami, where you can distinctly hear screams coming through the wall of people riding Daemonen. I think it adds something to the tableau.

When I was a kid living in the DC suburbs, the closest thing we had to a home amusement park was Kings Dominion near Richmond. We went there several times, but we always preferred a couple that were a bit further away: Hersheypark in Pennsylvania, and (once it opened) the brand-new "Busch Gardens: The Old Country" in Williamsburg, VA, which promised to simulate a European vacation close to home. It never quite did that, but it at least had some pretty theming and landscaping. And, over time, it started accumulating impressive rides.

When I went to college in Williamsburg, Busch Gardens Williamsburg very much was my home park, and that was when I started riding their roller coasters. But the last time I was there was in the early 1990s, so the last coaster I'd ridden was the ill-fated Drachen Fire (an exciting but mis-designed ride that beat me up enough that, in hindsight, it put me off riding coasters regularly for decades).

Getting interested in them again in the 2010s, I was aware that BGW had added many impressive new rides. But though I still have family in Virginia, I'd never found the time to go back there. My sister and her family love the place (still much more than they do Kings Dominion) and go often, and she'd had a long-standing offer to take me back to Busch Gardens sometime.

We went down there to hang with family over the past several days, and on Friday, with a smaller party consisting of my sister and my daughter, I finally caught up with Busch Gardens Williamsburg. It was an oppressively hot weekday, so crowds were very light. But it did mean we had to hydrate and pace ourselves. Nevertheless, I managed to ride a lot:



Yeah, I went straight to Pantheon, their massive multi-launch top-hat coaster. None of this working up to things. My rides on coasters with inversions were going to be solo, since the people I was with don't like those, but that's fine. It was nearly a walk-on. I had an interesting conversation with the guy riding next to me, the kind of coaster freak who indulges his hobby while traveling on business (seems to be a common thing).

Apart from its lackluster "Roman" theming and maybe being a bit too short, everything about Pantheon is great: the weirdly banked airtime hills, the forward and backward swing launch with an airtime bump in the middle of it, the way it launches you directly into an inversion out of the station just to show you it means business, the stall that is basically a whole hill taken upside down. What you can't see in the video is that the lap restraint seems designed to give you a lot of room to float around, so my butt was flying off the seat basically the whole time. Good times.



InvadR, the wooden coaster in this Coasterforce video, was the coaster for the whole group, since my kid has decided she likes wooden coasters on this scale and my sister has always liked them. This is the first coaster by manufacturer GCI that I've ridden, though Compounce's Wildcat has GCI trains and Boulder Dash has GCI retrack. It's a modern but smallish ride, 75 feet tall with a tangled twister layout. InvadR is a decent ride, though it has more rattle than some other woodies we've ridden lately. This is in the "New France" section that the park has always had as a sort of Frontierland, fudging the Europe theme a bit. The theming seems vaguely based on ideas of Viking colonization in the New World but seems to imagine the Vikings attacking French Canada? I'm not sure the dates work out. Oh well, it's got some bite, I had back row so I was probably feeling that bite the hardest, and it was fun to be able to ride with everyone.



My sister and I rode the newest one in the park, Big Bad Wolf: The Wolf's Revenge (pictured in this Attraction Source video). It's a nice tribute to the original, defunct Big Bad Wolf, which was a formative ride for me, but it's considerably tamer than the original, with no large drop and inverted but not free-swinging cars. It's built not in the original BBW's space (which is taken up by Verbolten), but in the area formerly occupied by Drachen Fire. The village theming, though, is more elaborate than the original version. Since your legs are dangling free, they can really go to town with foot-chopper illusions, which were rather disconcerting to me, since I'm used to head-choppers but not this.

An unusual thing about it is that unlike many coasters of this type, there isn't any kind of retracting floor to help load and unload in the station, so getting on and off can be quite a hop, which slows things down and will require many smaller riders to be boosted by an adult. The seats are also some of the least accommodating for larger riders. But I can imagine that for many kids, this ride will be a gateway to riding big coasters like the original Wolf was, as long as they can take the idea of dangling below the track. On the day we visited, it was the only coaster for which there was really a signficant wait for me (and that was not very long).

At this point, things were getting downright nostalgic. We took in some lunch and air conditioning in the old Festhaus near BBW: The Wolf's Revenge, and to stay cool we all took a couple of spins on Roman Rapids, which was the first theme-park raft ride I ever rode, depicted here by Canobie Coaster:



It's nothing special as these rides go, though the theming is a little unusual. But my next ride, after some nonsensical struggles with the park's locker system, was a very special trip down memory lane:



The ride, the myth, the Monster. This CoasterForce video shows the refurbished Loch Ness Monster with the audio and theming enhancements they put in last season, including audio on the lift hill, video in the long helix tunnel and a statue of the Monster after the final loop. It's running great and I'm happy to say that it holds up. This was the first looping coaster I ever rode, about 35 years ago; it's outlived some of its successors, and it's great to see the park giving it love.

After a transit ride on the park's wonderful triangular skyride network, I tried a coaster that surprised me--I didn't expect to like it as much as I did, possibly because it's of a type that gets some snobbery from coaster enthusiasts:



Griffon, in the "France" area, is a colossal B&M dive coaster with a very simple layout, shown here by Coasterforce: its main event is a 200-foot, entirely vertical drop, which it first dangles riders over for several seconds like sinners in the hand of an angry God. That leads into a huge swooping Immelmann turn, which leads to... another vertical drop and another Immelmann, as if we didn't get it the first time. Then there's one little airtime hill, culminating in a splashdown effect which is mostly there to wow people watching from off-ride (you don't get wet), and into the brakes.

It seemed like it might be kind of a one-trick pony. But experiencing it in person, you get the full force of its theatrics. Everything about it is outsized. The track and the station and the trains look like they were made for beings several times the size of normal humans. The view from the leisurely turnaround before the first drop is spectacular, skyscraper-worthy. And it makes sure you get a really good long dangle over the abyss, held in only by shoulder restraints. More than any other coaster at BGW, the aim is awe. It really gives you the feeling of being manhandled by inhuman forces. I do think Pantheon is the best ride at the park, but Griffon is a surprisingly close second for me.

Griffon actually had a single-rider line of sorts, which I used, and it got me on the ride almost immediately, on a seat in the front row. I think my brother-in-law had warned me that this usually doesn't work, but I suspect that's on heavier days when the line extends beyond where the single-rider lane branches off.

We had some ice cream in the France area and spent some time listening to a band that did a pretty good cover of Fountains of Wayne's "Stacy's Mom." Then it was some more transiting on the skyride, culminating in a long, hot march to our last ride of the afternoon:



Yeah, I knew we were gonna do Apollo's Chariot (depicted by Coaster Studios there) sooner or later, because my sister likes it, and it's great to be able to ride with somebody. (We'd tried to ride it earlier in the day, but it was broken down then.) My kid declined, but this B&M hypercoaster is the kind of truly massive ride that people who aren't hardcore coaster freaks will actually ride, because it doesn't beat them up and the thrills are just manageable enough. It's a lovely long ride, and it was actually more forceful than I expected--it may have been because I was tired and overheated, or maybe Apollo's Chariot itself was just really warmed up late in a hot day, but I was graying out a little on the turnaround helix. I love that surprise violent dip at the end where they take the on-ride photo.

What didn't I ride? Well, DarKoaster has been broken all season, and I wasn't that interested in Verbolten (dis-recommended by my sister), Tempesto (essentially identical to Phobia Phear Coaster at Lake Compounce--a good ride, but it's not a priority here), or Grover's Alpine Express in the Sesame Street-themed kiddie land (my companions did ride that a couple of times when I was off riding something else).

And I just had to triage out Alpengeist, the giant inverted looper, which would have been one assault too many for my old body in that boiling, busy day. That's a ride I've been interested in for a long time, nevertheless. In a sense it was the ride that started to turn the Busch Gardens I knew as a kid into the park it is today. My brother-in-law doesn't like it, but I'll surely do it if I ever go back.

And just a few weeks after our last visit to Lake Compounce, we went back today. Sam had actually bought a season pass, which for Compounce is a really good deal that pays for itself almost immediately, particularly if you use the three buddy passes that come with it. So we only had to buy one new ticket for this visit.

We went today because my daughter's summer job is giving her some weekdays off instead of weekends, and unlike some regional parks, Compounce's waterpark was now open (it wasn't on our last visit). Hours were short, though, and it was an "Education Day" attended by many school field trips. So crowds were, not heavy, but a little heavier than before and very tilted toward large crowds of teenagers.

The only coaster we got on was Wildcat again, which has become a new favorite of my daughter. This time we sat near the front, which made for a less forceful ride but more impressive visuals. (Boulder Dash actually wasn't running today, or I'd had tried for a front-row ride there, which I've heard is essential.)

But we did do a bit of splashing around in the lake itself at the small beach there, and rode the park's large family raft slide, Mammoth Falls. But the real highlight of the day was that Compounce's excellent but frequently inoperative raft ride, Thunder Rapids, was actually operating! And, yeah, we got multiple rides on that thing. Here's Canobie Coaster's off-ride footage, which gives you some idea of the nice landscaping:



This is in an area oddly isolated from the rest of the park, far out along the west edge of the lake. The miniature steam train does now have a station there, but the vintage trolley that used to also run out there is gone. Anyway, it's easily the best of these rapids rides in New England, far livelier than Blizzard River at Six Flags, or Dr. Geyser's Remarkable Raft Ride at Story Land. When it's actually running, it's imperative to ride it.

My sister-in-law was so kind as to give me the download code for X-Plane 12 for Christmas. I'd previously found its graphical improvements not quite impressive enough to justify the purchase, but the new lighting and shading model really shines when the lights go down in the cit-tay, and the sun shines on the baaaaaayyyy:



It's also much better in garbage weather with rain and such, though that is harder to convey in a still image.

Graphically, they're playing a probably impossible game of catch-up with Asobo Studios' Microsoft Flight Simulator and its real-time streaming world derived from Bing Maps data. X-Plane still uses the old model of a static world stored on your computer, and relies on optional downloads from its user community (both freeware and commercial) to flesh out the parts of the world you really care about with add-ons. But that also means it's far less dependent on some outside server infrastructure.

But this computer can't run Microsoft Flight Simulator.

The San Francisco pictured above uses the data that ships by default with X-Plane. I was actually using a very detailed free add-on for San Francisco with X-Plane 11, which didn't have any special landmarks for that area in its factory download (so while the basic geography would be there, all the buildings and bridges and such would have been generic "autogen" assets). You can see that in X-Plane 12, a few landmarks like Salesforce Tower and the SF-Oakland Bay Bridge are represented pretty accurately, but there are still a lot of autogen buildings there.

The basic global geography download includes more or less accurate street layouts and coastlines for much of the world, but the shapes are relatively low-resolution polygons and one thing that does tend to take me out of the simulator immersion is when that's hard to ignore. You'll see a coastline with realistic-looking soil and vegetation, but following unnatural precise angles (in a place where human intervention shouldn't have created that in reality). The same is true of roads. The curved lozenge shape of the block across the street from me is there in the database, but sharpened into a parallelogram. I actually think they could do a lot to improve the basic visuals just by automatically putting some subtle curves on street bends and intersections, though they may be afraid of any deterministic process to do this going wrong in some situations.

I haven't tried using the scenery add-on I was using before in here yet, but I suspect it would work fine. Most of the scenery and aircraft add-ons for X-Plane 11 do work here, though some add-on aircraft that predate version 11 don't work or work badly. Some of the authors have made updated versions that use new features in X-Plane 12.

Users have created many libraries of free objects to use in these add-ons, and one of the frustrations of free user-created add-ons is that they often have a lot of external library dependencies which are hard to manage. I've noticed that the most popular add-ons tend to be the ones whose dependencies are simple or nonexistent. It seems like everything like this eventually evolves to needing a package manager.