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mmcirvinOn the last perfect day before the heat wave, Sam and Jorie went back to Canobie Lake Park. Unfortunately, it was a Thursday and I had to work. Today, the heat wave broke—it was low eighties and sunny, an absolutely flawless day—and we all went back there. And I finally got to ride the two roller coasters there that I hadn't ridden yet: the Dragon kiddie coaster (with Jorie), and the park's brand-new star attraction, Untamed.
Aside from coaster-riding, we spent some time in the Castaway Island water area, but Jorie was really apprehensive about spending any time in a spot where she might get water squirted at her or dumped on her, and she certainly wasn't going on any of the waterslides (I've never been keen on them either). So I tailed her around the margins of the area while Sam got some watersliding in.
It seems like every time we go, there's a different ride Jorie gets obsessed with riding repeatedly. This time, it was a surrealistic kiddie ride called the Autobahn, just a rotating disc under a shady tent with a bizarre random assortment of rideable objects bolted to it: motorcycles, dune buggies, Moon buggies, a tractor, horses, a stagecoach, some things I can only describe as a cross between a jetski and an inline roller skate, a sort of pickup truck with a roof-mounted death ray controlled from seats in the bed, and, as the crowning accessory to any self-respecting autobahn, a fairly detailed rotating Apollo LEM in the center, with its descent-stage engine bell decorated in a suspiciously Dalek-like motif. My guess is that this was originally some kind of space-themed ride whose vehicles got gradually replaced with any damn thing they could get their hands on, but this is only a hypothesis.
Toward the end, she also rode the kiddie bumper cars for the very first time; at age 4, this was the first time Jorie has ever been in full control of a powered vehicle with both steering wheel and pedal, and, while she spent a lot of time repeatedly whirling in a tight circle and slamming into the wall, she seemed to be enjoying herself.
Dragon
By sheer, long-running coincidence, these are the first two steel coasters I've ever ridden that were not made by Arrow Dynamics. The Dragon is a standard Zamperla kiddie ride that was installed in 1991; Jorie had actually ridden it once before with Sam, but it was new to me. When we were in line, I asked Jorie to tell me what it was like, and she just said "The coaster will show you!"
It's surprisingly exciting for what it is; it's a powered coaster (that is, one with motors in the train) that runs through a pair of helices, then goes through the station and runs the whole course a second time. There's no drop of any significance, but there's a real sense of speed, and a vaguely tunnel-like effect as it runs between the supports for the helices. Since the only restraints are single-position lapbars, little kids are riding with a lot of freedom of motion, which can be disconcerting for their parents. I was glad that Jorie was riding on the inside of the curves with me sitting next to her.
Anyway, I found it happy-making to be riding a roller coaster with my kid for the very first time. She says it's her favorite ride at the park; I asked her why and she said "because it's very fast. I like things that are fast more than things that are slow." While I won't press the issue too hard, I'm hoping she is a coaster freak in the making.
Untamed
Untamed is a Gerstlauer Compact Eurofighter, which has a completely vertical lift hill followed by a beyond-vertical drop and three inversions. I was actually feeling a bit of apprehension before riding it. I've not entirely recovered from my youthful chicken-ness regarding roller coasters, but I suppose the associated feelings are part of the fascination for me now. The other coasters at Canobie are basically milder counterparts of ones I've ridden in the past, so I could tell myself I've conquered worse. While Untamed is far from the biggest or twistiest coaster I've ridden, it actually has something which was completely new to me: that initial lift and drop, the signature elements of the Eurofighter series. I recall, many years ago, imagining how scary it would be for a coaster to have something like that, before anyone had actually done it. I suppose the quivery trepidation before getting in line for the ride is really part of the total experience.
I knew I could take the rest of the ride. For some reason, I do not find inversions on roller coasters inherently scary at all. They are just fun. The type that involve punishing G-forces are physically painful, and I might rationally be scared of experiencing the pain, but that's a separate issue not limited to inversions. I am not at all scared of a coaster turning me upside down in a loop-the-loop or a corkscrew, and I have no idea why not, because before I had ever ridden on such a coaster I imagined this would be the scariest thing.
It is not; drops are the scariest thing. I never quite get over that. I deal by screaming, in the usual manner. And a vertical or more-than-vertical drop is pretty much the ultimate drop.
In any case, I successfully convinced myself to go on, and the actual ride is concentrated awesomesauce. The cars run individually and seat eight people in two rows; I was in the leftmost seat in the second row, but due to the design of the cars, this is not much different from being in the first row. Being hoisted up the lift vertically on your back is deliciously scary, partly because it's hard to see anything except blue sky and partly because you're very much leaning against the shoulder restraints. But I found I could take it. It's best to try to just live in the moment.
The vaunted initial drop is indeed scary, but the really scary part is over in about one second, because, due to the strict zoning and space constraints Canobie has to work under, it's the smallest standard model of Eurofighter and the drop is not actually all that tall. [1] It peels out into the entry for the first loop immediately after pitching beyond vertical, with no real straight section.
Those inversions are just amazing. The initial vertical loop seems gigantic; it's most of the height of the lift hill and it feels like you're going fairly slowly at the top. Then you go directly into a fast Immelmann turn that is over before you can fully process what's happening to you, then the car goes around a curve and through a really fun zero-G roll. Then there's a helix and a short straightaway back to the station. It's a short ride, but there's so much unrelenting twistiness packed into less than thirty seconds of ride time that you come away feeling thoroughly satisfied. At least, I did.
It's also an astonishingly smooth ride, probably the smoothest coaster I've ever ridden on, with the aforementioned Dragon a close second. There is no headbanging or other pain whatsoever. I used to wonder what people were talking about when they said old Arrow coasters (like the Canobie Corkscrew) beat you up; now I know because I have something else as a point of comparison. The ride is also very quiet; it had to be to get zoning approval. Mostly what you hear is the screaming.
I think for overall thrills I would place it on the same level as Canobie's classic PTC woodie, the Yankee Cannonball, though it's hard to compare two such different coasters head to head. Untamed has that Gerstlauer lift/drop, the wonderful inversions, and the miraculous smoothness of a 21st-century steel coaster; the Cannonball is a longer ride with several hills and has the extra fear index of a skull-rattling 1930s woodie. One big advantage of Untamed is shorter, faster-moving lines: ever since a collision several years ago, the Cannonball (which, like most old wooden coasters, lacks automated block brakes) has been running only one train at a time, and it doesn't have the capacity that Untamed can manage even with single 8-person cars. Untamed's line was quite reasonable today, on a beautiful weekend day in summer; they were only using about half of the queue maze.
On the other hand, for short lines it's hard to beat the Canobie Corkscrew, which is usually practically a walk-on. I didn't ride that today, but it looked like the wait might have been shorter than for the Dragon.
[1] You can see rotten kids sneering about this all over YouTube comments. Incidentally, there's a bit of P. T. Barnum in the marketing. The photo of a car just entering the drop pasted all over the Boston area in posters advertising the park is not actually of Untamed; it's of a larger Eurofighter with a much longer initial drop and differently-styled cars. Some people have identified it as Saw: The Ride at Thorpe Park in the UK. Untamed itself is actually identical in size and layout to Rage at Southend's Adventure Island, with which British readers may be familiar.
Aside from coaster-riding, we spent some time in the Castaway Island water area, but Jorie was really apprehensive about spending any time in a spot where she might get water squirted at her or dumped on her, and she certainly wasn't going on any of the waterslides (I've never been keen on them either). So I tailed her around the margins of the area while Sam got some watersliding in.
It seems like every time we go, there's a different ride Jorie gets obsessed with riding repeatedly. This time, it was a surrealistic kiddie ride called the Autobahn, just a rotating disc under a shady tent with a bizarre random assortment of rideable objects bolted to it: motorcycles, dune buggies, Moon buggies, a tractor, horses, a stagecoach, some things I can only describe as a cross between a jetski and an inline roller skate, a sort of pickup truck with a roof-mounted death ray controlled from seats in the bed, and, as the crowning accessory to any self-respecting autobahn, a fairly detailed rotating Apollo LEM in the center, with its descent-stage engine bell decorated in a suspiciously Dalek-like motif. My guess is that this was originally some kind of space-themed ride whose vehicles got gradually replaced with any damn thing they could get their hands on, but this is only a hypothesis.
Toward the end, she also rode the kiddie bumper cars for the very first time; at age 4, this was the first time Jorie has ever been in full control of a powered vehicle with both steering wheel and pedal, and, while she spent a lot of time repeatedly whirling in a tight circle and slamming into the wall, she seemed to be enjoying herself.
Dragon
By sheer, long-running coincidence, these are the first two steel coasters I've ever ridden that were not made by Arrow Dynamics. The Dragon is a standard Zamperla kiddie ride that was installed in 1991; Jorie had actually ridden it once before with Sam, but it was new to me. When we were in line, I asked Jorie to tell me what it was like, and she just said "The coaster will show you!"
It's surprisingly exciting for what it is; it's a powered coaster (that is, one with motors in the train) that runs through a pair of helices, then goes through the station and runs the whole course a second time. There's no drop of any significance, but there's a real sense of speed, and a vaguely tunnel-like effect as it runs between the supports for the helices. Since the only restraints are single-position lapbars, little kids are riding with a lot of freedom of motion, which can be disconcerting for their parents. I was glad that Jorie was riding on the inside of the curves with me sitting next to her.
Anyway, I found it happy-making to be riding a roller coaster with my kid for the very first time. She says it's her favorite ride at the park; I asked her why and she said "because it's very fast. I like things that are fast more than things that are slow." While I won't press the issue too hard, I'm hoping she is a coaster freak in the making.
Untamed
Untamed is a Gerstlauer Compact Eurofighter, which has a completely vertical lift hill followed by a beyond-vertical drop and three inversions. I was actually feeling a bit of apprehension before riding it. I've not entirely recovered from my youthful chicken-ness regarding roller coasters, but I suppose the associated feelings are part of the fascination for me now. The other coasters at Canobie are basically milder counterparts of ones I've ridden in the past, so I could tell myself I've conquered worse. While Untamed is far from the biggest or twistiest coaster I've ridden, it actually has something which was completely new to me: that initial lift and drop, the signature elements of the Eurofighter series. I recall, many years ago, imagining how scary it would be for a coaster to have something like that, before anyone had actually done it. I suppose the quivery trepidation before getting in line for the ride is really part of the total experience.
I knew I could take the rest of the ride. For some reason, I do not find inversions on roller coasters inherently scary at all. They are just fun. The type that involve punishing G-forces are physically painful, and I might rationally be scared of experiencing the pain, but that's a separate issue not limited to inversions. I am not at all scared of a coaster turning me upside down in a loop-the-loop or a corkscrew, and I have no idea why not, because before I had ever ridden on such a coaster I imagined this would be the scariest thing.
It is not; drops are the scariest thing. I never quite get over that. I deal by screaming, in the usual manner. And a vertical or more-than-vertical drop is pretty much the ultimate drop.
In any case, I successfully convinced myself to go on, and the actual ride is concentrated awesomesauce. The cars run individually and seat eight people in two rows; I was in the leftmost seat in the second row, but due to the design of the cars, this is not much different from being in the first row. Being hoisted up the lift vertically on your back is deliciously scary, partly because it's hard to see anything except blue sky and partly because you're very much leaning against the shoulder restraints. But I found I could take it. It's best to try to just live in the moment.
The vaunted initial drop is indeed scary, but the really scary part is over in about one second, because, due to the strict zoning and space constraints Canobie has to work under, it's the smallest standard model of Eurofighter and the drop is not actually all that tall. [1] It peels out into the entry for the first loop immediately after pitching beyond vertical, with no real straight section.
Those inversions are just amazing. The initial vertical loop seems gigantic; it's most of the height of the lift hill and it feels like you're going fairly slowly at the top. Then you go directly into a fast Immelmann turn that is over before you can fully process what's happening to you, then the car goes around a curve and through a really fun zero-G roll. Then there's a helix and a short straightaway back to the station. It's a short ride, but there's so much unrelenting twistiness packed into less than thirty seconds of ride time that you come away feeling thoroughly satisfied. At least, I did.
It's also an astonishingly smooth ride, probably the smoothest coaster I've ever ridden on, with the aforementioned Dragon a close second. There is no headbanging or other pain whatsoever. I used to wonder what people were talking about when they said old Arrow coasters (like the Canobie Corkscrew) beat you up; now I know because I have something else as a point of comparison. The ride is also very quiet; it had to be to get zoning approval. Mostly what you hear is the screaming.
I think for overall thrills I would place it on the same level as Canobie's classic PTC woodie, the Yankee Cannonball, though it's hard to compare two such different coasters head to head. Untamed has that Gerstlauer lift/drop, the wonderful inversions, and the miraculous smoothness of a 21st-century steel coaster; the Cannonball is a longer ride with several hills and has the extra fear index of a skull-rattling 1930s woodie. One big advantage of Untamed is shorter, faster-moving lines: ever since a collision several years ago, the Cannonball (which, like most old wooden coasters, lacks automated block brakes) has been running only one train at a time, and it doesn't have the capacity that Untamed can manage even with single 8-person cars. Untamed's line was quite reasonable today, on a beautiful weekend day in summer; they were only using about half of the queue maze.
On the other hand, for short lines it's hard to beat the Canobie Corkscrew, which is usually practically a walk-on. I didn't ride that today, but it looked like the wait might have been shorter than for the Dragon.
[1] You can see rotten kids sneering about this all over YouTube comments. Incidentally, there's a bit of P. T. Barnum in the marketing. The photo of a car just entering the drop pasted all over the Boston area in posters advertising the park is not actually of Untamed; it's of a larger Eurofighter with a much longer initial drop and differently-styled cars. Some people have identified it as Saw: The Ride at Thorpe Park in the UK. Untamed itself is actually identical in size and layout to Rage at Southend's Adventure Island, with which British readers may be familiar.
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no subject
Date: 2011-07-25 03:51 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-07-25 04:13 am (UTC)Canobie's a pleasant little park, with relatively low admission prices compared to the big guys, free parking and pretty landscaping. If you're going to spend most of your time around the kiddie rides, it's as good as or better than any Six Flags monstrosity.
no subject
Date: 2011-07-25 04:17 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-07-25 04:28 am (UTC)So my funnest memories are of going to Busch Gardens Williamsburg in and after college, and the original Elitch Gardens when I was working in Boulder.
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Date: 2011-07-25 05:11 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-07-26 01:11 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-07-25 03:44 pm (UTC)They provide a test seat just outside the queue that you can use to tell whether you'll be allowed to ride before you get in line. Someone built like
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Date: 2011-07-25 03:56 pm (UTC)She's actually ridden one Canobie coaster that I haven't, since she rode and enjoyed the old SDC Galaxi that used to stand where the Extreme Frisbee is now. (The Frisbee and the Rowdy Roosters were shut down yesterday, probably for maintenance. The Frisbee, a gigantic rotating thing on the end of a swinging pendulum that was 2007's headline attraction, is firmly in the category of rides I won't go on because they look like they'd just make me violently ill.)
no subject
Date: 2011-07-25 11:15 pm (UTC)[1] Attempted whimsy.
no subject
Date: 2011-07-26 10:59 am (UTC)The new thing for the past decade or so has been to build steel "hypercoasters" that look like giant monster versions of an old-fashioned out-and-back wooden coaster, and because they don't invert, those usually only have lap restraints. I've never ridden one, but they tend to get the top marks on best-coaster-ever lists.
(There are, of course, limits. There was recently a horrible accident with one of these at Darien Lake when they let on a double amputee with only part of one leg left, and he fell out.)
I've also heard of some recent experiments in Germany with using racing-car-like five-point harnesses instead of horsecollars. They take longer to fasten, and I imagine they are less proof against idiocy on the part of the ride operators, but they're much more comfortable.
Kids ride the big coasters at Canobie who couldn't be much over the 48" minimum, and they don't seem bothered, but, you know, kids. They'll put up with a lot.
no subject
Date: 2011-07-26 11:07 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-07-26 11:46 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-07-26 11:47 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-07-26 02:26 pm (UTC)I guess the fear was kids sliding out from under the single-position lapbars, which were sized for adults.
The hypercoaster lap restraints are individually ratcheting and T-shaped, with a post between the legs to keep that from happening. But the kiddie coaster mentioned above has an old-timey single-position lapbar, though it's set pretty low and the forces involved are mild enough that a kid would have to be energetically trying to escape it to get under. On the Yankee Cannonball they added seat belts after the accident, though I don't know how much good they do.
As a parent, the ride that scares me the most now is one that didn't scare me at all as a kid: the sky ride, which at Canobie uses ordinary ski-lift chairs with non-locking lapbars. Someone intent on falling out of the sky ride could do it trivially, and a kid without well-developed survival instincts could slide under. When I was a kid my survival instincts were, if anything, hypertrophic and I was satisfied that as long as I hung onto that thing and stayed behind it, I'd be fine. But worrying on behalf of another person is something else again.