halfway up wasn't so bad

[spatch]

The first day of coastering at Busch Gardens was a lot of fun. I am back in the hotel now exhausted as all hell, but very pleased with how it all turned out. I had planned to spend the busy Saturday taking pictures during my backstage coaster tour and then ride a lot on Sunday, but my shiny camera died while I was taking the slow elevator up Griffon's 210-foot lift hill. Oh. Well, then.

Turns out the batteries were at fault, but by the time I went "Wait, weren't those new batteries from the same pack that died in the TV remote? What if I just got some new ones?" I was too busy riding and having fun. I rode a lot today.

But here is the neat maintenance elevator that we rode to the top of the lift hill:



And here's what part of the ride looks like from halfway up (and then the camera died):



Busch Gardens is a beautiful park and there are lots of great places to take neat pictures of tangled tracks and foliage and trains and stuff. I'll visit them tomorrow with fresh batteries, and write a full trip story later on.

Comments

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

A few weeks ago I visited (the very nearby!) Canobie Lake Park for the first time. Since we were with a 3-year-old and I wasn't in a coastery mood anyway, we spend most of our time in the well-equipped kiddie zone and I didn't ride the roller coasters. But I did see their 1930s wooden coaster, the Yankee Cannonball, and would like to give it a try sometime.

What I didn't even realize at the time is that the park also has a smallish inverting steel coaster, the Canobie Corkscrew. What's more, it has an interesting history--it was actually one of the earliest corkscrews, built in the Seventies for an indoor amusement park in Illinois, then moved somewhere down South before it ended up at Canobie Lake. I'll have to give it a go as well.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

...and it's an exact clone of the first modern steel inverting coaster, the Corkscrew at Knott's Berry Farm; another clone was the aforementioned Python of Busch Gardens Tampa.

And I now realize that the place where it was originally installed, Old Chicago, was the subject of a hilarious/sad feature I read a while back through a link at deadmalls.com.