Six Flags - More Pain!

They say that your body has no memory for pain. That is a great survival adaptation that helped us evolve as a species from the plains of Africa, and enables us to keep returning to amusement parks!

Spent the day last Sunday with my brother and his family at Six Flags. Robyn and I had never been there as a couple, and neither one of us had been there since our teenage years. My brother had season passes for his family and accrued enough credits to get two free passes for the park for us. The admission is free, but you pay for the rides later!

The first ride that we went on was the American Eagle. For those of you who don't know this ride, it is a very large, relatively old wood frame roller coaster. I'm not saying the ride was rough and bumpy, but I had smoother rides on the railroads of the Soviet Union. At comparable speeds. And they served tea.

I was convinced that pieces were shaking off the cars as we went around, and that there had to be a park employee with a metal detector below retrieving them. Robyn and I exited the ride, each clutching different parts of our anatomy that had gotten wrenched. For her it was her neck. For myself, my lower back.

"Screw the signs about what height you need to be to ride this thing," I offered. "They need a sign stating the maximum age for riders, because I'm sure we're over it!".

While the ride was rough, it was not nausea-inducing. That's where our next ride comes in - the Demon. Now, I remember the Demon from my youth because it has loops and corkscrews and didn't jar an internal organ loose from its moorings. I was about two people from getting on the ride when they announced the ride would be delayed temporarily. I decided to stick it out, since the cars were so tantalizingly close. As I watched, they ran 2 sets of cars through empty. Then, as the third set pulled up, a park employee put on latex gloves and starting dragging a trash can to the back of the cars. Obviously the excitement was too much for one rider. As the attendant swabbed the seat and safety bars with disinfectant and paper towels, I daydreamed about the other riders getting enveloped in a mist of someone else's barf. I would hope there were a few free park passes for the asking for any victims after an event like that.

Since Kevin and his wife Jody had gone to Six Flags multiple times this summer, they were able to steer us clear of any other potential hazards.

"That ride over there is the Iron Wolf", Jody stated. "They say that if you have neck or back problems, that you shouldn't go on it. I found that anybody that HAS a neck or a back should avoid it, as it will be in pain once you leave the ride!"

We deferred to her wisdom. Besides, there was a food court somewhere that needed patronizing, right?

One entire area that didn't exist in my youth was the water park at Six Flags. We were able to enjoy several of the rides there, as well as the wave pool. The wave pool was fun, but for whatever stringent safety reason it was closed down for 15 minutes of every hour. I conjectured that it was either for:

a. Keeping people from getting exhausted in the unrelenting waves

b. Changing lifeguards so there were always attentive people overlooking the throngs; or

c. They needed time to fish the bodies out and clean the place, much like the floaters get cleared from the fish tanks at the K-Mart pet department every morning.

So visit Six Flags when you can. And if you get hurt, just remember, no one forced you to get on those things, you idiot!