Hey Team,

Another one gone. Another one gone. Another one bites the dust.

After taking a red eye from San Jose to New York, shunning sleep for almost 48 hours and panicking about missing out on the fastest roller coaster in the country AGAIN…yesterday turned out to be an incredible day.

For a little bit it looked like I was going to have just as much trouble getting to Six Flags Great Adventure as I did last October. I spent an hour wandering around Port Authority in New York (the main bus hub in the city) trying to get someone to acknowledge the existence of a bus route I was able to find online but that didn’t seem to have a place in our reality. Luckily, George and Jessica from Boston had decided to join me in the roller coastering and happened to be driving through New York around that same time.

We got to Six Flags unsure what to expect. All I knew was that I needed to get to the park sometime between 10:30am and 2:00pm and call Angel the PR Manager when I got there.

Angel not only greeted us at the gate with tickets but took us backstage (that’s what we’d call it at Disney at least) and drove us straight to the tallest, fastest roller coaster in the WORLD (Kingda Ka) before walking us through the back door to skip the line!

That also happened to be the exact same time that they closed the attraction because of inclement weather. Emotional roller coastering ensued.

Angel, being the gracious host that she was (despite being in charge of the entire park that day), told us to go have fun and she’d call us when she got word that the ride was reopening and meet us there. That tactic resulted in three false alarms, one of which involved us standing at the ready for the coaster to get powered up, listening to the announcer tell the people waiting in line that the anticipation was over, watching as the lap bars were raised and then listening to the announcer once more as he explained, “Sorry guys, the wind has changed directions and the storm is blowing back towards us again.”

Ouch.

Eventually Angel had to go to a long meeting and didn’t want us to miss our chance so she gave us some magic passes to get us in through the exit if Kingda Ka ever opened. And at this point things were looking pretty grim.

I was running on empty after a lack of sleep. More roller coasters were closing because of the weather. And even my ridiculous optimism was starting to wane in the face of a never-ending drizzle. (Especially with October’s failure weighing me down.)

But with only four hours to go before the park closed (we had already been there for five hours without doing much of anything) things started to look up. The sky cleared some. The drizzle subsided. Rides started reopening. (Not Kingda Ka, but it provided hope and awesome distractions.)

And then, as I sat trapped in what would be the second lamest ride of the day, I looked to where Jessica was pointing and saw an empty car running the track of Kingda Ka!

We sprinted toward the other side of the park, phone in hand, as I called Angel and asked her if she wanted to meet us there to help film the action. The line was already ridiculously long and for a moment I felt kind of bad that I was walking in through the exit…but then I got excited and forgot to keep feeling bad.

I’ll just skip to the end: Wow! What an incredible ride! From the front seat, the force of the wind as the ride accelerated to 128 mph in 3.5 seconds made it impossible to not be concerned that my eyeballs were going to shoot out the back of my skull. I couldn’t BELIEVE how fast 128 mph on a roller coaster felt! Did I say incredible? Cause that’s the only good word I have to describe it. Maybe Wednesday’s video will do a better job.

Thanks a TON to Angel and Six Flags for making #36 go away! Welcome to Team Amtrekker. Not to mention Paul over at Fox Business News and “Happy Hour” for making the connection. You guys all rock!

I’m done.

Brett.

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This entry was posted on Sunday, April 13th, 2008 at 1:18 pm.