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"The adventure begins!"
Okay, here is the story: I've been planning to take a vacation and go out to Southern California and visit the parks out there. I was planning to fly out, spend about a week, and then come back, hopefully getting to Disneyland while they are still celebrating their 50th season. That was the plan. Plans have a way of changing. A couple of months ago, my parents decided to pack up and move out to Thousand Oaks. Then they got a brilliant idea to have me drive their second car out to them. Suddenly my California visit had become a two-week cross-country odyssey. I would head out IR-70, duplicating the first part of my vacation a few years ago, but continuing all the way out to the West coast.
That was the plan. Plans have a way of changing.
This time, the culprit was HoliWood Nights and a funny little geographic quirk. Between Indianapolis and St. Louis, IR-70 has to head very much to the South. Furthermore, IR-64 out of Louisville actually intersects IR-70 in St. Louis. As it turns out, the mileage penalty for taking IR-71 South to IR-64 instead of going straight out IR-70 is only 70 miles. 70 miles out of a 2,400 mile trip is almost negligible. Suddenly I had an excuse to go back to Holiday World again, and because it is actually shorter to go to Holiday World than to go to St. Louis, it actually saves me from starting out on Friday night after work and spending a night in a motel.
Actually it turns out that I couldn't have left on Friday night anyway. I simply wasn't prepared. I got up early on Saturday morning, and with all the packing and preparation, it was still 11:00am EDT before I left Columbus. Driving my parents' car caused some added complications. Not only did I have to gather up all the stuff they wanted me to bring out for them, I had to buy myself a new suitcase just so that I could get it to fit into the trunk. While it is neat to be able to drive out to California in a little convertible, it just isn't nearly as big as my Crown Victoria!
It's 292 miles to Holiday World, and I arrived right at 4:00 CDT. From the looks of the parking lot, the park was exceptionally busy. Cars were parked all over the place, indicating that earlier in the day they had literally run out of space in the two lots. By the time I got there, there were a few scattered spaces available, so I parked the car and entered the park. That's when I made my critical mistake.
I pushed through the enormous crowd and went immediately to the Thanksgiving section and entered the queue for The Voyage. The park has added a section of queue railing outside the station building, and the line for the ride extended all the way past the end of the new railiing. I failed to notice how long the wait was, but I had to wait through the entire "cargo hold" of the queue. That queue may well be the worst part of the ride. It's a complicated maze of narrow passages designed to pack as many people into as small a space as possible. It reminds me of a ship loading diagram I saw once in an American History textbook.
Just before my ride, a light rain began to fall. I was kind of expecting the rain, but I was hoping it would hold off until the evening, perhaps coming through wherever I ended up while I slept. Friday night there was a line of storms on the national weather radar map extending from Texas into Wisconsin, said storms including a lot of bright colors not often seen on weather radar images. Apparently I had met the storm. The rain slicked up the rails and did something I wasn't sure was possible: it made The Voyage run faster. Last month, it was fast. Tonight, it was absolutely insane. Will it be possible for anybody to improve on this ride? The Voyage is a ride in a class by itself, almost without peer. And that first ride was so good, I had to ride again.
The wait was about 40 minutes, and I was two trains away from boarding when the storm got significantly worse. Lightning closed every ride in the park and left me stranded on the platform for what turned out to be a two-hour rain delay. Oh, the storm didn't last that long, but once the storm let up we had to wait for a series of safety checks, including a maintenance track walk, so the ride was out of service for a full two hours. I considered bailing out, but neither of the other coasters were running (in fact, I don't think The Legend ever came back up after the storm!) and there was still a long line of people waiting to ride The Voyage. Did I want to forfeit the ride I had already waited a couple of hours for? Of course not. Especially the way the ride was running tonight!
In the end, I think I ended up with four rides on The Voyage. It was also the first time I ever visited Holiday World without riding The Raven. What is this world coming to? Oh, it's also worth noting that among the thousands of people who were at Holiday World, there was a fair number of coaster nuts, perhaps an unusually large number. I won't drop names, but I ran into quite a few. I wonder if it's because tonight was the first night that the park was open until 10:00 pm. I'd love to go back tomorrow for more, but I need to go the other direction. For now it's a night in Mount Vernon, Illinois, with an eye towards visiting Six Flags St. Louis in the morning.
--Dave Althoff, Jr.
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