The Rise and Fall of My Thrill Ride Hobby

It is interesting, looking back now on my thrill ride "hobby" in the previous decade, how my feelings toward riding roaster coasters and other rides that either flipped me upside-down or severely tested my bearings with sudden, steep drops and turns have evolved. At first, I was one of the adult family "heads" taking my kids out to the park, with little desire to get on any of the rides. Many of them seemed outright terrifying to me, but late in the summer of 2002, at Wild Adventures theme park in Valdosta, Georgia, I decided to try out some of the more sedate-looking ones. This included coasters designed for little children like Ant Farm, Gold Rush, and Tiger Terror. These I managed to survive by shutting my eyes tight and repeating to myself "Safe, safe, safe..." throughout the ride. Later, I took it as a personal challenge to "face the fear" (as my brave son Will put it) and tackle some of the more scary rides, and with my eyes wide open. By the spring of 2003 I had become a thrill ride addict, and wondered to myself how anyone could truly enjoy life without a regular diet of roller coasters and rides that tossed and turned every which way but (thankfully) loose. After all, we're all astronauts in the sense that we're on "spaceship" Earth, hurtling through space: why not take the role to its proper end and undergo astronaut training?

My theme park fascination continued through 2004, but it began to fade the following year. Our attendance began to dwindle until, in the past few years, we hardly ever visit one. Why the drop-off in interest?

Well, for one, "conquering" a ride by experiencing it enough times for any apprehension to be gone takes the "thrill" out of thrill rides to a great extent. Also, I am not too keen on having to drive the distance involved in getting to a theme park like Wild Adventures, Busch Gardens, Universal, or Walt Disney World and then driving the return trip home. I don't like to pay the entrance fee, either, although an annual pass can sometimes be a good deal if we visit the same park a number of times. Going through a park for hours on end can be grueling in itself, and especially during the hot Floridian summertime, which can span from spring through most of fall (and seems to have already begun in late winter this year). But what sets me the most against theme parks is the idea that I usually have to wait for long stretches in long lines just to enjoy a two-minute ride. That I have totally lost my patience to withstand.

To top all of these drawbacks, I have a medical condition that won't be helped any with the kind of gravity manipulations and stress that many thrill rides emphasize. So even if I lived right across the street from a good theme park and had a lifetime free pass for it, as well as an express pass that allowed me to bypass the long lines, I still wouldn't be going on most of the rides. So at least for the indefinite future, I'm afraid that I will be cutting even further back on my theme park visits. But that's already been happening anyway during the course of the last seven years...