A Sudden Induction

By: Great Biscuit

In my previous installment, the Biscuit clan had arrived at Six Flags Fiesta Texas to find a virtually deserted park. With two rides down and many left to go, we headed over to The Boardwalk area. The girls soon discovered a few kid-oriented rides which had no lines at all.

(What is the deal with the spinning bus?  Why does it seem that EVERY Theme park has this ride?  Do they just give that out free when you puchase three or more other rides of equal or greater value?)

While the girls were thusly engaged and safely under the watchful supervision of First Lady Biscuit and Nana & Papa, I took a side trip to catch me a coaster.

It had been a while since I was able to get my coaster on so I was really looking forward to a chance to ride the rails again. The closest coaster to our location was Poltergeist and it was one I had never ridden.

Because the ride was built after the park opened, the coaster itself is sandwiched in behind some other buildings. To make it accessible from the park, they offset the queue and the loading area quite a ways from the actual track and tucked them between a restaurant and the back side of the car ride. The affect of this is that you cannot see the track from the line or from the loading dock. (This is an important note for later.)

I shuffled my way though the endless rows of empty rails and trudged up the ramp to the loading dock. There was a train waiting when I got there and the gates were all open. I was TOTALLY loving this no-crowd thing! I joined the three people already on board and after a couple of minutes, and a few more folks had wondered up and gotten on, the bored and alarmingly sleepy looking ride operator closed the gates, dropped the restraints, gave a thumbs up and hit the magic button.

It was then that I discovered something. It is probably a good idea to take a peek a coaster in action BEFORE you get on it.

Poltergeist is not one of those normal, haul you up a hill with a chain, type of coasters. No my friends. This bad boy was a linear induction coaster.

Now don’t get me wrong. I LOVE these things and have ridden them many times. However, I do like to know ahead of time so as to properly prepare myself. If there had been a ride video of my face during said takeoff, it would have gone viral by now. My head was suddenly pinned to the chair, my eyes were bugging out of their sockets and my lips were flapping so far around the side of my head that I was experiencing the disconcerting sensation of simultaneously kissing both of my own ear lobes.

While other men may have been reduced to shrieking like a startled school girl, I am happy to report that I bore it with equanimity and quickly recovered. By the time we made it through the first loop, I had reeled in my facial muscles and took to waving my hands in the air and grinning like the Joker on tater tot day at Arkham.

In short, the ride ROCKED!

I pondered riding it again, but didn’t want to leave the girls waiting. Plus I was sidelined by an injury while exiting. I don’t know how I did it, but in the course of making my way out of the queue, I raised my left arm while cornering a turn in the exit lane and somehow managed to smack the tip of my elbow on the edge of a metal bar. This created a chain reaction which shot lighting bolts up my arm and clear around the side of my back. It was about the worse funny bone smack I’ve ever dealt myself. And it totally soured the mood for another ride.

After meeting back up with the family, I discovered First Lady Biscuit had taken the girls on the mini-swings. This was nifty with me as I am much more prone to getting ill on those types of spinning rides as opposed to twisting and turning coasters.

I don’t get it either.

I also discovered that from the vantage point of the bench in front of the Taz swings, you could clearly see Poltergeist.  In fact Nana Biscuit snapped the shot up above while I was riding it.  I guess I should have stuck around over here a few minutes after all.

When the girls were done with their ride, we all headed over to Scooby Doo Ghostblasters and shot ourselves some ghouls. This ride is kind of like a poor man’s Buzz Lightyear Space Ranger Spin. The concept is similar and both are themed. But the comparison pretty well ends there. Scooby is much shorter, a lot cheesier, not as nicely themed and doesn’t allow you to spin. The queue is limited when it comes to looking at anything interesting, and the ride itself seems a bit cardboard cut-outish. It’s a great way to enjoy some air conditioning, but that’s about all it has going for it.

After hanging with Mystery Incorporated it was time to go get a birds eye view of the park. (See panoramic photo in the last installment.) Little did we know that this simple act would become immortalized in the history of Biscuitdom.