Knott's Berry Farm

Sunday Lauren and I decided to celebrate Easter the way God intended, by heading to Knott's Berry Farm. This was her second visit but my first. We had a lot of fun, marred by some ill feelings on my part. We hit 10 rides and attractions:

• Silver Bullet - My favorite ride of the day. Very reminiscent of Scream!, only seemed a bit longer. I really like corkscrews.
• Jaguar! - More of a family coaster, especially coming after Silver Bullet. Still this was a fun ride.
• Montezooma's Revenge - this unfortunately named coaster marks my first backward inversion. I was stunned to learn that it is over 20 years old! The launching mechanism on this is a flywheel rather than hydraulics, but it felt about the same to me.
• Knott's Wild West Stunt Show - Hammy acting and some loud noises. This was surprisingly funny.
• Ghost Rider - My first mistake of the day. First the good - this had really nice drops, and was a really long ride despite feeling very fast. Now the bad...it was by far our longest line of the day. That's not such a big deal, but this thing shook my head around so much I was checking my ears for blood by the end. I am starting to learn my coaster preferences, and my main one is that I don't think I like wooden roller coasters. I've only ridden three that I can think of - this, Psyclone, and Colossus - and of the three, Colossus is the only one that didn't make me feel like I had just gone 30 seconds with Bas Rutten.
• Xcelerator - After recovering with some lunch, we hit Xcelerator. My God this thing accelerates you. The ride is only about 20 seconds but it is a great 20 seconds: amazing acceleration and the top of that tower is a very cool feeling. This had a really short line also. I was shocked to learn that the other coasters in this style, such as Kingda Ka and Top Thrill Dragster are twice as high and even faster.
• Boomerang - Montezooma's Revenge launches you right out of the loading station. Boomerang instead cranks you backwards up a spike, and then rolls you forward through the loading station and through a cobrahead and an inversion, before stopping and repeating it all backwards. My third backwards coaster and my first backwards cobrahead.
• Supreme Scream - This cranks you to the top, and then power shoots you down. These rides make me nervous but I always have fun on them.
• Timber Mountain Log Ride - A log flume, pretty tame but still fun and a nice change of pace. The talking moose was great.
• Hat Dance - This is one of those spinner rides where you can further spin your car, like the teacups at Disneyland. I am embarassed to say I spun myself sick. I started the day with a smallish headache, Ghost Rider really didn't help matters, and this put me over the top. I didn't get sick or anything but that was it for me and I felt pretty crummy the rest of the day.

Even with the occasional sick feelings, this was a very fun day. It was good training for the upcoming biannual CalTech Great Adventure night which is just two weeks away. My one regret (well, besides spinning myself stupid and getting on Ghost Rider) was that I tried to buy a boysenberry Icee but the stand we bought from was all out. How often do you get a chance to buy a boysenberry Icee?