Coney Island is something of an amusement park located along the Ohio River, just east of downtown Cincinnati. In the old days people use to hop on a boat and head east to enjoy a day there. Today it has a few rides, some arcade games, a couple of live shows and, I believe, the largest recirculating swimming pool in the country.
Back in the day it had a bunch of amusement park type rides, including a couple of roller coasters that, by the time I first was old enough to go there, seemed huge and very intimidating to me. Looking back on them they weren't nearly as fast and furious as anything out there today. And over the years I've ridden my share of really good coasters, including several that were the fastest, tallest, longest and coolest at the time. The old Shooting Star was a pretty cool coaster back at old Coney but it is nothing like The Beast.
The ride that scared the crap out of me, though, was called the Wild Mouse. It wasn't all that tall, nor was it all that long or fast. But it was rickety. It was a metal semi-coaster that took you up the hill and then, before dropping you, let you slowly glide through a series of 180 degree turns. When the car took those turns, and remember, it wasn't going fast, it tilted out a bit until the underpinning rollers caught the bottom of the track. Every time I thought the car was going to keep tipping and fall off.
In a way a roller coaster can be like a great car. It can be a bit intimidating, it can be fast and sometimes dangerous (at least in your mind) and quite often the old ones hold the fondest memories. Still, even after you've "conquered" a coaster you often want to go back again and again and ride it. There are cars in all of our lives that give us that same visceral thrill. Maybe one of those is in this group from this past Labor Day's Cruise-A-Palooza. Let me know.
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