> Islands of Adventure has lots of really great roller coasters. The best was Duelling Dragons, a double coaster where the two trains, Fire Dragon and Ice Dragon, set off at the same time and go through their tracks within a foot of each other at some points. It's an inverted coaster and a really good long ride too, with huge numbers of awesomely scary drops, loops, corkscrews and everything else you can imagine. We went on each dragon two or three times to figure out which was more h4rdc0re. Fire was definitely better, mostly for the very first drop, which is just indescribable. To finish off our last day at the two parks, I waited in the "front row" line for Fire Dragon for about half an hour. Being in the front row on that first drop was pretty much worth the cost of admission all by itself. The other really noteworthy rides at the park were the Incredible Hulk rollercoaster, and the Spiderman 3-D ride. Dr Doom's Fear Fall was OK too, but not really worth more than one ride like the others were.

Agh! ENORMOUS jealousy trip sets in at this point. I really want to go to one of those big BIG parks with the cool rides; I've only ever been to three theme parks, and none of them were really mindblowing.

The three I'm talking about are Pleasurewood Hills (I think that's what it's called), Chessington World of Adventures (I hope they spent some money on the rides because they obviously spent very little on the name) and Thorpe Park. Of the three, Thorpe Park is the only one with any really good rides, and there the only really good one is Colossus. That's their main attraction, a rollercoaster that turns you upside down ten separate times throughout the course of the ride. It's pretty cool, especially the corkscrews where you're dangling into your harness and hoping you don't have a heart condition, but just isn't that exciting second time around. *sigh* Another one that sounds really good, called X:\No Way Out (any ride that tries to get coolness off a DOS prompt is asking for trouble) is touted as a "backwards rollercoaster in pitch darkness", but actually going backwards makes it really dull, and it's not in pitch darkness, just semi-gloom.

Is it that I'm hardened to cool stuff and don't appreciate it, or just that the designers aren't very inventive?

Si-"I want to go to Floridaaaaaaa"-gi

PS. Recently Thorpe Park installed "Nemesis:Inferno", which is supposedly really good. Still being built when I went there, though.