Amusement Park tales

Oh, the human drama! Fighting couples used to make my bosses pause midstep and look around for someone to go deal with it. One afternoon a couple got into the kind of fight that would be followed by either professions of undying love or calls to attorneys and trips to Mama'n'Daddy as soon as they hit the driveway.

They got into an argument over Kenny Rogers. I don't know any more than that. Then the wife removed the gas cap, dropped the keys in, and walked to the park. Husbin' screamed until a ranger rode up to see what the problem was. A mechanic was called, he quoted his price, and was told the park should pay for it.

Not happ'nin.

The wife was found and she, the ranger, my boss, and the husband spent the better part of the afternoon calling various departments for wire hangers, hooks, and everything else they could think of to rig together something to retrieve the keys.

 

Well, you've got to know when to hold them and know when to walk away.

 

Yeah, every ride had a slightly different procedure that you had to learn to pass the operator's test. As a ride geek, it was always fun trying to figure out where each ride's blocks (sections of the ride where only one train or car could enter) were, and how you'd manage to pull people off the lift if you had to. Especially in some of the more remote areas of bigger rides like the rapids and log flume rides.
My favorites were the suspension coasters. If anything really bad happens where they had to take people off, there's a little platform that starts at the base of the lift and moves up underneath the train. Then they manually release the restraints and you step onto the platform and over to the stairs. I don't know if I'd have the stomach to pull that off. Just walking up the stairs on the side of the main hill on some of those coasters was enough to slow me to a crawl.
The rapids rides are interesting, too. Once you get into the main channel, it's free-flowing and there's nothing to stop the boats. There are some strategically placed jets that can steer them to an extent, but they're otherwise on their own. So if you had a worst-case scenario -- someone falling out of the boat and into the channel -- there is a procedure that quickly drains all of the water in the ride.

 

Wow! I thought they had more control than that. The most hazardous thing about our rapids ride was the sludge on the bottom. Step out of the boat and you were likely to slip on the stuff. It was also deeper than I thought. (I walked around the drained and cleaned ride once.) I'm five feet tall and the water probably came to my waist.

 

Have I told my story about being in the middle of a gender and nationality flipped real-life Griswolds at Wally World incident? It wasn't nearly as entertaining, and my boss at the time turned out to be the true hero of this story.

 

I think the ride is designed to keep the boats on a general course and make sure they don't get stuck on rocks and such by how the current is engineered, but yeah, for the most part, it's just a boat in a stream.

 

There’s a very, very unpleasant scene early in this story. Proceed with caution.

Schlitterbahn’s Tragic Slide

 

This was well before my time working there, but I think every kid who grew up in New Jersey in the 1980s knew the story.
I worked there about 10 years after this happened. By then they'd redeveloped that part of the park to a German theme and one of the rides was the bumper cars. I knew people who worked on them who swore the ride was haunted. The cars would occasionally wig out, drive on their own, things like that.
My first job was working at an ice cream stand in that area. I never saw any spooky stuff, but to this day I can still get a perfect swirl coming out of any soft serve machine in the world.

The Haunted Castle, Revisited - NFPA Journal

 

Well, shoot, so can many of us with enough practice. I haven't worked food service in more than 25 years but if you're at an all-you-can-eat with a soft-serve machine and you somehow trust that machine from a health and sanitation point of view, I can crank out a decent swirl for you.

 

So can 2 girls, 1 cup.

 

Yep!

 

Best wooden coaster evah!