Magical Mountains

Sunday (today/yesterday) was our trip to Magic Mountain. We rode lots of coasters, which is my main reason for going to theme parks.

Some highlights: After a long wait for the Tatsu, including a 30m wait when we were the 3rd group in line because it broke down, we got to ride that one. It was as good as I remembered, but the experience was marred by having to wait so long, among other things. But immediately after that we went on the Ninja! Nin Nin Nin! No wait time at all, and it's a great little coaster, an inverted cars type which zips in and out of the trees above one of the water rides, much like a "real" ninja might.

Next up I went for my standard attempt to convince people to ride the Superman with me. I usually fail at this, but this time everyone helped me convince L's sister to go with! We waited in line, which was pretty short, which is good as the ride itself is pretty short and if there's a long line it's not really worth it. The queuing was fun, because there are two spots where the path splits, and each time I asked which way we should go, only to get an indifferent answer... so we went left at the first split, and left again at the second split, and ended up being all the way in the front of the car! For those who may not know this ride, it's a powered launch which accelerates quite rapidly, and then it hits a hill and ends up going straight upwards. Then you say hi to Superman, experience a bit of weightlessness and then go rocketing backwards along the track back up to the station. Basically a L shape where you start at the base of the L. It was excellent! I hadn't been on it in several years, but it was worth the wait. I think Ris liked it as well, at least once she opened her eyes to see Superman.

Next in line was the Deja Vu, which is a coaster I'd not been on in previous trips: This is sort of an out and back coaster, but with a cool design: It's an inverted coaster (you hang from the track), and the seats are in a blunt V shape, such that for one car you'd have 4 across, but they're staggered, so even the seats in the middle have a good view to the sides. The train gets pulled up a giant vertical column which is 'before' the station, and then released to go rocketing through the station, into a couple of half loops and then a full loop and then up another vertical column, where it hangs for a few seconds. And then you go through the exact same setup in reverse, which feels really cool because you can't see where you're going at all this time. The wait for this one was a decent bit, but was very worth it, especially since I'd not been on it before, and I'll definitely go again.

We then walked over to the Batman, along the way we spotted the Batman Action Theatre, with huge explosions and stuff going on there, though we couldn't see very well. It was really packed, which I found surprising at first, then it made more sense: I go to theme parks pretty much exclusively for the coasters, but a lot of families with smaller children (who can't ride the coasters) have to do other things, and thus an action show is probably a good bet. Anyways, the Batman coaster was excellent, there was no waiting (it's one of the older coasters in the park) and it was a good ride. Some of the others say it's one of the worst for motion sickness, but as I don't really get motion sick it's one of my favorites. It's also an inverted coaster, sitting, and has a lot of loops and corkscrews.

Finally, we visited the Scream. Which I think is a dumb name for a coaster and doesn't have as strong a theming as the rest, but it still is a good ride: non-inverted (is there a better name for that) sit-down coaster, four people across, and it has a ton of loops, corkscrews and that sort of thing. Probably either the smoothest or second smoothest looping coaster in the park (I think the Tatsu is a bit smoother of a ride, but hard to compare the two.)

We had two other stops on the list, but unfortunately when we reached the Goliath (my favorite coaster in the park, and also L's most hated) it was closed for a while due to malfunction, and thus we moved on (It did start up again before the park closed, but it was getting late). We headed over to the X, which is the only other coaster in the park I'd not tried, along the way a huge fireworks display started over the park. Very awesome. There was a pretty big line for the X, and since we didn't actually know how long it was (since you couldn't really see the far part of it, and we'd not been on it before), we decided to save that one for another day.