katy + spinny stuff = bad

Today we went to the State Fair again, to do all the non-ride stuff that we didn’t do last Tuesday and probably won’t this Tuesday either. The great part is, it was practically free. We have season passes for admission; we took the train and a shuttle bus to the fair so we wouldn’t have to drive and park; and we didn’t ride any rides today. Good thing too — the rides are anywhere from $4 to $6 each. I can’t see why anyone would go any day but $2 Tuesdays.

The more I go to amusement parks, the clearer it is becoming to me that I can’t go on any rides that spin. I never used to have any problem with any rides, but now the only ones I don’t get queasy on are the straight on roller coasters or straight drop kinds of rides. I think that it’s probably related to my terrible sense of balance and my general clumsiness and tendency to knock things over and bump into stuff as I walk. Maybe I have messed-up inner ear crystals.

Speaking of rides that spin, last Tuesday Doc and Kim and I went on the new, modern equivalent of the old Spinnaker ride at Six Flags. This is the torturous barrel-shaped thing that spins at ridiculous speeds, glues you to the wall using G-force, and then drops the floor out from under you. No one with any semblance of sanity would get into this contraption, but we did. (What does that tell you?) The last time I went on the Spinnaker it was with Kim in high school, and we drank a milkshake before we got into the thing, and we paid for it the rest of the night. This time, fifteen years later, we got into the thing again (no milkshake this time) and that pretty much ruined the rest of the rides for me that evening. The problem with the State Fair is that most of the rides spin. At least at Six Flags, there’s a whole lot of them that just go straight.

Doc tells this hilarious tear-inducing story about when he went on the equivalent of the Spinnaker at an amusement park in North Carolina when he was a kid. You really have to hear it from him in person to get the full effect, but in a nutshell, a girl across from him lost her lunch and it CREPT AROUND the side of the thing, and people were screaming and struggling to get away from it while they were being pinned down by G-force.