Being paid to ride roller coasters (Tuesday, May. 24, 2005)

A week of silence as despite my attempts to get fired, my company decided to send me to LA for a week! Fan bloody tastic. My work colleague and I got there a day early so we had a day to kick around and do something non work
related. So what did we choose to do? Did we spend the day relaxing on Malibu beach, watching the *ahem* sights?
Did we spend a day in LA sight-seeing? Did we have a cultural day out at the Getty Center? Or did we behave like a
couple of kids and go to the largest roller coaster park in the world?

So off we went to 'Magic Mountain', and joined the queue of a billion teenagers, looking like a sad old gay couple. The Getty Center started to look far more appealing once I'd seen the size of these things - at least twice the height of anything in the UK. To put it in some perspective, the highest roller-coaster at Thorpe Park is 98 feet
high (Collosas), the highest at Magic Mountain is 415 feet (Superman The Escape). To put it mildly, I was shit
scared. The first ride wasn't too bad, despite being the largest looping roller-coaster in the world. Then came
Goliath. At it's peak it is 235 feet high but the main drop takes you underground into a tunnel, an almost vertical fall of 255 feet at 87 mph - pant stirring stuff.

But that was before Superman. We'd been walking past this thing all day which had been making the noise of a jet plane, and convinced ourselves that we would truly be a gay couple if we didn't do the manly thing, and join the queue of 12 year olds for the ride. The queue was much shorter than I'd hoped, and before I knew it we were strapped into this 'thing'. The worst bit about all the rides was the tension that builds whilst you are sat in the
car waiting to be flung so fast your internal organs swap places. This was doubled on Superman by 3 factors, firstly the wait was nigh on 5 minutes, secondly, the girl in front started crying saying 'get me off please, I want
to get off, I'm going to die' and thirdly, all the staff ignoring the girls plea. I started wondering to myself whether she'd had one of those 'Final Destination' film type premonitions, and we were actually about to be jettisoned into space.

Then we're off, over 100 miles an hour in no time, and shot up to over 400 feet. Just awesome. At the peak of the
ride you experience over 5 seconds of weightlessness, and then you're on your way down, where (in my case) you can
watch your sun glasses fly off your head and into the sky above you, never to be seen again. I can't imagine I'll ever come much closer to throwing up (without the intervention of alcohol) than on that ride. I also forgot to check the seat in front of me to see if the girl in front had actually been shot into space, ah well, I'll check for it on the news later.

The rest of the visit was fairly timid by comparison, there was the night where I got off the lift at the wrong floor in the hotel and tried pretty much every door with my key card before realising. There was the humour at American versions of words, 'pants' being a particular favourite. Much fun was had going into clothes stores to
find a helpful assistant who would 'help us find some pants that weren't too tight' - such kids. The winner by a
country mile though goes to Bonnie the 80 year old air steward (that's American Airlines for you) on the journey back, who in offering me more wine said 'would you like me to touch you up sir?'.

Yes please Bonnie...

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