Jarrett
Most Obnoxious Member 2016
So with Great Lakes leaving me just one credit short of 300, it also left me in a ton of control over what it was. I had recently had a trip somewhere else fall through but I had the time off so I decided to do one of two overnighters I had been planning to do, and with one of them having a looking GCI I had been wanting to get on, Six Flags St. Louis was the obvious choice. I had also hoped to maybe do some cultural things out that way that interested me, one of which I found just driving past it and the other I had learned about from the Civilization PC game franchise.
Day 1
I woke up pretty early on day one after a good night's sleep, got my crap together, and got my Uber to the airport to grab my car. The rental they gave me was an absolute piece of crap but it got the job done. So with that in the bag I made my way west, stopping once to grab McDonald's and a few times for potty breaks before getting to St. Louis. I parked my rental, checked into my hotel, and grabbed my Uber right down the street to the park!
After getting left at the drop off area, I headed in to see six American flags flying over the entrance, first I'd ever seen that.
The entrance mall reminded me a bit of Six Flags America's main street but with Compounce's layout. It looks like an old school 1910's Midwestern town and it's just how that should look, I loved it.
Hanging a left for 1904 World's Fair, which actually had a discernible theme in the section where I was headed, credit 300 was mine!
American Thunder was my first coaster considered to be a compact model by GCI, but I had no idea how tiny it actually was! This coaster might actually fit in my side yard! It's impressive seeing all that crammed into such a tiny ball of twisted wood.
Represent!
I had prioritized this coaster ever since Mystic Timbers Media Day. At that event, Mystic Timbers became my new favorite GCI hands down, but several people including my ACE rep were saying "I can't put that above a GCI with a double down, I'm sorry." So that made me want to get out here more, here I am! Let's get that 300th credit, the line's short and everything!
I loved American Thunder on my first ride, got a seat in the back and everything. However, I can't help but feel it' was slightly overrated as a GCI. It was very good, don't get me wrong. I absolutely loved it. However, my first ride had onboard audio. There were two kids in front of my trying to shriek as loudly and annoyingly as possible and parents who were photographing them coming back into the station thinking it was cute. So that was extremely annoying. Onto the ride, it was actually very good. Really violent in those tight corners, some nice low to the ground maneuvers, and nice interaction with the structure punctuated by those beautiful red crossover beams. Most of the air on the ride was phenomenal, as good GCI air mostly is. However, the last two hills went from solid floater-ejector to just mild floater. I loved it, it was a great ride, but it's nowhere near their best creation. It's one of their best, but not at all their overall best. Renegade and Mystic Timbers both destroy it, but it's a good ride still.
But a credit's a credit, and a milestone's a milestone! And a themed milestone sign is a themed milestone sign!
The queue attendant took my official photo so here it is! The big three double oh is in the bag and the milestone sign now hangs on my wall above Paco's fish tank!
I explored onward after that in search of more creds, having not even looked at a map previously, and got to Ninja only to find it down with people stuck on it. Call CNN! I knew these things weren't safe, that's how I've been on 300 of them and never been involved in a ride accident.
That almost changed later in the day...
The park was landscaped beautifully! Hard to navigate at first, but it's pretty for a Six Flags park.
Next up was the park's Arrow mine train, River King Mine Train. I wasn't expecting much out of this but it kind of impressed me, to be honest. It's certainly a weird little coaster with a ton of lift hills, but it interacts with its terrain beautifully and that drop in complete darkness is kind of disorienting. A few more tunnels would have been nice, but this is an awesome family coaster. Another ride lands at #3 in its set, this time behind Thunderation and Adventure Express.
Then I did the most forgettable boomerang ever. It's called Boomerang, it has old Arrow trains that have derailed in the past, a bright and unoriginal Six Flags color scheme, not much to be said really. Found it a bit rough.
With that out of the way, I headed back to another patriotic-themed wooden coaster, Screamin' Eagle! We all know how I feel about this era of coaster but I went in with an open mind, having heard it's a mess of airtime.
Photo didn't turn out but it doesn't need to be crystal clear to see that this is possibly the weirdest place to put a coaster entrance.
My first problem with this ride right here. The ramp up to the station isn't a tunnel, it's a 30-inch slot in the wall. Now I don't think I actually have claustrophobia, but I really, really, REALLY don't like enclosed spaces so this drove me nuts, especially with how hot it was. I kept my eyes fixed on the little slot by the ceiling the whole time just trying to remind myself there was more space out there.
Boss looked beautiful once there was a window, though!
Liked the eagle heads on the sides of the trains! Only red had them but it was a nice touch!
Well that let me down.
I was honestly hoping that this might be a classic that wasn't #RMCitorWreckit. I had seen online that it was back in the woods so something like Wild One in that setting would have surely wowed me. But it didn't. There was literally no airtime on this ride, it was like riding a couch over somewhat badly maintained wooden coaster track with no air or sense of speed. It barely creeps over each of its hills and even in the second row to the back (where I was told to sit multiple times) it didn't get me out of my seat and into the at restraint at all. The best moment of the ride is a very weak pop of floater that took me off guard just because it was stronger than the rest of this forceless snoozefest. Sadly the setting back in the woods like that is pretty unique for a classic coaster, which is why I had high hopes that it wouldn't put me to sleep, but sadly it's just not a good ride. At all. So you know what that means, this ride gets the lovely distinction of...
#RMCitorWreckit
With that out of the way, the next stop was the third and final woodie at the park, the CCI juggernaut known as The Boss.
So I decided to break down and get a locker for this one just because I didn't know how likely the trains were to break my electronics on a ride like this, having never done Gerstlauer wooden trains before. Well I didn't remember my locker because I was expecting a reciept with the number on it (I always just keep that in my pocket) but it didn't give me one. So I had to have a locker tech come over and get my dollar out so I could get my rental, which I ended up just photographing on the screen and keeping around with me.
Unlike Eagle, I went into this told that this ride was absolutely horrible. The walk back to it takes forever and I noticed the trains aren't exactly GCI's rolling armchairs. I picked the second to back row and sat down, braced for the worst. And honestly, I don't see the hate for it! Okay, I do, but I enjoyed it. That first drop into the ramp down the terrain and down into that second turn is awesome and you get so much air on it. Those high turns and steep drops throw you from your seat so much, the air hills do too to an extent. However, I can easily see why someone wouldn't like it. Those turns along the hillside, while taken very fast, are very underbanked and very rough. If you don't mind riding a little defensively, it's fine. But if you don't like this ride it doesn't make you a wuss at all, it is a rough ride and I will admit the helix at the end is terrible. Not Cornball or Legend terrible, but pretty terrible.
Now here's where I'm going to get hate. Could RMC improve it? Absolutely. An RMC on that scale renamed The Master or something would be absolutely sick. However, I feel like Screamin' Eagle is the coaster that should be RMCed out of this park. You could have a great GCI that's all twisted up in a lovely knot of airtime, a big epic CCI that dishes out an insane, irreverent ride, and an RMC that runs back into the woods like that, maybe even call it Screamin' Cardinal for the team of the same name. I feel the same way about Boss that I felt about the original Rattler. I liked it for the concept, not necessarily the geometry. And while I never rode original Rattler, I wanted to because it looked insane dropping down that quarry and twisting around it, when it was RMCed it shot right to the top of my bucket list because they took a coaster that looked awesome for its concept and added geometry in an attempt to make it totally awesome. Keep Boss's terrain interaction, get some steeper climbs and dives out of those high turns, kill that MCBR, and do something with that helix and it would be an amazing ride. However, Screamin' Eagle would be almost as good as an RMC I feel, and they would retain a good wooden coaster as opposed to a bad one if they RMCed that one instead of Boss.
After a few rerides on Boss I headed to Pandemonium. I love these Gerstlauer spinners and it barely had a line! I rode with this couple on one side and just me on the other, so needless to say it spun like crazy. Add in the little Tony Hawk thing still left under that turn and you have what I think is my new favorite spinner. These spin like crazy!
With that out of the way I headed up for Batman and Mr. Freeze to get this park cleaned out.
This is probably the sorriest clone I've seen in terms of theming left. They just kind of took the cop car fountain out and left this, quite a change from SFGAm's that still had the lights on and water gushing from the hydrant.
Standard Batman clone, no theming, waste of speed, just loads you down with force and hits you a few times. One and done.
Possibly the most pathetic example I've ever seen of DC theming forced on a ride where it wasn't appropriate.
Final credit to clean the park out! Mr. Freeze was kind of hard to find (I had skipped over its area for a while) but once I found that plaza, I knew I had found it! This queue entrance was awesome, but little did I know that the rest of the theming was off the hook too!
This is the coolest station ever, no pun intended! It's themed like some demented villain's abandoned ice cream factory hideout, right down to the trippy grunge station music! This is some of my favorite Six Flags theming yet!
I loved the sliding station too!
Add in the coolest Premier trains ever and you have me hooked before I'm even on the ride!
Oh my god! This is easily my favorite old school Premier coaster I've been on! If the awesome theming hadn't won me over as is, the ride experience is pretty great too! Going up that top hat, the sun will almost certainly blind you for a split second (eclipse glasses ERT anyone), and the upside down floater in that top hat is freaky as is, but combining the two you have probably the most disorienting element ever, and not just because you're going backwards. Sitting in the back like I did, that vertical spike is insane as it lifts you as high as it can before dropping you face first to do the whole thing again. I'm sold on this being my new favorite type of clone, why couldn't all parks get these instead of boomerangs?
With the park all cleaned out now, I headed to Justice League, remembering how much I loved the one in Chicago.
We'll buy a bunch of Proslide blaster slides and Larson loops and market them as coasters and BOOM!!!! There goes Cedar Point's reputation as Roller Coaster Capital of the World!
I guess the advantage of these screen rides is that they're super cheap to clone. This is one of the two originals so it wasn't as good as the newer one at SFGAm but it was still very enjoyable. I want to do one of the newer ones, I hear the ones being built now have Harley Quinn in them too!
Alright, let's see how she fares in the front!
Yeah, it's still amazing, but it's a back seat ride. That trio of bunny hops at the end is good, but you're sacrificing a lot of airtime for speed in the front, and on such a tiny coaster, there just isn't that much speed. Great pacing, but you can definitely tell it's only 80 feet tall. So I rode again in the back and moved on for night rides.
I need a new camera, I photographed the sun and the moon wasn't even in front of it.
Did Excalibur real fast on the way per recommendation and it was fun. Not earth shattering but probably the best flat ride in the Midwest.
Went back for a few on Boss to wait out the sunset! And in the very front, the beginning of the ride is awesome as you accelerate out of that giant first drop!
Well on one of the rides the girl in front of me let her hat just fly off and it got sucked right into my wheel assembly. So she was laughing like what happened wasn't extremely dangerous. Luckily it just chewed it up and spat it out but it was still really dangerous and could have seriously damaged the ride. So she's like "you see that hat" and I straight up told her it wasn't funny and let the ride ops know. And she threw a hissy fit because they wouldn't go get her hat that she lost being an idiot.
Just power lapping this until it gets dark and I can go back to American Thunder for some last rides!
Boss is everything Son of Beast wishes it was! Big, violent, imposing, a ton of airtime, and most importantly, safe. Those Gerstlauer trains are great for rougher rides and at night when you can't see where you're going until you rise up above that treeline overlooking the park, it's incredible. Definitely an amazing ride! Not quite CCI's best work (that has to be Raven or Great White) but it's up there!
Couldn't say no to one more lap on Mr. Freeze on my way over.
There was a skunk in the planter! Second time that's happened this season! A path sweep had to keep us all back and keep the kids from petting it. Awful pic, sadly, but it was dark and SFSL isn't lit very well.
So I expected American Thunder to be all lit up and beautiful at night...wrong! Not a glimmer of light on it, perfect for night rides!
And man it was! Triple dipped in the back to close out the night and it was absolutely incredible! It really warmed up some more and was riding much more aggressively than it had been earlier. And for the last ride of the night, just before they dispatched, "Hit Me With Your Best Shot" by Pat Benatar came on and the ride ops got the whole train clapping as we rolled out! The perfect way to end the night, getting tossed around that dimly lit wooden structure in almost total darkness!
After that I had a bit of an Uber mishap...my phone died even though I had turned it off. So I went to ask for a charging station when it turned out I knew the supervisor I had asked! This guy worked at Cedar Point and remembered me when I met him last season, but when I approached him he just said, "hey, Jarrett!" It was totally by chance I had met him, said he recognized me rocking the Steel Vengeance shirt. So he was nice enough to loan me his charger to charge up enough to get an Uber back to the hotel.
What a nice little hotel room! It had this cool Gateway Arch picture hanging over the bed! I put my stuff down, went to gas up and grab some White Castle to eat in the hotel room with the beer I brought from home, and hit the sack tired as anything.
Day 2
I woke up around 7 because I couldn't get back to sleep and grabbed hotel breakfast. Afterwards I got in the car and headed to the first of two cultural things of the trip, Route 66 State Park!
This was the first parking lot I found in the state park, just a boat launch.
Pretty landscape, and somewhere over there is a bridge that used to be a part of Route 66.
Found a trail entrance not too far from it. Still nothing that noteworthy, but I did find what I was looking for, kind of!
This, right here, is a part of what used to be the iconic Route 66! You used to be able to follow this bad boy all the way to California!
Me with what used to be Route 66!
The final stop I made at Route 66 State Park was the one I was looking for, this is the visitors center!
It used to be a hotel but it was converted into a museum.
It was obviously very blocked off but this is that bridge! You can check it out from the parking lot!
The museum was actually pretty well put together, albeit a bit small.
All kinds of artifacts from when Route 66 was in service. Hotel memorabilia and old road signs and the like.
Most of this was just artifacts but that gourd in the middle was actually handpainted by someone who liked 66.
Those little drive in movie theaters that were popular in the Route 66 era? Turns out they would actually rent out heaters for a small fee because it got cold at night!
I should just take what's left of 66 to Texas next year.
They had a ton of stuff memorializing this hotel on display. Apparently it had individual garages for travelers to store their cars at night.
Got my kicks, off to the next destination...which started with a mildly amusing GPS direction!
My final stop of the trip was something I just kind of found online and decided to check out because I knew it was close by. The largest archaeological site in North America, Cahokia Mounds Heritage Site is in Collinsville, Illinois. It was the biggest Native American city to ever exist north of Mexico and was larger than almost every European city at the time. Now on the site sits some of what is left of Cahokia, this interpretation center (which we're about to check out), and their iconic 100-foot tall Monks Mound earth pyramid.
For some reason they grew test swatches of prairie here, not sure why but they had a few of these planters growing wild prairie plants in the parking lot.
There was this really cool mural on the door that showed eagles flying over Monks Mound.
Inside a big, beautiful lobby, the centerpiece is this little model of the site. That big pyramid in the center is Monks Mound.
Right away you can tell this isn't just a few piles of dirt and some rocks. They excavated a lot and all of it is on display with plenty of info about it. I was actually amazed at how some of these things were not only made but also how long they lasted.
When preservation forces you to build the RMC next to the John Allen woodie.
Cahokia was built by a people known as the Mississippian Culture, who lived along and traded all over the greater Mississippi River. Cahokia was by far their biggest city but there were little villages connected to larger villages along the river all over the region.
This is kind of the prize of their collection and it's called the Birdman Tablet. Despite being thousands of miles away, I couldn't help but be reminded of the Mayan artwork we saw in Tulum back in 2013. Had Cahokia not died off, I feel like the Mississippian culture could have easily become just as great as the Mayans or Aztecs. The odd thing was that their artwork was so similar yet so different.
This was a very long wooden canoe they excavated from the site.
For those of you wondering where them hoes at, them hoes is at Cahokia! But in all seriousness, these hoes (there is a stone equivalent too) were how they built mounds! They'd use them to scoop dirt into a large 50 pound basket and carry it to the mound to be dumped and formed.
This diorama was split into quadrants to show how they lived throughout the seasons. This is the spring quadrant, which shows them fishing. Notice how well they're made!
Yeah their diorama game was on point. Several beautiful displays that showed life in Cahokia all over this museum. This one shows them hunting and gathering on one side and farming on the other. While agriculture allowed them to grow a surplus of food and stay there year round, they continued to hunt, gather, and fish for food.
Look how well this figurine was preserved! It was actually on a turntable so you could view it in the round. This statue is roughly 1000 years old!
Towards the middle of the room was a large glass box you could walk through that was done up to look like a stroll through the city when it was populated.
This was a reproduction of the granaries where they stored their food surplus. It was built on stilts coated in animal fat to keep animals from getting in and eating their crops.
I found it interesting that they were living an urban life driven by agriculture yet still grabbed that bow and arrow and went out to hunt their meat. There was no mention of domesticating farm animals so I wonder if they just didn't mention it or there was a reason they didn't raise their own livestock.
Some more well preserved artifacts they dug up.
They had a small segment in the back explaining the archaeology that went into the interpretation center and how they did the digs. This shows the excavation of a mound in layers with bones and artifacts found inside.
After a short ten minute movie about everything, it was time to head over to Monks Mound!
Pictures do not do Monks Mound justice. Yes, in most of these, it looks like a grassy hill. But it's a huge, man-made, perfectly pyramid-shaped grassy hill. They spent 300 years building this structure in four layers and it's a good 100 feet tall.
Monks Mound as seen from an angle.
In the context of the people who used to live here in Cahokia, Monks Mound was where the chief lived. Like in many depictions of Mesoamerican pyramids, particularly Mayan, you'll see a small wooden hut atop the structure? Monks Mound was made of packed earth and not brick like a Mayan pyramid, but it had the hut as well, and that's where the chief of the city lived.
When we went to Tulum in 2013, there was a pyramid-styled Mayan temple at the archaeological site but we weren't allowed to climb it. They used to, but ever since some stupid archaeology student vandalized 700 year old stucco with a glass bottle in the temple at the top, they stopped letting people climb. But Cahokia still allowed visitors to climb Monks Mound!
Time to climb my first pyramid! And in possibly the last place I thought you would be able to do such a thing!
One level down, one to go!
Monks Mound is climbed! It was honestly a bit harder to get up than I had initially thought because it's a bit steeper than a normal staircase but anyone could climb it.
The view from Monks Mound, folks! All of this used to be a huge Native American city!
You could see the whole site almost! Several mounds, and markers could be seen from the top.
This is kind of the moment where your Cahokia trip all comes together. It comes across as a nice museum on the edge of a sketchy suburb at first but once you get to the top of Monks Mound, all of that information you learned in the museum comes together. You get up there and look around and it's very clear that there used to be an enormous Native American city all around you. Like, you have a sense of what it used to look like but Monks Mound convinces you that it's not just a story, it feels way more real after climbing.
From one great city on the Mississippi to the next, you can clearly see St. Louis's skyline and the Gateway Arch from the top.
The chief that lived here certainly had quite the view to wake up to!
The highway is back that way somewhere but you can't see the mound from it.
This is one of the most incredible things I've ever done in my travels and nobody knows it's here! I'm going to be hyping the absolute crap out of Cahokia whenever I hear of anyone going that way, because as of now it's my favorite thing in St. Louis!
Climbing down was precarious and actually kind of sad, but I'll be back here someday for sure!
From Cahokia I hopped in the car and headed home, with a stop to get horrible Taco Bell service and get hopelessly lost trying to find my way around some traffic in Terre Haute. But I got home at a reasonable time and dad had made Manicotti!
What an incredible time! Emily and I always joke about how awful St. Louis is because we constantly get lost there every time we drive through but honestly, there are worse places to be lost. It's home to two amazing wooden coasters, a pretty good state park with a cool little museum, and a UNESCO World Heritage site that happens to be the biggest cultural hidden gem I've ever come across. Definitely hang out here a bit if you do SFSL, if anything Six Flags and Cahokia are enough for an awesome full day. Not to mention the Gateway Arch which I did the first time I came through here! I love St. Louis!
Day 1
I woke up pretty early on day one after a good night's sleep, got my crap together, and got my Uber to the airport to grab my car. The rental they gave me was an absolute piece of crap but it got the job done. So with that in the bag I made my way west, stopping once to grab McDonald's and a few times for potty breaks before getting to St. Louis. I parked my rental, checked into my hotel, and grabbed my Uber right down the street to the park!
After getting left at the drop off area, I headed in to see six American flags flying over the entrance, first I'd ever seen that.
The entrance mall reminded me a bit of Six Flags America's main street but with Compounce's layout. It looks like an old school 1910's Midwestern town and it's just how that should look, I loved it.
Hanging a left for 1904 World's Fair, which actually had a discernible theme in the section where I was headed, credit 300 was mine!
American Thunder was my first coaster considered to be a compact model by GCI, but I had no idea how tiny it actually was! This coaster might actually fit in my side yard! It's impressive seeing all that crammed into such a tiny ball of twisted wood.
Represent!
I had prioritized this coaster ever since Mystic Timbers Media Day. At that event, Mystic Timbers became my new favorite GCI hands down, but several people including my ACE rep were saying "I can't put that above a GCI with a double down, I'm sorry." So that made me want to get out here more, here I am! Let's get that 300th credit, the line's short and everything!
I loved American Thunder on my first ride, got a seat in the back and everything. However, I can't help but feel it' was slightly overrated as a GCI. It was very good, don't get me wrong. I absolutely loved it. However, my first ride had onboard audio. There were two kids in front of my trying to shriek as loudly and annoyingly as possible and parents who were photographing them coming back into the station thinking it was cute. So that was extremely annoying. Onto the ride, it was actually very good. Really violent in those tight corners, some nice low to the ground maneuvers, and nice interaction with the structure punctuated by those beautiful red crossover beams. Most of the air on the ride was phenomenal, as good GCI air mostly is. However, the last two hills went from solid floater-ejector to just mild floater. I loved it, it was a great ride, but it's nowhere near their best creation. It's one of their best, but not at all their overall best. Renegade and Mystic Timbers both destroy it, but it's a good ride still.
But a credit's a credit, and a milestone's a milestone! And a themed milestone sign is a themed milestone sign!
The queue attendant took my official photo so here it is! The big three double oh is in the bag and the milestone sign now hangs on my wall above Paco's fish tank!
I explored onward after that in search of more creds, having not even looked at a map previously, and got to Ninja only to find it down with people stuck on it. Call CNN! I knew these things weren't safe, that's how I've been on 300 of them and never been involved in a ride accident.
That almost changed later in the day...
The park was landscaped beautifully! Hard to navigate at first, but it's pretty for a Six Flags park.
Next up was the park's Arrow mine train, River King Mine Train. I wasn't expecting much out of this but it kind of impressed me, to be honest. It's certainly a weird little coaster with a ton of lift hills, but it interacts with its terrain beautifully and that drop in complete darkness is kind of disorienting. A few more tunnels would have been nice, but this is an awesome family coaster. Another ride lands at #3 in its set, this time behind Thunderation and Adventure Express.
Then I did the most forgettable boomerang ever. It's called Boomerang, it has old Arrow trains that have derailed in the past, a bright and unoriginal Six Flags color scheme, not much to be said really. Found it a bit rough.
With that out of the way, I headed back to another patriotic-themed wooden coaster, Screamin' Eagle! We all know how I feel about this era of coaster but I went in with an open mind, having heard it's a mess of airtime.
Photo didn't turn out but it doesn't need to be crystal clear to see that this is possibly the weirdest place to put a coaster entrance.
My first problem with this ride right here. The ramp up to the station isn't a tunnel, it's a 30-inch slot in the wall. Now I don't think I actually have claustrophobia, but I really, really, REALLY don't like enclosed spaces so this drove me nuts, especially with how hot it was. I kept my eyes fixed on the little slot by the ceiling the whole time just trying to remind myself there was more space out there.
Boss looked beautiful once there was a window, though!
Liked the eagle heads on the sides of the trains! Only red had them but it was a nice touch!
Well that let me down.
I was honestly hoping that this might be a classic that wasn't #RMCitorWreckit. I had seen online that it was back in the woods so something like Wild One in that setting would have surely wowed me. But it didn't. There was literally no airtime on this ride, it was like riding a couch over somewhat badly maintained wooden coaster track with no air or sense of speed. It barely creeps over each of its hills and even in the second row to the back (where I was told to sit multiple times) it didn't get me out of my seat and into the at restraint at all. The best moment of the ride is a very weak pop of floater that took me off guard just because it was stronger than the rest of this forceless snoozefest. Sadly the setting back in the woods like that is pretty unique for a classic coaster, which is why I had high hopes that it wouldn't put me to sleep, but sadly it's just not a good ride. At all. So you know what that means, this ride gets the lovely distinction of...
#RMCitorWreckit
With that out of the way, the next stop was the third and final woodie at the park, the CCI juggernaut known as The Boss.
So I decided to break down and get a locker for this one just because I didn't know how likely the trains were to break my electronics on a ride like this, having never done Gerstlauer wooden trains before. Well I didn't remember my locker because I was expecting a reciept with the number on it (I always just keep that in my pocket) but it didn't give me one. So I had to have a locker tech come over and get my dollar out so I could get my rental, which I ended up just photographing on the screen and keeping around with me.
Unlike Eagle, I went into this told that this ride was absolutely horrible. The walk back to it takes forever and I noticed the trains aren't exactly GCI's rolling armchairs. I picked the second to back row and sat down, braced for the worst. And honestly, I don't see the hate for it! Okay, I do, but I enjoyed it. That first drop into the ramp down the terrain and down into that second turn is awesome and you get so much air on it. Those high turns and steep drops throw you from your seat so much, the air hills do too to an extent. However, I can easily see why someone wouldn't like it. Those turns along the hillside, while taken very fast, are very underbanked and very rough. If you don't mind riding a little defensively, it's fine. But if you don't like this ride it doesn't make you a wuss at all, it is a rough ride and I will admit the helix at the end is terrible. Not Cornball or Legend terrible, but pretty terrible.
Now here's where I'm going to get hate. Could RMC improve it? Absolutely. An RMC on that scale renamed The Master or something would be absolutely sick. However, I feel like Screamin' Eagle is the coaster that should be RMCed out of this park. You could have a great GCI that's all twisted up in a lovely knot of airtime, a big epic CCI that dishes out an insane, irreverent ride, and an RMC that runs back into the woods like that, maybe even call it Screamin' Cardinal for the team of the same name. I feel the same way about Boss that I felt about the original Rattler. I liked it for the concept, not necessarily the geometry. And while I never rode original Rattler, I wanted to because it looked insane dropping down that quarry and twisting around it, when it was RMCed it shot right to the top of my bucket list because they took a coaster that looked awesome for its concept and added geometry in an attempt to make it totally awesome. Keep Boss's terrain interaction, get some steeper climbs and dives out of those high turns, kill that MCBR, and do something with that helix and it would be an amazing ride. However, Screamin' Eagle would be almost as good as an RMC I feel, and they would retain a good wooden coaster as opposed to a bad one if they RMCed that one instead of Boss.
After a few rerides on Boss I headed to Pandemonium. I love these Gerstlauer spinners and it barely had a line! I rode with this couple on one side and just me on the other, so needless to say it spun like crazy. Add in the little Tony Hawk thing still left under that turn and you have what I think is my new favorite spinner. These spin like crazy!
With that out of the way I headed up for Batman and Mr. Freeze to get this park cleaned out.
This is probably the sorriest clone I've seen in terms of theming left. They just kind of took the cop car fountain out and left this, quite a change from SFGAm's that still had the lights on and water gushing from the hydrant.
Standard Batman clone, no theming, waste of speed, just loads you down with force and hits you a few times. One and done.
Possibly the most pathetic example I've ever seen of DC theming forced on a ride where it wasn't appropriate.
Final credit to clean the park out! Mr. Freeze was kind of hard to find (I had skipped over its area for a while) but once I found that plaza, I knew I had found it! This queue entrance was awesome, but little did I know that the rest of the theming was off the hook too!
This is the coolest station ever, no pun intended! It's themed like some demented villain's abandoned ice cream factory hideout, right down to the trippy grunge station music! This is some of my favorite Six Flags theming yet!
I loved the sliding station too!
Add in the coolest Premier trains ever and you have me hooked before I'm even on the ride!
Oh my god! This is easily my favorite old school Premier coaster I've been on! If the awesome theming hadn't won me over as is, the ride experience is pretty great too! Going up that top hat, the sun will almost certainly blind you for a split second (eclipse glasses ERT anyone), and the upside down floater in that top hat is freaky as is, but combining the two you have probably the most disorienting element ever, and not just because you're going backwards. Sitting in the back like I did, that vertical spike is insane as it lifts you as high as it can before dropping you face first to do the whole thing again. I'm sold on this being my new favorite type of clone, why couldn't all parks get these instead of boomerangs?
With the park all cleaned out now, I headed to Justice League, remembering how much I loved the one in Chicago.
We'll buy a bunch of Proslide blaster slides and Larson loops and market them as coasters and BOOM!!!! There goes Cedar Point's reputation as Roller Coaster Capital of the World!
I guess the advantage of these screen rides is that they're super cheap to clone. This is one of the two originals so it wasn't as good as the newer one at SFGAm but it was still very enjoyable. I want to do one of the newer ones, I hear the ones being built now have Harley Quinn in them too!
Alright, let's see how she fares in the front!
Yeah, it's still amazing, but it's a back seat ride. That trio of bunny hops at the end is good, but you're sacrificing a lot of airtime for speed in the front, and on such a tiny coaster, there just isn't that much speed. Great pacing, but you can definitely tell it's only 80 feet tall. So I rode again in the back and moved on for night rides.
I need a new camera, I photographed the sun and the moon wasn't even in front of it.
Did Excalibur real fast on the way per recommendation and it was fun. Not earth shattering but probably the best flat ride in the Midwest.
Went back for a few on Boss to wait out the sunset! And in the very front, the beginning of the ride is awesome as you accelerate out of that giant first drop!
Well on one of the rides the girl in front of me let her hat just fly off and it got sucked right into my wheel assembly. So she was laughing like what happened wasn't extremely dangerous. Luckily it just chewed it up and spat it out but it was still really dangerous and could have seriously damaged the ride. So she's like "you see that hat" and I straight up told her it wasn't funny and let the ride ops know. And she threw a hissy fit because they wouldn't go get her hat that she lost being an idiot.
Just power lapping this until it gets dark and I can go back to American Thunder for some last rides!
Boss is everything Son of Beast wishes it was! Big, violent, imposing, a ton of airtime, and most importantly, safe. Those Gerstlauer trains are great for rougher rides and at night when you can't see where you're going until you rise up above that treeline overlooking the park, it's incredible. Definitely an amazing ride! Not quite CCI's best work (that has to be Raven or Great White) but it's up there!
Couldn't say no to one more lap on Mr. Freeze on my way over.
There was a skunk in the planter! Second time that's happened this season! A path sweep had to keep us all back and keep the kids from petting it. Awful pic, sadly, but it was dark and SFSL isn't lit very well.
So I expected American Thunder to be all lit up and beautiful at night...wrong! Not a glimmer of light on it, perfect for night rides!
And man it was! Triple dipped in the back to close out the night and it was absolutely incredible! It really warmed up some more and was riding much more aggressively than it had been earlier. And for the last ride of the night, just before they dispatched, "Hit Me With Your Best Shot" by Pat Benatar came on and the ride ops got the whole train clapping as we rolled out! The perfect way to end the night, getting tossed around that dimly lit wooden structure in almost total darkness!
After that I had a bit of an Uber mishap...my phone died even though I had turned it off. So I went to ask for a charging station when it turned out I knew the supervisor I had asked! This guy worked at Cedar Point and remembered me when I met him last season, but when I approached him he just said, "hey, Jarrett!" It was totally by chance I had met him, said he recognized me rocking the Steel Vengeance shirt. So he was nice enough to loan me his charger to charge up enough to get an Uber back to the hotel.
What a nice little hotel room! It had this cool Gateway Arch picture hanging over the bed! I put my stuff down, went to gas up and grab some White Castle to eat in the hotel room with the beer I brought from home, and hit the sack tired as anything.
Day 2
I woke up around 7 because I couldn't get back to sleep and grabbed hotel breakfast. Afterwards I got in the car and headed to the first of two cultural things of the trip, Route 66 State Park!
This was the first parking lot I found in the state park, just a boat launch.
Pretty landscape, and somewhere over there is a bridge that used to be a part of Route 66.
Found a trail entrance not too far from it. Still nothing that noteworthy, but I did find what I was looking for, kind of!
This, right here, is a part of what used to be the iconic Route 66! You used to be able to follow this bad boy all the way to California!
Me with what used to be Route 66!
The final stop I made at Route 66 State Park was the one I was looking for, this is the visitors center!
It used to be a hotel but it was converted into a museum.
It was obviously very blocked off but this is that bridge! You can check it out from the parking lot!
The museum was actually pretty well put together, albeit a bit small.
All kinds of artifacts from when Route 66 was in service. Hotel memorabilia and old road signs and the like.
Most of this was just artifacts but that gourd in the middle was actually handpainted by someone who liked 66.
Those little drive in movie theaters that were popular in the Route 66 era? Turns out they would actually rent out heaters for a small fee because it got cold at night!
I should just take what's left of 66 to Texas next year.
They had a ton of stuff memorializing this hotel on display. Apparently it had individual garages for travelers to store their cars at night.
Got my kicks, off to the next destination...which started with a mildly amusing GPS direction!
My final stop of the trip was something I just kind of found online and decided to check out because I knew it was close by. The largest archaeological site in North America, Cahokia Mounds Heritage Site is in Collinsville, Illinois. It was the biggest Native American city to ever exist north of Mexico and was larger than almost every European city at the time. Now on the site sits some of what is left of Cahokia, this interpretation center (which we're about to check out), and their iconic 100-foot tall Monks Mound earth pyramid.
For some reason they grew test swatches of prairie here, not sure why but they had a few of these planters growing wild prairie plants in the parking lot.
There was this really cool mural on the door that showed eagles flying over Monks Mound.
Inside a big, beautiful lobby, the centerpiece is this little model of the site. That big pyramid in the center is Monks Mound.
Right away you can tell this isn't just a few piles of dirt and some rocks. They excavated a lot and all of it is on display with plenty of info about it. I was actually amazed at how some of these things were not only made but also how long they lasted.
When preservation forces you to build the RMC next to the John Allen woodie.
Cahokia was built by a people known as the Mississippian Culture, who lived along and traded all over the greater Mississippi River. Cahokia was by far their biggest city but there were little villages connected to larger villages along the river all over the region.
This is kind of the prize of their collection and it's called the Birdman Tablet. Despite being thousands of miles away, I couldn't help but be reminded of the Mayan artwork we saw in Tulum back in 2013. Had Cahokia not died off, I feel like the Mississippian culture could have easily become just as great as the Mayans or Aztecs. The odd thing was that their artwork was so similar yet so different.
This was a very long wooden canoe they excavated from the site.
For those of you wondering where them hoes at, them hoes is at Cahokia!
But in all seriousness, these hoes (there is a stone equivalent too) were how they built mounds! They'd use them to scoop dirt into a large 50 pound basket and carry it to the mound to be dumped and formed.
This diorama was split into quadrants to show how they lived throughout the seasons. This is the spring quadrant, which shows them fishing. Notice how well they're made!
Yeah their diorama game was on point. Several beautiful displays that showed life in Cahokia all over this museum. This one shows them hunting and gathering on one side and farming on the other. While agriculture allowed them to grow a surplus of food and stay there year round, they continued to hunt, gather, and fish for food.
Look how well this figurine was preserved! It was actually on a turntable so you could view it in the round. This statue is roughly 1000 years old!
Towards the middle of the room was a large glass box you could walk through that was done up to look like a stroll through the city when it was populated.
This was a reproduction of the granaries where they stored their food surplus. It was built on stilts coated in animal fat to keep animals from getting in and eating their crops.
I found it interesting that they were living an urban life driven by agriculture yet still grabbed that bow and arrow and went out to hunt their meat. There was no mention of domesticating farm animals so I wonder if they just didn't mention it or there was a reason they didn't raise their own livestock.
Some more well preserved artifacts they dug up.
They had a small segment in the back explaining the archaeology that went into the interpretation center and how they did the digs. This shows the excavation of a mound in layers with bones and artifacts found inside.
After a short ten minute movie about everything, it was time to head over to Monks Mound!
Pictures do not do Monks Mound justice. Yes, in most of these, it looks like a grassy hill. But it's a huge, man-made, perfectly pyramid-shaped grassy hill. They spent 300 years building this structure in four layers and it's a good 100 feet tall.
Monks Mound as seen from an angle.
In the context of the people who used to live here in Cahokia, Monks Mound was where the chief lived. Like in many depictions of Mesoamerican pyramids, particularly Mayan, you'll see a small wooden hut atop the structure? Monks Mound was made of packed earth and not brick like a Mayan pyramid, but it had the hut as well, and that's where the chief of the city lived.
When we went to Tulum in 2013, there was a pyramid-styled Mayan temple at the archaeological site but we weren't allowed to climb it. They used to, but ever since some stupid archaeology student vandalized 700 year old stucco with a glass bottle in the temple at the top, they stopped letting people climb. But Cahokia still allowed visitors to climb Monks Mound!
Time to climb my first pyramid! And in possibly the last place I thought you would be able to do such a thing!
One level down, one to go!
Monks Mound is climbed! It was honestly a bit harder to get up than I had initially thought because it's a bit steeper than a normal staircase but anyone could climb it.
The view from Monks Mound, folks! All of this used to be a huge Native American city!
You could see the whole site almost! Several mounds, and markers could be seen from the top.
This is kind of the moment where your Cahokia trip all comes together. It comes across as a nice museum on the edge of a sketchy suburb at first but once you get to the top of Monks Mound, all of that information you learned in the museum comes together. You get up there and look around and it's very clear that there used to be an enormous Native American city all around you. Like, you have a sense of what it used to look like but Monks Mound convinces you that it's not just a story, it feels way more real after climbing.
From one great city on the Mississippi to the next, you can clearly see St. Louis's skyline and the Gateway Arch from the top.
The chief that lived here certainly had quite the view to wake up to!
The highway is back that way somewhere but you can't see the mound from it.
This is one of the most incredible things I've ever done in my travels and nobody knows it's here! I'm going to be hyping the absolute crap out of Cahokia whenever I hear of anyone going that way, because as of now it's my favorite thing in St. Louis!
Climbing down was precarious and actually kind of sad, but I'll be back here someday for sure!
From Cahokia I hopped in the car and headed home, with a stop to get horrible Taco Bell service and get hopelessly lost trying to find my way around some traffic in Terre Haute. But I got home at a reasonable time and dad had made Manicotti!
What an incredible time! Emily and I always joke about how awful St. Louis is because we constantly get lost there every time we drive through but honestly, there are worse places to be lost. It's home to two amazing wooden coasters, a pretty good state park with a cool little museum, and a UNESCO World Heritage site that happens to be the biggest cultural hidden gem I've ever come across. Definitely hang out here a bit if you do SFSL, if anything Six Flags and Cahokia are enough for an awesome full day. Not to mention the Gateway Arch which I did the first time I came through here! I love St. Louis!
