OK, that was hilarious. The woman in the ticket booth explained to me why I couldn’t ride, and I asked how likely it was that someone else would come along in the remaining half hour and pay for the little coaster next to the giant Ferris wheel that everyone was riding. She shook her head and said, “No, no one.” She told me to come back tomorrow during the day when there’d be more riders. Luckily, I lingered around for a few minutes, and, lo and behold, two teenagey girls came up and apparently bought tickets for the coaster. The ticket woman excitedly gestured for me to come — I think she was as excited as I was.
Then there was the operations. An old man was running it, and I think he is a little bit demented. He saw that only three adults were riding and decided to go crazy. We started with a backwards launch, and I mean LAUNCH! Then every time we pulled through the station forward he hit the launch harder than I think any dragon coaster is meant to go. Then, after three or four goes around, he let the train drift backward into the station, only to shock us by again hitting the launch and having us go around three or four more times. And then this entire process repeated over and over. We must have gotten 25 laps on that thing, and the laterals were insane. When we finally stopped, the old man was laughing his head off, and so was I when I thanked him.
