It's Moolicious!

Jess and I made it to Hershey Park on Saturday. This is the first time I've been there in like 15 years, so I kept having weird deja vu moments. Random things would cause it: the bavarian architecture of the chocolate hut, the yellow letters of the "French Fries" booth, the line for the "Comet" rollercoaster. It looked much smaller than I remember. I felt taller than most of the buildings.

The title of this post comes from the Chocolate Ride at "Chocolate World," Hershey's scarily similar version of the Wonka Factory. The whole building, millions upon millions of dollars worth of rides and displays, is basically one giant corporate masturbation. This place puts the "milk" in milk chocolate, but the best part is they give away free peanut butter cups. There's even an interactive ride with singing cows! Hence the title... never mind that the thousands upon thousands of dairy cows who provide all that tasty goodness, the cows who are the reason Hershey was built where it was, are routinely artifically inseminated, unable to turn around in their stalls, kept in a constant state of pregnancy, and plugged into painful milking devices so they can produce the millions of gallons of milk that go into making milk chocolate.

Go ahead, Timmy. It's a tasty treat!

For those of you who don't know, I am a huge rollercoaster buff. I don't wear funny t-shirts or annotate videos for the Travel Channel, but I consider myself a coaster junkie. I especially like wooden rollercoasters, and on every one I ride I always try to sit in the back. It's the only way to ride - the back seat is the roughest, the fastest, and the most likely to fly off the track at any moment.

My favorite so far is the Thunderbolt at Kennywood here in Pittsburgh. My record is riding it 13 times in a row, 26 times in a day. It is, how you say, coaster perfection. When I was a kid my mum had a bag full of popsicle sticks, and I spent a week gluing 200 of them together in an attempt to recreate the Thunderbolt. I had elaborate plans on how to make the trains, too, and had visions of watching my own coaster fly around the tracks. I made it to the first hill and ran out of sticks.

Hershey has some awesome wooden coasters (must... ride... Wildcat... again) and I'm going to make it a point over the next five years to do a tour of amusement parks and hit up all the wooden coasters. I'll make a travelogue and sell it to some TV station. People loves the rolling coasters.

So, Jess and I had a great time. We managed to spend less than $150 on the day, and didn't get sick from the corn dogs or the ultra-sweet lemonade. The hardest part of the day was actually driving home. We didn't leave the park until 11 PM, and it's a two-hour drive back to Berkeley Springs, so it became a game of "how closed can martin's eyes get while still able to see the road"? Yah, we nearly died like three times. I never understood how people fell asleep at the wheel until Saturday night. Holy balls, it felt like a dream.

I'm back in the 'burgh now, along with Jess. The awesomest of awesome news is that I'm typing this on her iBook, which she's lending me over the summer. Sweet! I've been hankering for a laptop for some time now - oh the advantages of a computer in bed next to you - and now I get to enjoy a Mac for free. Good times. It's not one of those newfangled MacBooks. This is old school iBook, with a bona fide G4 processor. Sad but true, it's faster than my monster PC. Go figure. All it needs is another 512 of RAM... maybe I'll invest :)

We're heading to Idlewild tomorrow, which is a small amusement park in the mountains of Western Pennsylvania. It's the third-oldest amusement park in the country, and the 10th oldest in the world. It doesn't have lots of flashy coasters or anything
(it's only coaster, the "Rollo Coaster," is a simple out-and-back that's about as exciting as this blog) but it's got lots of good food, a decent water park, and a whole giant "Mister Roger's Neighborhood" recreation that I've never seen but heard is awesome. Should be a fun afternoon.

Stay classy. I'll catch you later.

Martin