This is me. The one on the left, more specifically, is me when I was in high school. I am going to tell you a story about when I was in high school. On vacation with my family, as in this photo.
Truth is, it's all of those things. It's everything you do when you seek out an exciting new experience.
I was never a stranger to travel. My mother and her family are immigrants from France, and my maternal relatives all made it a point to get my sister and I to France to see where we come from as soon as it was feasible. As a child my father traveled a lot, both domestically and internationally. He would always come back with all these cool stories and bring my sister and I spoils from the far off lands where he did business. Before I even started kindergarten I had been to France, England, and Canada traveling with my family. At the same time, my father's extended family was in Nashville, Tennessee, so going to visit them meant a spectacular road trip, often late in the afternoon/evening, traversing everything from the twisted cityscapes of Cincinnati and Louisville to the rolling hills of Kentucky and Western Tennessee.
In addition to this, my family and I went on vacation every summer like most middle class families of four in the US do. We did the Florida/Disney thing when my sister and I were very young, we road tripped from Detroit to Boston through Canada. These vacations deviated slightly but over the years took on a pretty standardized format: five days in a coastal city in the southeast, two days at an amusement park in the vicinity. I was always excited for everything, but I loved going to these amusement parks. We had Kings Island back at home, and it was great, but it wasn't this. These out of state parks always gave me something I didn't know I craved so badly: something new. Something unfamiliar. I loved everything about vacationing with my family, be it a road trip through a winding mountain highway to a delicious meal at a nice metropolitan restaurant to the hilarious antics I shared with my mother, father, and sister. Because it was pleasant, yes, but also because it was new and exciting.
Roller coasters were always an on/off interest of mine since I was a kid. I rode my first roller coaster when I was around four or five years old, a little EF Miler kiddie coaster at a Jeepers in a Detroit area mall. Then we moved from Detroit to Dayton around the time I started the first grade and we had Paramount's Kings Island, where I absolutely loved riding Beastie, Racer, and Adventure Express. When I was in the first grade my mom got me a copy of the original Rollercoaster Tycoon from the library and I would play it for hours on end. I got to know all the coaster styles, all the flat rides, everything. In 2003 we went to Disney World when Mission: Space opened Then we went to Paramount's Carowinds in 2005 and got to see what a sister park to Kings Island looks like, and then my dad's childhood park Six Flags Over Georgia in 2006. 2007 was Busch Gardens Europe and 2008 was Dollywood, where I absolutely fell in love with the theme park concept. In 2009 we went back to Carowinds for the simplicity of it as part of our Charleston, SC trip. In addition to this, my sister and I were both in band at the time, so Music in the Parks meant joining all our stupid classmates for a day of being the mature one in the school group once a year.
Then in 2010, everything changed.
I had just finished my sophomore year in high school, I was going to be a junior in the fall, and I had very little interest in my future. I had just left my school's swim team because I hated having a scheduled social life shoved down my throat when I was just trying to do something I loved. I had no interests in life other than still being involved in a few youth theater organizations and maybe cooking dinner once a week. School had just ended, I had quit something that had been a huge part of my identity for two years, and I had basically wiped myself into a blank slate. My high school was to be demolished and rebuilt and they had just shoved us in trailers for finals week as they loudly demolished the building behind us during exams, Tik Tok was a popular Ke$ha earworm and not an app, there was this new thing called an iPad that was basically an oversized iPod Touch floating around if you were bougie, and the Facebook revolution was in full swing in America. But summer meant two things: my birthday in June, and family vacation in August. Despite my existence just kind of fading into the background and watching the sparks fly in the world around me, both of these events gave me hope that I would eventually write a story of my own.
My family has all of our birthdays squished within late May and early June in addition to my grandparents' wedding anniversary. So instead of a party for everyone, we always just got together and had a hell of a time and swapped gifts. But this year it was even more special as it was my grandparents' 50th anniversary. I still remember that night, we were out on the back deck in my grandparents' beautiful garden, warm summer night going through a wine case, and I was filming the celebration as a home video with the new camcorder my mother had given me for my birthday. "I have a feeling you're going to do some pretty cool YouTube stuff with that," she told me. Next thing I know, I'm on YouTube trying to figure out how to start a channel with the goofy pet videos I was making, and I stumble across a few roller coaster videos. And then there I went down the rabbit hole, looking at all these cool roller coasters all over the world. There's a wooden one that rampages through the wooded hills of Indiana, there's all the roller coasters from the real parks that were in Rollercoaster Tycoon from when I was a kid, there's this weird one in Missouri that slides you onto this ridiculously punchy launch, I was just discovering cool coaster after cool coaster! And eventually that took me to a park we had discussed but never put on the trip: Virginia's Kings Dominion, which looked remarkably similar to our Kings Island. Their coasters looked so cool! There was one that launched you out of a volcano and spiraled around the mountain! This tall NASCAR one that was so crazy they needed to trim it; it had been melting its wheels and making people black out and all kinds of craziness. One of them was like a bobsled and rolled around a trough. And then there was familiar stuff: Rebel Yell looked like Racer, they had a Backlot Stunt Coaster just like we did, and Anaconda looked like Vortex but over water. I told them about this, I told them that it was out of the way but we've never been and it looks really cool. And while I always felt my concerns fell on deaf ears back then, they were always very receptive to my suggestions regarding vacation, and somehow my dad agreed to go that far out of the way.
Trip rolls around, we get out there, and I loved it! Intimidator 305 blew me away with its shear intensity, leaving me with this funny feeling of seeing in muted color and being lightheaded, a sensation I would later learn is called greying out. I had heard so many rumors about this coaster, that it made people black out, that it was melting the wheels off so they had to trim the drop (confirmed by the water jets in the station which I thought were the coolest thing ever). Then we went over to Volcano: The Blast Coaster, and I also thought that was the coolest thing ever. I mean, not only did it repurpose an old fiberglass mountain to build a coaster that launched out of a fricking volcano, but it also used these cool screeching magnets called LSMs to do it? And floating around this volcano, twisting through these rolls with gusto high over the ground? I was blown away. This became my new favorite coaster, easily, and hooked me on them. I always loved mechanical things growing up, and I knew these machines were right up my alley just as they were when I was a kid playing Rollercoaster Tycoon. I decided to go into mechanical engineering as my career choice, with dreams of working on roller coasters. Sadly, we didn't get to ride as much that day as we got rained out, but I could always come back. But that miserable rainy day at Kings Dominion changed my life forever, not for what we rode, but what I discovered.
So here I was. I liked roller coasters. I was still a dumb high school kid with no life, but a dumb high school kid with no life and an interest in roller coasters. I started my junior year not the quiet kid in the corner, but the quiet kid that posted about roller coasters on Facebook. I got a copy of Rollercoaster Tycoon 3 and began designing my own roller coasters. I started following industry news, keeping up to date on all the roller coasters opening around the world. I learned of one opening next year, another LSM launcher like Volcano called Cheetah Hunt and just absolutely fell in love with this beautiful coaster, following it like a hawk bolt by bolt until it opened. I joined a few coaster forums and started posting, the opinions were that of a dumb high schooler that didn't fully understand what they were talking about, but the passion and enthusiasm were there.
But I wasn't riding. I was sitting behind a computer screen posting, waiting on the one or two times a year I'd get to go ride coasters with my family or something. I didn't work, I had no driver's license, I was just a dumb high schooler behind where he should be in life. My dad took me and a friend to Cedar Point for my birthday in 2011, we went to Carowinds that summer, the next summer we went to Dollywood to ride Wild Eagle on vacation, and I went to Kings Island with my family for my dad's work in September. The following year I went to Kings Island and Cedar Point a few times with my cousin and her husband while she still lived in Ohio, but none of that was mine. It wasn't until the end of the year when I got my driver's license, one week before my dad decided to take me to Busch Gardens Tampa to finally ride my beloved Cheetah Hunt.
The 2013-2014 offseason was spent with me simply learning to drive around the community, with hopes of going to Kings Island on my own that summer. And I was able to do it! First with help, then on my own. I had access to go drive to roller coasters! But eventually I got bored of Kings Island and decided to expand my comfort zone slowly but surely. I went to Cedar Point. Then Holiday World. Then I drove myself to my first coaster event at Kings Island where I started making coaster friends, one of which ended up road tripping with me to Carowinds in 2015, switching off drivers. And then at the end of the season, I managed to drive myself all over the great state of Pennsylvania on a beautiful solo road trip I'll never forget.
My sense of adventure has lead me to so many things. I've learned so much about not only the world around me, but myself as well. And this will only progress as I continue to write my coaster story. Come ride along with me!
