After the huge crowds yesterday at the park, I decided that the best option for me was to bite the bullet and get a Fast Lane Pass for today. This is an amusement park caste system whereby the ‘haves’ can fork over a bunch of money so that they barely have to wait in the queue, while the ‘have nots’ are stuck in the regular queue which has been made even longer because the Flash Pass elite are riding and re-riding and re-riding, and they’re getting in front of the queue every time. I hate the whole idea, honestly.

That said, I’m only here for today and if I can buy an opportunity to ride 10 things rather than 3 things in the same amount of time, then I’ll take advantage of that, even though I still hate the principle of it. So I went online and got the damn thing… and when I entered the park, I went straight to the booth to get my wristband. It’s still half an hour before the park officially opens, but you can come in and wander, you just can’t ride anything yet.

…or in the case of people wanting to ride Alpen Fury, you can go ahead and create a queue line before the ride even opens.

Many years of doing this have shown me that the best way to deal with a crowded park, Fast Lane Pass or not, is to get there before they open, head straight for the new ride, and get your ride in right away. The rest of the crowd will head there, too, and you’ll be able to knock off several more things in the first couple hours, while everyone else is still in the queue for the new thing. And it worked again today. Just 10 minute wait and I’m in line for the front seat. Nice! Most rides at Wonderland assign your seat, so lucking out on a front-row ride is a treat.

Yesterday’s ride on this was mostly a blur. I couldn’t tell wotdafuq we were doing most of the time. Turns came from nowhere, you never knew when you’d be upside-down, and G-forces came from every direction. So getting to ride in the front was great, because I’d be able to watch the track and see what was coming and get a better feel for the layout. Right? RIGHT?

Nope. It was a blur, too. Holy cow, this thing is bonkers. That opening bit right off the launch inside the mountain is one of the most disorienting moments of any coaster I’ve ever been on. Even when you can see it coming, it still won’t compute in your brain what you’re about to do.

Now, the park absolutely does not allow filming whilst on the ride (good for them!) so here’s the official POV from the park itself. See if you can make any sense of this layout at all…

I left that ride dazed, confused, disoriented, and very, very excited. That might’ve just edged out Batman Gotham City Escape to be my new #1 steel. Yesterday, I was putting this at #2, but that was just one ride, I was exhausted from travel, and I’d just stood in a 2-hour queue to ride it. But in the same way that I wasn’t ready to put Madrid’s monster at #1 before I had a second ride, I held off on Alpen Fury as well, since the first ride is almost always amazing, but once the shock of discovery is gone, you can better evaluate things beginning with the second ride. And in this case, the second ride was even better than the first.

I knew I’d get another ride in before heading home, so I decided to hold off on re-ranking it. Just in case.

Off to Yukon Striker again, this time in the middle row. Still a really good ride, and the Fast Lane pass made the queue only about 10 minutes.

Canada’s Wonderland has two very similar coasters on either side of the park: Leviathan, a 300+ ft B&M coaster, and Behemoth, a 200+ ft B&M coaster.

This is similar to a park in Charlotte, NC called Carowinds, which has Fury 325 and Thunder Striker - and both parks have similar color themes for the respective coasters. Also, I like the smaller of the two coasters at each park better than the bigger one…. even though the “small” ones are each over 20 storeys tall.

I love airtime. That’s the moment when the design of the ride causes you to lift out of your seat a little and you feel weightless. There are three basic types of airtime: [1] freefall [2] ejector [3] floater

Freefall airtime happens when you’re riding down a very steep drop and your butt leaves the seat as you crest the top of it, then it doesn’t meet the seat again until the bottom of the drop.

Ejector air is when the transition in the track is so abrupt that it catapults the rider into the air like an ejector seat. This can often happen when there’s a very sharp, small hill immediately after a very large one.

FLoater air is when the top of the hill is engineered so perfectly that you achieve weightlessness all the way over the crest of the hill. It’s hard to find more than one or two moments of this bliss-inducing engineering in a ride. Leviathan, which I rode yesterday, has two.

Behemoth has SEVEN of them. That’s crazy. When I got to the queue, nobody was in the single rider line, so I basically just walked right on. Got put with someone in the middle of the train. Now, the old saying goes: riding in the middle of a roller coaster train is like kissing your sister. It’s not awful, but there’s no point in it.

Rule, meet exception. The middle of the train on Behemoth is exactly where you want to be if you like floater airtime, and I do. The front of the train gets a bit of ejector at the tops of the hills. The back gets some freefall on the way down. But the middle gets looooooooong periods of floater air on every hill. And there are a lot of hills! (photo: Rik Engelen from RCDB)

Big grin on my face the entire time and I kept thinking, “I love this ride!” - So I hopped right back in the queue and did it again.

Then it was off to Backlot Stunt Coaster, which used to be the Italian Job Stunt Coaster, complete with MINI Cooper trains and a stunt scene involving a helicopter and stuff. They no longer have the license to that film, so now it’s generic. They took the MINI logos off the trains, but you can still tell they’re MINI Coopers.

I used to like this little coaster a lot, but it has not aged well at all. It rides more like a poorly-maintained wood coaster than a steel coaster, jittery, jarring, and it feels like the wheels are square sometimes. Not fun.

Speaking of poorly-maintained wooden coasters, next up is Mighty Canadian Minebuster. Canada’s Wonderland has a pair of full-sized wood coasters and every time I’ve been to this park, I’ve hated both of them. The rides themselves are fine, but the track is so full of potholes and jackhammering that you leave the ride wondering if you still have all your fillings.

I had heard that they’d re-tracked a big portion of Minebuster for this year, though, so I thought I’d give it a try.

Credit where it’s due, the first third of the ride is now really nice. The new track is great. But it’s only the first third of the ride. After that, the old track feels even worse because you’re comparing it to the new track you’d just ridden on. I hope they re-track the rest of it, as well as Wilde Beast, the other woodie at the park.

Stopped for a quick bite at Subway, where a 6” sammich and a bottle of water costs $25. Yeah, I won’t be having dinner in the park tonight.

Then it was off to find my last remaining credit: Snoopy’s Racing Railway. Coaster #937

It’s a dual-launched family-sized coaster with a cute storyline: Snoopy’s train is being robbed by a gang of moustachioed Woodstocks and RCMP Charlie Brown saves the day. I never thought I’d see Chuck as a Mountie, but here we are.

After that, it was time to visit my old friend Vortex, an Arrow Dynamics brand suspended coaster, with track overhead and cars that swing freely beneath. There are a few of these left in the world and this has always been my favourite. Speedy, fun, and just intense enough to be interesting. I managed a front seat ride on this one, too!

Have you ever had an old friend that you haven’t seen in awhile and you’re shocked at how they act when you catch up with them again? That was Vortex today. I had always loved this ride, but today it was like Vortex showed up to the party wearing a leather catsuit, stiletto heels, and carrying a whip, demanding submission from the other party guests. What had once been a zippy, fun ride was suddenly a test of endurance, with extra speed and the cars swinging out wildly on the turns.

The proof of this newfound intensity came right at the very end, when the cars get to the final brake run. The lead car has always swung pretty high here, but today it was slamming the swing stops (bumpers to keep the cars from over swinging) coming in…

That in itself isn’t unheard of for this ride, but it also swung the other way after bashing the swing stop and it hit that one, too. At this point, non-coaster-people are going, “umm.. ok” but coaster people are going “geezus! That’s insane” I sat there on the brake run, still swinging, when I heard the lady in the row behind me say, “holy shit, what did they do to this ride?”

OF COURSE I got right back on it agian. Got the front row again. Got my ass whupped again. Vortex, old friend… welcome back to my Top Ten. You deserved it.

Exhaustion is creeping up on me now. The heavy g-forces, the heat of the day, and the crowds wear me down faster than they used to and I’m just about ready to pack it in. I want one more last ride on Alpen Fury, though. The way it usually works is the first ride is always the best, then every subsequent ride is a tad less enthusiastic than the one before, because the surprise factor is gone.

I had gotten two rides so far and this ride was also going to be front-row, so no surprises. Just reduced excitement. Except it was better. Every ride was better than the last. It was at that point that I knew I had a new #1 steel coaster. Wow. And I know that opening blast out of the mountain gets all the attention (and rightly so) but have a look at what it does around the back side…

I left the park mid-afternoon, exhausted but happy. It’s not every day that I get to put two rides in my top ten and one of them is landing at the top spot! It was a great day today, but now it’s back to the reality of packing everything up again. Got to hit the road early tomorrow.

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