Great America

Looks like my daily blogging for August was more than a little ambitious... I'm now aiming for 15 posts for the month, or 1 every other day. Still a little behind... gotta get caught up!

On Wednesday, I got to experience a blast of nostalgia as my group at work went to Great America for a fun day. Some observations/memories:

• Tickets are $54 at the gate. Holy moly.
• It's probably a combination of being a weekday and the ticket price tag, but there aren't really any lines anywhere. I remember back in my elementary/jr high/high school days, you'd be able to get one ride on the popular coasters (Top Gun and Vortex) your entire day because the wait in line would be around an hour. On this day we walked right into the car, and some people just stayed in the coaster since no one was waiting in line.
• Speaking of which, I don't know when it happened, but GA is no longer "Paramount's Great America." Now it's just "California's Great America." I guess it lost corporate sponsorship? The most obvious impact of this in the park is seeing that Top Gun no longer exists - it's simply called "Flight Deck." None of the iconic music, no video clips... so sad.
• Rides ridden: Top Gu- I mean, "Flight Deck," Vortex, Demon, Grizzly, Whitewater Rapids. I think I used to enjoy roller coasters more than I do now. Plus, I lost my hat on Whitewater... doh.
• Neat part of the day: the company paid for an hour of free carnival games in about 9 booths next to the Drop Zone. For an hour there were around 200 engineers milling around trying their hand at shooting mini-basketballs through even mini-er hoops, throwing pitches against a radar gun, squirting water to fill up balloons, and winning prizes up the wazoo. I was able to pick up a stuffed Scooby-Doo for Shally by flinging a 63 mph "fastball" that was the fastest in my heat. The high speed for the day was 66 mph according to the game operator.
• That got me thinking - I feel like I'm in roughly average physical condition. I threw that ball just about as hard as I could, getting my whole body into it. I threw 2 pitches the whole day and felt it the rest of the day. Now, 63 mph is considered an extremely slow pitch in baseball. Maybe if I had some training and technique, I could get up to 70 mph by utilizing more leg drive. But all the same, just how ridiculously strong/genetically gifted do you have to be to throw 90+ on a regular basis, up to 100 times? How much of a toll does that take on your body?
• Fond childhood memory: coming to Great America for the 6th grade graduation field trip... and spending almost all day playing Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles in one of the arcades with a few buddies. That's right, we paid money to get into the park... so we could put more money into video games. I was Raphael. I died a lot because his special move was to keep rolling into people.
• Remember when high school physics classes would have field trips to Great America to do physics studies in real life? Why can't all classes do that?