Ugh, I have been trying to drag this out for as long as possible, but sadly (though happily for anyone still coming back to this thing), we’ve arrived at the last day of the vacation thing.
Henry and I woke up early again and went for one last walk. I wanted especially to get a picture by the WILDWOODS sign when it wasn’t overly crowded and it turns out that 7am is a good time to accomplish this though even then we had to hang back a bit and wait for other people to have their chance. Um, I know that this concrete beach ball is barely even that high off the ground but my heart was PALPITATING. I had to call upon my inner Suni Lee for some balance inspo.
#TOKYOOLYMPICS2020 #NEVERFORGET #WATCHEDITINEVERYHOTELWESTAYEDAT
But on the real though, I will always associate the Olympics with this vacation now!
I think I already mentioned this in my BIRTHDAY POST but some grandma was pushing a grandbaby in a stroller when we were doing our dumb photoshoot and she was adamant about taking a picture of the both of us but it was really awful and she cut a ton of the sign out, lol. I preferred to be as far back as possible so as not to ruin the picture with my cringe.
I was starving when we got back to the room so we woke up SURLY CHOOCH and made him get ready for breakfast. He actually remembered to say Happy Birthday so that was cool. You would think I would have wanted to go somewhere to have a big fancy birthday morning meal but no – I was dying to eat at the restaurant below the OLYMPIC BEACH RESORT or whatever the Olympic is called now. So, just basic diner-ish food but I was cool with that, just for the chance to be THAT MUCH CLOSER to the inside of the OLYMPIC.
Henry was really over this whole OLYMPIC thing by now. And I don’t think Chooch even realized what was happening.
YESSSS.
I had French toast because it was my birthday. It was OK! I was just happy to be eating said French toast IN THE OLYMPIC. And the hostess thanked us profusely for coming in so I thought we were real VIPs for a second until she said the same shit to people who came in after us. :(
Afterward, I started to harass Chooch for coming to the beach and then…not going to the beach.
“I didn’t come to the beach,” he mumbled. “I was brought to the beach.”
WOW OH WOW JUST WOW, we are such sinister parents. Can you believe the GULL we must have, dragging this poor, precious boy to the JERSEY SHORE against his will? I know I’d rather be sitting in my dark bedroom playing MINECRAFT or whatever with internet friends.
“OK Bobby,” I said cheerfully, “take off your shoes, we’re going to the beach while your FATHER packs.”
Speaking of Back to the Beach (literally try to reference this as much as possible IN THE REAL LIFE), when we were on the boardwalk, there was a picture of a young Frankie Avalon getting ice cream at Kohr Bros and Chooch grumpily muttered, “I don’t even know who that is.”
“IT’S FRANKIE AVALON,” I cried. “FROM BACK TO THE BEACH!” I bet he really wants that movie to be what he’s remembered for, lol. But I was a kid when that came out and literally had no idea who he was, just that PEE WEE HERMAN was in this movie and I had to see it, oh my god, so my Aunt Sharon took me to the theater, neither of us having any idea what the actual movie was about, and I’ve been obsessed with it ever since. I recorded the song that the cast sings at the end with the microphone of my old ass Fisher Price tape recorder, memorializing it on my first ever mixed tape (it was translucent yellow with a rainbow on the corner!) when I was in grade school. That tape will always live on in my heart.
(I also taped “Somebody’s Watching Me” by Rockwell from the TV at my Pappap’s house using the same method and I thought I was a fucking genius, probably.
Anyway. The beach. We went to there. I think Chooch had regERTZ for not actually wanting to spend more time there sooner but oh well, maybe listen to MOMMY next time, she knows best.
Chooch: who cares about the beach
Also Chooch: *compulsively makes a mess in the sand like a toddler*
Ugh, then we checked out around 10:30 (I will actually admit that the GOLD CREST was OK even though it wasn’t THE OLYMPIC and that maybe I would stay there again only because I don’t want Henry crapping on my good childhood memories and traditions with his dumb snoring and blank T-shirts or whatever.) From there, we drove to Six Flags Great Adventure, which was only about an hour away and look, I know I said that we had nixed this from the original itinerary because El Toro is closed for the season and then the brand new RMC single-rail – Jersey Devil – went down for maintenance, but listen Linda: the Jersey Devil ended up opening up again and I wanted to ride a fine-ass RMC on my motherfucking birthday, OK?
I figured it would be crowned, but it would be worth it to me to just go there, ride the damn thing, and then leave.
Also, I kept waking up throughout the night because the TV was playing commercials for Jersey Devil literally all night long. Like it was an omen.
LOL, but then we got there and it was CLOSED. And so was Nitro, the third most anticipated coaster I wanted to ride. So basically, the park’s top three (not even exaggerating, these are legitimately the park’s premier attractions) coasters were DOWN that day, which meant that even though it actually wasn’t that crowded, everyone was funneling into the other lines so some of the coasters had two-hour waits.
So that was a big let down, but I will say one thing: the atmosphere here was the best of the three Six Flags I’ve been to (well, four if you count that now-defunct Geauga Lake one in Ohio that Henry and I tried to have “a date” at in the salad days of our relationship lol. Ugh.
I mean, it’s not the Wildwood boardwalk, that’s for sure!
Anyway, I was super sulky and pouty about my shitty birthday luck (but at least we didn’t pay to get in!), so I just wanted to leave right away after finding out the bad news. But Chooch was all, “Can we just, I dunno, mosey on over to Kingda Ka, just to see?”
That was definitely my LEAST ANTICIPATED coaster of the whole park because I hate hate hate Top Thrill Dragster and this one is even higher (it’s actually the launch that I hate because it’s honestly so unnecessary, no one should ever want to feel like that). But fuck fuck fuck, the wait time was only about 30 minutes so I let him drag me on it and we got the back row and I honestly had a hard time walking after that; my legs were made of Jell-o.
You can see that piece of shit in the background – that big tall dumb looking thing. It’s a strata coaster, so it’s over 400 feet high. I just hate it. I hate sitting there waiting for it to launch, it’s like waiting for a death sentence.
But in the forefront is EL TORO. It had a pretty terrible maintenance issue / accident in June when the back car of one of the trains partially derailed (no one was hurt). It happened early on in the ride so a shit ton of the track got busted from the derailed wheels scraping along the course. Needless to say, this bad boy is going to be down for a while and I’m gutted because this is such a bucket list coaster for me, and I’ll tell you why: it’s the closest thing to my beloved T-Express in South Korea’s Everland that I will ever get to until I go back to Korea one day. T-Express completely shattered my idea of what a roller-coaster – especially a wooden one – could accomplish. I just never really cared that much about coasters when we went to parks – I would ride them, but I was always on the prowl for crazy flat rides and unique dark rides. I mean, I was a card-carrying member of the Dark Ride & Funhouse Enthusiasts club, lest you forget.
The T-Express is an Intamin pre-fab coaster and it broke records when it was constructed. Then Intamin (with the help of RMC!!! DREAMTEAM) built El Toro several years later and EVERYONE gushes about El Toro. It’s in so many enthusiasts’ Top 10 and I am so sad that I will likely have to wait another year before finally experiencing it. The silver lining to this is that some of the coaster YouTubers I watch say that this coaster was running pretty rough and slowly over the last few years and that getting retracked is probably the best thing that could happen so HERE IS HOPING.
Other things we managed to ride that didn’t have terribly long lines:
- Runaway Mine Train thing (so fucking rough and awful but that part of the park was very pretty)
- The Joker, pictured above: Chooch’s and my first 4D free spin and it was not great and the line moved so slowly. I’ll take the good old, tried and true Zipper over this any day.
- Harley Quinn’s Crazy Train or something, which was a surprisingly fun family coaster.
- Skull Mountain – a really fucking shitty indoor wild mouse type coaster that had next to no theming and was basically just a half-dark warehouse with like, junk laying around.
- Hall of Justice League – super long wait for a shooting ride, but the video they had playing during it was actually pretty entertaining even though I do not care about DC comic superhero stuff at all, and the ride itself was SHOCKINGLY fun for a shooting ride, which I usually hate.
Standing in line for Skull Mountain and having no idea how let down we were about to be, lol. Also, if you were following along on my birthday week adventures, you may recall that Chooch started repeating his t-shirts and that’s because we stupidly let him pack for himself and he thought we were only going to be gone “until Monday.” Luckily, he had some extra shirts but Henry to go to a Dollar General on our first day in Wildwood to buy him socks and underwear lol.
We left Six Flags around 3 or 4 (and I got yelled at by a custodian cleaning up puke by the exit for trying to go around him, which seemed on par for this lame birthday) because we were driving home that same day (WHO PLANNED A TRAVEL DAY ON MY BIRTHDAY, HENRY) and didn’t want to get home at like 3am. The drive was super boring and full of me being a big crybaby because nothing is ever good enough for Princess Erin. There is some additional stuff in this post that I wrote in the car when I was pointedly ignoring Henry. We got home around 1am and the cats didn’t even care because they hung out with my mom all week so they didn’t miss at all.
And I have been floating in post-vacation depression ever since.
UNTIL NEXT TIME, BYE.