I actually got an acceptable amount (six hours) of sleep last night. This would be remarkable on its own, but it’s flat out amazing when you consider that I didn’t get to sleep until 1 AM – i.e., I slept until 7 AM. Central time. That’s 8 AM my time! I haven’t slept that late in quite awhile.

Today, I went to Six Flags Fiesta Texas (known to roller coaster geeks as SFFT). SFFT is the last park I have left on my roller coaster bucket list. What makes this particular Six Flags park special is that it was built inside a quarry! I tried to get some pics to illustrate…

A few of the park’s roller coasters rise above the top of the cliff face, their tracks diving in and out of the quarry. One of the coasters even takes you through the cliff, in the form of a tunnel that was blasted through the solid rock! That coaster, known as Iron Rattler, was the real reason I had to visit SFFT. But I’m getting ahead of myself here. I had an experience at the park entrance that I’d like to talk about…

When I’m planning on going to an amusement park, I’ll usually check their website first, to see if there are any discounts or special details; sometimes you can save a few dollars that way. I neglected to do that this time. I just walked up to the ticket office and asked to buy a ticket. The kid inside told me basically, “You don’t wanna do that.” He informed me that the price for one adult admission, when purchased at the brick-and-mortar ticket office was about $90, but that it would only be $35 if I bought the ticket online. So I walked away, pulled out my phone, and saved $55. There was no app to install – just had to go to the Six Flags website!

My first thought was “Yay, Six Flags, for saving me money when I was ready and willing to give you a much larger amount.” Then I thought “Boo, Six Flags, for trying to get me into the habit of buying tickets online so you don’t have to pay people to staff the ticket office.” But I used to work at an amusement park, and I knew some of the people who worked at the ticket windows. Believe me…they don’t wanna be there. All right, back to the coasters…

As I was saying, Iron Rattler was the ‘big draw’ that pulled me to SFFT. I have heard/read many wonderful reviews of this coaster. After riding it, I can honestly say that it is indeed a great coaster, but not as great as I had hoped. It’s not my new favorite coaster…in fact, it’s not even my favorite coaster in the park.

There are two coasters at SFFT where, not only was the individual roller coaster new to me, I hadn’t even ridden any coasters of the same type. The first of these was Wonder Woman Golden Lasso, which was my first single-rail coaster (see photo above). What can I say? Amazing, surprising, unrelenting, smooth, an absolute blast! This may be my new favorite coaster! I have ridden well over 200 roller coasters, and was wearing eyeglasses on the vast majority of them. This was only the second time I have ever grabbed my glasses because I thought they would fly off. So imagine my surprise when I had to make a mad grab for my glasses on another coaster on the same day.

SFFT’s Batman: The Ride was my first ant farm coaster. “Ant farm” is a term I made up for this style of coaster, because the cars go up, down, back, and forth, but not left or right – much like the residents of an ant farm. But in case that sounds boring, they added vertically spinning seats. And man, oh MAN do those suckers spin! We’re talking serious G-forces here, folks. This is amazingly fun!

As for Parkinson’s and other physical maladies, I took a couple extra carbidopa/levodopa pills over the course of the day, made sure to stay hydrated, and paid frequent visits to air-conditioned shops and restaurants, so I did pretty well. I stayed about five hours, and left about three hours before closing time. I was thinking about going back to the park after a quick bit of rest, but my back was bugging me a little and I had ridden everything I wanted to ride, so I called it a day.