i’ve already written about lake winnie, but it deserves a second look. about half of the rides were operated by kids from my high school, all of them serving summer time in the employ of the park. lake winnepasaukah. home of the matterhorn. a spinning mini-coaster on a spoke system, taking a series of dips and hills over and over again. at the controls was a wanna-be d.j. with a meanstreak and a tape-deck. the trick was to sit in the matterhorn car on the outside of the circle, leaving the inside for your mid-teen date. or perhaps just the girl who you had optimistically decided to follow around the park. no matter, because you were counting on that evil ride operator to choose an opportune moment to shift the ride into overdrive. this was your first lesson in centrifugal force, but you didn’t realize it. the faster the ride would go, the closer your “date” would gravitate to you and you had only pure physics to thank for this phenomena. so it wasn’t that romantic, and yes, you had to accept an incredible amount of dizziness in exchange for this extreme high-velocity closeness, but it works well enough for junior high. it seemed worth it to risk motion sickness in exchange for just a little bit of closeness, spinning at 13 revolutions-per-minute to “jungle love” by morris day & the time.
Oh-wee-oh-wee-oh!
and now you can relive this in your own backyard…. assuming you have a rather sizable backyard and enough extra electricity and insurance to cover it. ital international sells used musik rides. you can have a 70s era himalaya for a reduced cost of $120k. maybe you’d like the flying bobs model for a mere $50k? and don’t think that these are just remnants of a bygone era, because they are still being made here in the southeast at bertazzon’s of brentwood, tennessee.
of course, you’d have to hire your own brace-faced teenager to man the controls…
