04/18/2023
2 years ago, I drove 12 hours to come to Dollywood to ride Lightning Rod and it broke down while I was driving and wouldn't open before I left. 2 months ago, I registered for the Lightning Rod Roundup event, which was to be my revenge. Of course, Lightning Rod went down a week before the event and had not run again by Saturday when the event took place. They expected it to be up and running at some point that day. After testing it first thing in the morning everything went quiet until around 4PM when the trains started testing again. I walked over to the ride where the operators tried to tell me it wasn't open, but before they could I told them that after this trip I will have driven a total of 48 hours in attempts to ride Lightning Rod. I'm going to stand here until Lightning Rod either opens or is deemed closed for the day, or until the park closes. And so, I stood there...if there was just a single train that was sent out with people, I was going to be in the front row of it.
As time passed people started joining me. I don't want to say which one, but he just happened to be the operations crew chief for one of the biggest coasters in the country. He also previously operated Lightning Rod a couple of years ago. He knew the operators that were standing out front and this provided me with way more insight as to what was going on than I would normally ever have. More enthusiasts, most of them other ride ops, started joining the line as the time kept passing. After 90 minutes at around 6PM, the crew chief guy waiting behind me suddenly walked over to the side to look at the train testing and then came back. He told me they had added water dummies to the trains, and running the train 5 times after adding the water dummies is the final step before opening the ride. The train cycled again, and he said that's 2! Everyone was so excited, when the next one came around, all of us including the actual ride ops were yelling 'THREE!'. With only 2 more to go, they would start letting us in at any moment and sure enough, right then one of the other operators came slowly walking out with a smile on her face. I couldn't believe it. After all of this, it was finally going to happen! She made it out the door and said 'guys...huddle up'. I have never seen so much joy evaporate instantly into thin air. I had already gone into shock when she then said, 'I'm sorry but they're deeming the ride closed for the night'.
I never let myself get my hopes up when it comes to this sort of thing. I always expect the worse so I don't get disappointed. But the way this all went down, it was like a cruel joke was being played on me. No matter how hard I fought it, at that point I couldn't help but be 100% sure I was going to ride it. We had been standing there and talking for so long, it was me that everyone felt horrible for. I was the only one of the group that had never ridden it before. All in all though, it was disappointing, and it did lower my spirits, but I started to realize that it just wasn't that important to me anymore. Yes I really wanted to ride it, but 2 years ago I had never ridden anything like that before in my life. I've ridden over 100 more coasters since then. If I had ridden Lightning Rod this weekend, I'm sure I would have loved it, but it wouldn't have become my new favorite coaster like it would have 2 years ago. In fact, it most likely wouldn't have even been my favorite coaster on the trip. Those honors easily belong to Arieforce One at Fun Spot Atlanta. After spending the day at Six Flags Over Georgia on Sunday, I finished the trip off Sunday night closing Arieforce One down, getting 16 total rides, including riding the last 8 trains of the night with other enthusiasts. It was the perfect ending to an imperfect, but still very enjoyable trip.
Texas you're next!
