Friday, July 5, I left Sterling to fly up to Minnesota for a week, with Nick Universe being my only theme park. I was pretty excited, as this was my first time going to MOA.
After a brief 2 hour drive to Chicago Midway, I got through security easily and arrived at my gate.
I arrived at the gate an hour early, so I got bored and took some pictures.
Finally, about 30 minutes to the estimated departure time, my plane arrived.
Goodbye Chicago, Hello Minneapolis!
After a quick 50 minute flight, I arrived at the Minneapolis-St. Paul Airport and headed on over to MOA with my cousin and aunt.
I had never been there before, and to be honest, I envisioned it to look bigger.
After dealing with parking and finally getting in to mall, I saw the first signs of Nick Universe.
After I got my wristband, I headed on over to Spongebob for my first ride of the day.
I was looking forward to riding it, and it didn't let me down.
The next ride was the Pepsi Orange Streak. It's sort of hard to get a good picture of this ride as it goes almost all the way around the park, so I just took a picture of the lift hill.
Then we preceded to Splat-o-Sphere. I like Moser's drop towers/spring rides, so this was fun for me.
Continuing on with the rides, we went to Avatar next, which was my favorite of the day. I thought it was a really neat ride, and sort of reminded me of a Disko.
Avatar was another ride that was hard to get a good picture of, as there aren't many good vantage points to take a photo of it. However, I did manage to get a little bit of it in this pic.
After Avatar, my cousin was ready for a break, so we decided to do a little shopping. I bought some Puma shoes and 3 CD's at FYE. After we ate dinner, my cousin was ready for some more rides.
Fairly Odd Coaster was next. (sorry about the blurry pic)
I really enjoyed this ride. It was a lot of fun and the On-Ride video was a neat thing to see.
After Fairly Odd Coaster, we went over to ride the Log Ride, which, coincidentally, my cousin rode with my grandpa 16 years ago. It was a fun ride and I liked the fact that you didn't get wet.
We also went and rode Avatar again after the log ride.
Although this picture was taken during the day, we decided to end the night with Spongebob. It was sort of neat to be at Nick Universe with almost no one there, and having it be considerably darker than it was before. We were lucky and got the last dispatch of the day.
The vertical lift hill was a very neat element.
All in all, Nick Universe was pretty neat, and the rides were good. For arriving at 6 P.M. and leaving right at closing, with some shopping in between, we did pretty good:
Spongebob: 2
Avatar: 2
Orange Streak: 1
Splat-o-Sphere: 1
Fairly Odd Coaster: 1
Log Chute: 1
Total: 8
(I'm on the far bottom right and my cousin is right next to me)
After staying at my Aunt and Uncle's house near the Canadian border for almost a week, we drove back down to Illinois. On the way back, I saw what was left of a defunct amusement park in Bemidji, MN.
My Aunt and Uncle said it was called Paul Bunyun land.
Other than a mini-golf course, some miniature railroad track was all that was left of the park.
We also drove through the Wisconsin Dells during a torrential downpour. We were in this storm throughout the whole state of Wisconsin from Duluth, MN, and down into Illinois. It was sort of weird being under tornado watches and warnings for 9 hours straight. I did however manage to take a few pics of Mt. Olympus:
SFGAm 7/15
Not too much to say about this trip. Fortunately, it wasn't very busy, and we managed to get on a good amount of rides. I had my best rides ever on Raging Bull and Superman, and I was able to race on American Eagle, in which Red side won. Also, I enjoyed TDK, given that I was the first dispatch of the day. I don't think I would want to wait for it though. I also managed to get a women kicked out of the park, and ran into someone from TPR, in addition to getting an On-Ride photo on Spacely's with my friend from California, who is on the left. (on bottom of page)
American Eagle(red): 2
Superman: 1
Raging Bull: 2
Demon: 1
Iron Wolf: 1
Spacely's Sprocket Rockets: 1
Whizzer: 1
Viper: 2
Vertical Velocity: 1
Ragin' Cajun: 1
Rue le Dodge: 2
King Chaos: 1
The Orbit: 1
Whirligig: 1
Total:18
The End
