42 Inches

Saturday Alyce hit a major milestone, 42 inches!  42 inches?  3 1/2 feet?  What's the big deal with that?  Well 42 inches is the height one needs to be in order to ride the majority of the rides at Six Flags.  Before 42 inches and you are relegated to the more mundane rides like the Ferris Wheel, antique cars, and kid rides.

Saturday after handing over the deposit to the builder we thought a trip to Six Flags would be a nice diversion from all the craziness of the past few weeks.  Mom and I had talked in the past about Alyce getting close to 42 inches and thought now would be a good time to check her height.  After a ride on the Fog Horn Leg Horn train we stood Alyce next to a height check stick and behold she was 42 inches on the money!

You'd think the first thing we'd do is to get her on a roller coaster but that was not the case, in fact we took her to go ride down the slide.  For some odd ball reason the slide in the kid's playground has a height limitation of 42 inches.  You can run, jump, and play on anything else on the playground but there is a Six Flags employee at the very top making sure you are of proper height before going down a slide.  Proof positive that insurance companies are sucking the fun out of childhood.  Alyce in the past wanted to ride the slide and we thought this would be a great way to celebrate the accomplishment.  For the next 20 minutes she'd circuit down the slide, back around, up the steps, and back down again.

After that Mom wanted to take Alyce on her first roller coaster ride.  The two of them then stood in line for 45 minutes to ride the Tony Hawk's Big Spin roller coaster.  This roller coaster is pretty tame if only based on height, however, as the cars go around the track they spin.  For the 45 minutes I took Luke on a few kid rides but was back in time to catch a video of the two of them on the coaster.


Catching back up with Mom and Alyce I asked Alyce what she thought of the coaster. Her response was an unenthusiastic "that was really NOT very much fun".  She wasn't traumatized from the experience but wasn't jumping for joy.  Next we rode the carousel and that seemed to wipe any memory from the coaster from her mind.  We showed her a different less exciting coaster later and she said that she would ride that the next time we go to "Sfix Flags".