Dragon Mountain Roller Coaster - Niagara Falls, Ontario, Canada
on George Hamilton (Jamaica), 10/Aug/2011 00:49, 34 days ago
Jamaica blogging has been short-changed recently. Here's my excuse. I was back in Canada for a few weeks seeing the family, being useful and having adventures like the one below.Before starting on about the adventure, I'll give examples of the three possible narrative approaches. It's all the same story, just different communication modes. But to break up the words here is a photo first.You have to admit that the following picture looks serene and peaceful.Here are three promised narrative approaches.First there are my words where I try to be complicated and build up suspense. Next there are the interspersed pictures which convey a serene pastoral picture of a wonderful place that you could safely take your grandmother to. Finally there is a two minute long youtube video clip by silviomodolo that illustrates the adventure with moving pictures, clanging noises and screams. I think the clanging noises occur when the dragon monster's fillings banged together at the thought of chewing you up. But otherwise the video is just as serene and pastoral as the second approach.After watching the video, probably your grandmother might politely decline your offer to share in the adventure. You might opt out too. For all I know your grandmother may be braver than you. Would I opt out? I don't know because I did not see the video until after my adventure. I had spent half an hour taking the occasional photo and watching the beast and trying to get a good photo angle. Me and the thing I looked at must have started bonding in a mechanical, serene, pastoral way. I would be good to it, and it would be good to me. All is well, as they say in JA.This is the same picture but with a small brightly colored caterpillar clinging onto the top part of the loop. It's got to be a caterpillar, who in their right mind would be suspended upside down 50 feet off the ground?And now the caterpillar is coming out of the loop. Hey wait - that's really people!Maybe somebody's grandmother was on it waving happily along with the other riders.And a final point-and-shoot slightly zoomed photo as it passes by my vantage point.It was time I felt to do it– something that I had procrastinated on for a number of years.Me and my mechanically bonded friend. The it that I was challenging was reputedly the largest steel one of its kind in the world.So right away that ruled out Moby Dick and King Kong who are not metallic. Because it was my first one, it was simply just an average-sized monster for me.But I had a nagging suspicion about this it not really being the largest in the world.After all it wasn’t in California, the remainder of the USA, Europe or Japan.However it was nearly a mile long and about 185 feet high. That is big, if not gigantic. The size of the Loch Ness monster, "Nessie", pales in comparison. Later on, I calculated, as I am want to do,the whole circuit was about a mile long and took three minutes to complete, so on average the caterpillar was progressing along at a leisurely 20 mph (35 km/hr). No speeding tickets for it.Nessie says "Och, I'm not that wee! This is just an old snap, we Scots could splurge on color photos too if we really wanted to."Procrastination was actually advantageous for me.Some who had challenged much smaller monsters than mine in the 1980’s had died when the Flip Flap monster on Coney Island cracked their necks.There’s a time and place for everything.It is pointless to go adventuring and not return. My adventure was safe. I am here to write about it.The Dragon Mountain roller coaster - the world's largest steel roller coaster, that also features more travel through tunnels - 1,163 feet - than any other coaster in the world. Here is the dragon head entrance on Dragon Mountain as photographed by SmugMug:But back to original research. I took the ride with our daughter Nadine and her husband Eric. We were all cool in the underground station as we waited. Occasionally we would here screams from outside but that would obviously be from people on other rides, not caused by my friendly roller coaster buddy.Then we were on after the previous riders had exited on the other side of cars. None of them looked particularly traumatized. Nor were there life jackets or parachutes under the seats which I also took to be a reassuring sign. There were no air sickness bags in the backs of the seats in front of you. The pull-over restraining devices seemed no worse than seat belts on an airplane. But I wasn't worried anyway because the roller coaster and I had already bonded.Then the roller coaster slowly clanked its way up the incline. I thought to myself that it's not a crime to store potential energy - that's all it was doing. Up the incline, a snail blurred its way past the roller coaster. But me, my buddy and my human companions were still cool.At the top of the incline there was a momentary lull. Then gravity took hold of my buddy the roller coaster. It started to roll downhill. Faster and faster of course, or should I say less slowly and less slowly for the benefit of nervous readers?The initial interesting point along the route was at the first of the two pairs of inversions. An inversion is a fancy way of saying a vertical loop as seen in the blog's first photograph. The track moved up in front of our faces at a progressively slower rate as gravity tried unsuccessfully to stop us. For a brief instant the track was directly above us and out of sight and then it fell away in front of us as we gained speed again to leave the loop. And then we went almost immediately into the second inversion.The other pair of inversions also came within the next two minutes. From time to time we passed through pitch black tunnels in between. The tunnels would have been good places to sneak in some Jamaican-style potholes. The jarring impact of potholes like that in the blackness would have been terrifying, but my friend is not into terror so there were none.Fortunately this is not a Jamaican pothole, just a slightly bigger hole in a road:After the four inversions, things were relatively calm as the roller coaster gradually coasted its way back to its starting point. A nice feature was the scenery along the track - lots of trees and greenery, very pastoral. It would not have been so pleasant staring downwards at concrete and crowds and looking across at another ride operating a few feet away. Now onto my third approach.If words and static pictures are not as exciting as you'd like, then you can load silviomodolo's youtube link showing what this ride is like. It was uploaded to the Internet on Nov 2, 2008. Copy the link into your internet program's address bar.http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uu3v0euBo9AOnly the sound track is slightly wrong, I never once heard the words "Is that all there is?", "Why are my feet higher than my head?", or "In Jamaica we have bigger potholes than this" and so on. Screams are part of a universal language and do not need comment. But this is a minor criticism - you watch videos mainly for the pictures, not for the sounds.So that pretty well wrapped up my Canadian holiday adventure and Jamaica will start to feature again. Reasonably soon I will go on the new railway line in Jamaica where the cars are pretty similar in color to my friend the roller coaster's, however the tracks will be more horizontal, but that's their problem.So to sum it up, it was fun, exciting and interesting. I would definitely go on a roller coaster again. Quite an experience - it was like an Imax movie but with the wind too. What more could you want?Moneywise, if you plan to visit more than once, ask to obtain a photo ID card for $5 (2011 price) and then all your other trips on the roller coaster will be free for the remainder of the year. Later, when you arrive at the Dragon Mountain just tell my buddy that George sent you.I used http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dragon_Mountain and Yahoo search as reference materialshttp://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20080417131704AAYS5CaThank you.