Richard Bannister

The final day of my trip was planned around a mid-afternoon flight from Chicago. There wasn’t enough time to visit a major park with new coasters, but I figured I’d be able to tick off at least one figure eight spinner with a possibility of a second if everything went to plan.

I arrived at the latest branch of Scene75 a few minutes before the posted opening. Rather than stand outside the entrance looking silly I walked to the adjacent Walmart in order to stock up on McCormick’s Montreal Steak Seasoning. This is a particular favourite that I’ve found many uses for – it’s great on sweetcorn for example. It’s possible to buy in Ireland through speciality shops, albeit at about ten times the American price, and that’s a big deal given the industrial quantity of it that I consume.

After a quick detour via the car I made my way into the now-open Scene75. I couldn’t find any signage indicating how many credits were required for the coaster, so asked the operator, who also didn’t know right away, but was able to read it from her card scanning device. Soon after I had the 28 credits needed for a private cycle on Tsunami (#3093), my second “Model B” figure eight spinner.

When I walked out the door of Scene75 I had two choices. I could either be nearly five hours early for my flight home, or I could shoot for one more pathetic credit and get to the airport three hours early. Though it wasn’t enormously sensible to buy park admission for a hit-and-run on a figure eight spinner, I figured that it was a relatively cheap way to reduce the amount of time I was going to spend in Chicago O’Hare airport, which could only be a good thing.

I was a little taken aback at the 40 minute queue for Farmers Fling (#3094) but that was within the one hour window I’d given myself, so I stood in line and in due course ticked off my 59th example of the type. I’d have liked to have ridden the park’s other coasters, but decided that I’d never hear the end of it if doing so caused me to miss my flight home!