Roaster Coller

One of the several blogs I read regularly (I use Thunderbird as an RSS reader, as well as for personal email, so I get new posts quickly) is Danny Evans' Dad Gone Mad. I think he's very funny, and I can relate to a lot of his stories.

His post today, about pushing his son to ride Space Mountain with him reminded me of our trip to Disneyland three years ago. I can't believe it's been that long. We'll have to go again when Zachary's a bit older.

Rachel was, of course, mad about all the various princesses, and wanted to go on the Snow White & the Seven Dwarfs ride. She did OK on that ride; physically it is very tame, but at one point I thought her heart was going to leap right out of her chest. She much preferred the even tamer stuff - the Mad Hatter's spinning tea cups, some of the Bug's Life stuff, the carousel's were big and she LOOVED the huge "Ferrist Wheel". She wasn't especially interested in the things she called "roaster collers", but she adored the Heimlich caterpillar train ride (I think she rode that more than any other).

Somehow, we managed to get her to go on the Pirates of the Caribbean ride with us. I'd never been to Disneyland either, so Dawn really wanted me to go on it. To help Rachel see that it was OK, we played up throwing our arms up in the air and enjoying ourselves. She did fairly well with it, though I don't think she really thought it was that great. Not like "It's a Small World" (and now I'm going to have that damned song rattling around in my head the rest of the day. Good job.), certainly, which she went on several times, but no abject terror.

A few weeks later, I picked Rachel up from my parents' place on my bike. At the time, she was still riding strapped into a seat mounted directly to the bike behind my seat. My parents live on a hill, so we had to start out going down said hill. I happened to look down and see her shadow on the ground -

arms thrown up in the air, yelling "wheeeeee" as if she were on a roaster coller.