Yet another good weekend! Ed and Shawn came over on Friday night, and we played a little Goldeneye, Mario Kart 64, Starfox 64, and Mario Party, all courtesy of Project 64, my new N64 emulator. Project 64 is pretty similar to 1964, but it supports Goldeneye, Starfox, and Madden 2002 better. 1964 appears to support Mario Kart better, except for the lack of luster in the trophies that you get for the GP races. Still, I think will stick with Project 64 as my emulator of choice. You can simply rename the save files to make them work for the other emulator anyway, so they're pretty interchangeable.
The next day, Ed, Cherry and I went to Busch Gardens, this time, without grandparents to slow us down! First, we took a ride on the Montu, which was one of the first inverted roller coasters. It's a quality coaster, but it was nothing compared to what we would go on later.
We walked around and discovered that there were a lot of animals that we never saw there on the previous trip. They have a new section that takes you right up close to the lions, which was something that I'd never seen before at Busch Gardens, or anywhere else really.
The next ride we got on was also very animal oriented - the Rhino Rally. It's a jeep safari ride, similar to the one in Animal Kingdom. We only had to wait like 15 minutes for it, compared to the over 90 minute wait we would have had to wait when we went to Busch Gardens in the winter. This short wait might have been related to the shortened ride, however. Apparently, half of the ride (the water portion) was shut down, so it was all on land. Still it was a pretty nice ride. Sometimes, a mechanical ride just doesn't beat good ol' gasoline engines. We saw a number of animals quite closely, and in particular we saw this rhino, who apparently thought Ed was very sexy. Open up the photo to see what I'm talking about, but don't say I didn't warn you!
Fortunately, besides that horrible sighting, there were quite a few sexy figures walking around in bikinis at Busch Gardens that day. Probably they were just preparing for wet rides like the Congo River Rapids, or maybe they were just trying to get guys like me in trouble with their wives/girlfriends. We got on the Congo River Rapids ride without our bikinis, and Ed and I got soaked, but Cherry managed to get off the ride completely dry!
Towards the end of the day, we had ridden the little Cheetah Chase roller coaster, the Bumper Cars, and the Flume Ride in addition to the rides mentioned above, and we were finally ready to get on the scariest coaster I have ever been on. Well, Ed and I, anyway. Cherry sat out on this one, just as she sat out on the Montu. I think she wouldn't have been really scared on the Montu, but hell, I was scared on the SheiKra. I was actually scared before I even got on it in earnest. The pulley thing that pulls the three row, 10 seats-per-row coaster car to the top of the park is at a much steeper angle than any other roller coaster I've ridden. It makes you really, really nervouse. The coaster then hangs you right before the first 90-degree drop, where the track below you seems to actually disappear, making it seem like more than 90-degrees. Then it drops you. Really, really fast. So fast, that, in the slow-motion DVD that you can buy at the end of the ride, it seems like your hair is flapping in the wind at normal speed while your body and everything else is moving in bullet-time. I think I saw splattered bugs on the front of our car (we were sitting in the first row.) So yeah. Really scary.
Finally, to get back to the entrance of the park, we decided to take the Skyway. We took two photos and tried to get the SheiKra in the background, but I blinked the first time, and Cherry blinked the second time. Only Ed didn't blink, so that's the pic I am posting here. You can see all of the other pics I took of this trip by clicking the link in the title, or you can just go to my photo gallery link in the Links section in the sidebar.
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