Home of the Soul Cookie

At the dawn of 2003, my friend Troll and I made a bet: Whichever of us lost the most weight by Halloween 2003 would have their admission to Six Flags Magic Mountain completely paid for by the other. I lost a goodly amount of weight thanks to the ol’ Atkins plan, and was crowned the victor in our weight-loss challenge.

This past weekend, the terms of the bet were finally paid off. Read on for the oh-so thrilling details.

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Friday

I had a four-day weekend off from work for “Spring Break” (it always manages to coincide with Easter, but they’re not going to call it “Easter Holiday”), and Troll had cashed in some of his vacation days too, so we hit the road early Friday morning, bound for Los Angeles and several stops of Troll’s picking in LA’s Little Tokyo neighborhood.

First up was a visit to the Japanese American Cultural & Community Center‘s James Irvine Garden, a tranquil, traditional Japanese garden hidden amid the steel and concrete and broken dreams of the City of Angels. I spent a good long time sitting on a rock, meditating, as a waterfall burbled nearby. I love waterfalls.

An interesting thing I learned: the Japanese symbol for family consists of the symbols for house and garden combined together.

After “zenning out,” we walked a couple of blocks to the Japanese American National Museum, which has an ongoing exhibit called Common Ground: The Heart of Community, which “chronicles 130 years of Japanese American history, beginning with the early days of the Issei pioneers through the World War II incarceration to the present.”

Friday, continued

To call it a powerful exhibit would be an understatement. The bigotry that the Issei (first-generation Japanese-American immigrants) and their children and grandchildren had to endure was immense. That, come the dawn of our involvement in World War II, they were rounded up and “secured” in internment camps was a pure, unmitigated travesty of justice. One of my first thoughts was that the Constitution had failed in those dark days of the 1940′s; later, though I realized the truth:

We had failed the Constitution.

I was gushing tears of pain and anger and sympathy as I made my way through the exhibit. Time and again I was faced with artifacts of hate (“Round ‘em all up!” extolled a US Congressman in one of the quotes; “How to Tell Japs From the Chinese” offered an article from Life), and time and again I was horrified by the ongoing contemporary parallels.

Whether it’s Jose Padilla, still held without bail (indeed, without being charged with a crime) as an “enemy combatant,” or the anti-gay hysteria and crusades to “protect” marriage, we’re still grappling with these demons of our worst natures. We’re a society of Mad Libesque opressors: just fill in the blank for the next class of human beings to run roughshod over.

End of rant.

Friday, continued

After our time at the Japanese American National Museum, we puttered around some of the shops in Little Tokyo, had a late lunch at a Korean hibachi restaurant (yes, I pointed out the absurdity of having Korean food in Little Tokyo, but it was actually very, very good), and made our way through L.A. traffic to the hotel.

Saturday

Off to Magic Mountain!

We arrived just as the park was opening to discover that it was apparently a group-buy day for Los Angeles High School; there were signs up all over the place and the park was packed to the gills with not-as-clever-as-they-thought-they-were kids.

Troll and I got ambushed by one of the Magic Mountain photographic snipers, a roving cadre of paparazzi wannabes whose job it is to take pictures of guests coming in to the park, whether those guests want their pictures taken or not. We actually made it in past the security checkpoint before one of them caught us.

The lines were long, the prices exhorbitant. That said, the rides were awesome. They’ve added several new coasters since I last went (in 1996, with the ex).

My favorite ride of the entire weekend was my Saturday outing on Deja Vu, an inverted (hanging) boomerang-style (go forward, then reverse course and repeat the track backwards) coaster. The line for that one was well in excess of three hours, but it was so worth it.

Troll wasn’t about to have any of it, having already endured his daily limit of one big coaster when we went on Goliath earlier in the day. Luckily, he was game to wait in line with me so I could indulge my not-so-secret inner coaster junkie.

Besides, it was at his behest that we went on many a water ride, including going on Roaring Rapids back-to-back by employing the Fast Lane tickets we’d bought.

Ah, yes, Fast Lane. It’s kind of like Disneyland’s Fastpass only, y’know, not good. First off, you have to buy it (seventeen bucks for a bundle of four tickets). Second, the really good, really kick-ass rides don’t take ‘em; they really can’t! See, there’s no window of time in which the tickets can be used, so there’s no ability for the park to space out their usage and nothing to keep people (as we did) from exiting a ride and immediately getting back into the Fast Lane line, bypassing the regular queue. If they opened the Fast Lane on the “premier” rides, you’d get people parking themselves in the Fast Lane lines, and the “general admission” lines would be even slower than they already are.

Not that we realized any of this when we foolishly said, “Okay!” when asked if we wanted to buy some.

So my advice is to prepare for aggravatingly long lines (yes, longer than anything you’ll find at Disneyland) and to skip the Fast Lane tix.

Sunday

Another day; more coasters. It was Easter, so lines all over the park tended to be shorter: I walked right in to Viper, which had been running with a two-hours-plus wait time 24 hours previously.

Got Troll to go on X; he was not at all as excited by the ride as I was, but I was very impressed that he agreed to go on it all, so kudos to him!

Speaking of Troll, I spent several hours just sitting and chatting with him in one of the park cafés; that was cool.

Spent most of the day drenched after getting talked into going on the Log Jammer, a flume ride, for the second day in a row. I was okay with that until, on the drive home, my feet were getting decidedly squishy in their water-trapping shoes. I took ‘em off (gotta love cruise control) but discovered, much to my chagrin, that the Log Jammer water left my footsies smelling all sorts of nasty. I really felt sorry for Troll, who had to put up with my nasty-smelling dogs for several hours.

Home again, home again, jiggety jig

The trip was a lot of fun; I would’ve been glad to go even if I’d lost the bet that spawned the journey.

And that’s about all I have to say about that.