Road Trip to California: Day 1-St. Louis

Blue Slushie, Check.

Be Sure to Check Out My Previous Post: A Day at Purdue!

With Blue Slushie in the cup holder, and Howard stern on the radio, I started my 2100 mile drive to
California. The drive would be broken down into 3 days, each averaging 12 hours of time on the road including pit stops.

Day 1 of the drive took me through Illinois, Missouri and ending in Abilene, Kansas.

St. Louis Arch

My First stop in downtown St. Louis, MO at the Arch. It is a beautiful monument that truly towers over the city and dominates the landscape as you drive in. It is located in a large grassy park overlooking the Mississippi river. When I was there, the line to go to the top was at least an hour long, and I didn't have that sort of time, so I took some photos, enjoyed the beauty of the arch and got back on the road.

Now with a long few days ahead of me, I made sure to try to have at least some fun out of the car, and Six Flags St Louis was the highlight of Day 1. It was a pretty hot and sticky day, so the majority of the guests were there for the water park, so the lines for all of the coasters were pretty short. Most of the rides were standard, and not necessarily noteworthy. I rode all of the coasters for credit toward my coaster count. Today's count was 9. As some rides were just standard coasters, I will just highlight my few favorites in the park.

Batman: The Ride.

First was Batman: The Ride. It is the standards Six Flags Batman Clone, except it exits the station
from the left instead of the right. The rest of the layout was essentially the same, but the landscape was a lot more bare than what it is at other parks. Still a great ride, and back row is still my favorite spot on this ride.

American Thunder with Got-2-B-Glued Decals

Wooden coasters are always a thing of beauty and their construction and appearance can always be appreciated wherever you are. Six Flags St. Louis has 3 wooden coasters: Screamin' Eagle, The Boss, and American Thunder. Screamin' Eagle was a nice hilly ride, with lots of bunny hills both out and back, rode on the front to get a view of the surrounding area (nice green hillsides). The Boss was extremely overrated. It had a lot of elements that should lead it to be a very exciting coaster, however the trains that it used were extremely rough and led me to actually sit down and recover after just 2 rides. I think with a re-tracking and newer trains this could prove to be a much better coaster, but for now, i would say avoid it.

American Thunder however was fantastic. Using my favorite Millennium Flyer trains, it provided both a very smooth ride and plenty of airtime. My only complaint was that it was too short!! Six Flags also has a very interesting collection of advertisers throughout the park, and this coaster train was shrink wrapped with Got-2-B-Glued adverts. Nothing says roller coasters like good hair gel.

I also took a ride on Pandemonium, a spinny car coaster. These coasters are much smaller in size and often resemble a carnival style "Wild Mouse" ride. Essentially, the trains are only 1 car long, and after ascending the first lift hill, the cars are able to spin freely based on the weight distribution of the riders as you travel the track, leading to a different ride experience every time you ride. Despite all the spinny, there is not much nausea that accompanies this ride, and leads to a very fun ride experience.

At the end of the day, I took a ride (OK more like 4 rides) aboard Mr. Freeze Reverse Blast! This

Mr. Freeze, Reverse Blast!

LIM launched coaster, sends rides through an inside top hat, and up a 218' vertical tower all in reverse at 70 mph, before  plummeting back to the earth and flying through the elements once more going forwards back to the station. This is a great launched coaster and the theming was done very well inside the launch building. However the coolest part of this ride was its "side-to-side" loading station. Essentially there are 2 separate loading tracks, that each slide towards the center of the building to line up with the main track, and then launch from there. This allows one train of riders to be experiencing the ride, while the other train is loading new passengers, which is not usually found on non-complete circuit launched coasters. Also fitting with the "Mr. Freeze" theming, the show/launch building was chilled quite nicely and made for a nice bit of relief on a hot summer day. Check out this video to see what I mean about the cool loading station.

Well 4 hours and 9 new coasters later, it was time to leave Six Flags and continue on down the road. It was a nice break in my day, and made the rest of my day of driving much nicer. Today also marked 100 hours of driving so far this summer, which was pretty cool.

100 Hours in the car so far!

Didn't get enough photos here? Then check out all the photos from the 3 day drive in the #LyfInFocus-Indiana To California Album!

Be sure to check out my next post:
Road Trip to California: Day 2- Kansas and Colorado!