$ cat ~/life/coasters.md
Coaster Enthusiast
Front row, hands up, every time.
$ cat ~/coasters/home-parks.md
Home-field advantage
Living in St. Pete means Tampa and Orlando are both an easy drive, so Busch Gardens, Universal, and Walt Disney World are basically home parks. That proximity changes the whole relationship with the hobby. A coaster stops being a once-a-year vacation event and becomes a Tuesday — a free afternoon, a quick lap on whatever's running the shortest line, home by dinner.
Annual passes pay for themselves by spring, and the parks stop feeling like destinations and start feeling like a gym membership I actually use. I know which entrance is fastest, which ride to hit first, and exactly how long the walk back to the car is going to feel after a long day.
$ cat ~/coasters/the-hit-list.md
The hit list
Iron Gwazi at Busch Gardens is the local king — a hybrid that has no business being as fast or as relentless as it is, twenty minutes from home. VelociCoaster is the best thing Orlando has built in years: a launch, a sense of theme, and a top hat that genuinely gets you. Fury 325 at Carowinds is worth the drive to Charlotte all on its own — a giga that just doesn't let up, and I cleared most of the park's lineup in a single October day. And Stardust Racers is the new dueling chaos at Epic Universe.
The throughline is simple: airtime, inversions, and a front-row seat with my hands up. I'm not a white-knuckle-grip rider. The whole point is to let go — to spend ninety seconds in a system engineered, down to the inch, to make my body believe it's in danger while knowing for a fact it isn't. It's the most trust I place in anyone's engineering all year.
$ cat ~/coasters/opening-day.md
Opening day
There's a specific thrill to a first public ride — before the wait times normalize, before the internet has finished deciding how it feels, before the ride becomes a known quantity. You're reacting to it honestly because nobody's told you what to expect yet.
I made the trip for opening day on TRON Lightcycle / Run at Magic Kingdom, Guardians of the Galaxy: Cosmic Rewind at EPCOT, and the opening weekend of Universal's Epic Universe — five new worlds in a single gate. Each one is logged in the trophy case, which is the closest a coaster habit comes to having a changelog.