A couple of weekends ago, Maggie and I joined my friend John Snyder and his wife and their son for a fun-filled day at Six Flags Great Adventure here in New Jersey.

The biggest draw for me was that this year they opened the most recent “World’s Tallest and Fastest Roller Coaster”, which they call Kingda Ka. This bad boy goes from 0 to 128 MPH in less than 4 seconds. Then rockets you vertically 428 ft, then over the top into a quarter turn to plummet back down to Earth and finally coming over a nice hill and back into the station. This experience lasts an entirely too quick 50 seconds. But having your eyelids catch air under them and start flapping in the wind on the way down is a “neat” feeling.

John and I then proceeded to ride all the running roller coasters in the park. The one that was shutdown was Batman the Ride, but it looked very similar to the one at Six Flags Over Texas. As for the rest, it was a fun filled day of thrills.

The most impressive where the Medusa, Superman Ultimate Flight, and Nitro.

I’d actually seen preview video of Medusa a few years ago on a show about cool roller coasters in the country. This is the first roller coaster to not have a floor in the car. Sure, there are the coasters out there where you hang down from the track, which technically wouldn’t have a floor, but they don’t need one. Medusa still has the cars on top of the track. So there are your feet hanging above the rails. It was a fun ride with some loops and twists and overall a good thrill.

Superman Ultimate Flight was definitely the innovator of our favorites. This coaster has the train hanging from the rails. And when you load onto it the car is hanging like it normally would if were sitting down. The fun begins once they lock you in. The cool part here is that they lock your legs in. Then once that’s done, the car tilts 90 degrees so that your chest is parallel with the group like you’re flying! From there, the ride is awesome. You can’t see where the track is going to take you, so it really feels like uncontrolled flight. Very fun.

And even after all that, our overall favorite ended up being Nitro based on it’s overall balance of length, thrills, and smoothness of ride. I really don’t like steel coasters that rattle your teeth, that’s reserved for wooden coasters only in my book. Anyway, Nitro is a coaster with 4 person per row and mostly very nice negative G hills. I think there was a loop or two in there, but the hills were definitely the best part. That feeling of weightlessness is awesome.

As a side note, to accomplish all this riding on a fairly busy day at the park, we used the QBot they now sell at every Six Flags. And of course, the New Jersey park the most expensive one to rent it at. Even better, they have two levels, regular and “Gold”. Gold is supposed to actually reduce your wait time. Since we had John’s son with us and didn’t know how long he might last, we opted for a Gold one. And I guess it worked since the longest we waiting for anything to come was 18 minutes. We rode the Kingda Ka ( a ride that regularly has 4+ hour wait times ) in 12 minutes. So, I always recommend you try and rent a QBot when you go to a Six Flags park.

Now I want to go to Cedar Point in Ohio to ride some of the previous records holders for Tallest and Fastest, including the one from 2 years ago, the Dragster.