TR: Carnival at Ridgemar Mall on 7/19/07

This was your typical shopping mall carnival with about 15 rides in the lineup. I have decided not to do a blow-by-blow account as I usually do. Rather, I will post some highlights from the show. This was a Talley carnival. I swear, they hold a monopoly around here. I know most all the carnies by now and the Tivoli Scorpion is becoming Talley's back-end piece. Anyway, on to the highlights.

Tivoli Scorpion: This ride is everywhere now. The same guy that has operated it since 2005 is still there. This time he was a bit more cool on my first ride and played a song from Keith Erban's new album! Keith is my favorite country singer and it was awesome to ride to his music. This ride was its usual intense self. I rode twice.

Zipper: This was one of the newer Zippers with the smaller cages. Single riders are allowed on the newer Zippers and thus I got my own cage! I rode twice in a row. Both rides flipped like crazy. I prefer these newer and smaller Zippers to the big old clunkers with the wide cages. To me, the newer Zippers feel more aggressive and the flips actually feel like flips. I lost my wallet on this one. Thank God the carnies were willing to get it out of the cage after we noticed it was gone.

Haunted Mantion: This was a dark ride with four-passenger cars. It was your typical carnie dark ride with one room and a hallway. This gets my vote as having the world's loudest set of bang doors at its entrance. They must have heard them in Toledo. This ride had the best example of the train gag I have seen, using authentic train sounds instead of air horns.

Nuthouse: This was a new funhouse to me. It had some pretty good floor tricks including a panel of floor that sounded a siren when you stepped on it. The best thing about this house though was the air jet that was triggered at one point. There were also cables and pylons to get through.

Tilt-a-Whirl: This one was run very well.

Starship 2000: This one was your average Starship ride, going up two times although I paid the op to raise me up a third time on my second ride.

So there you have it. I also rode some fast bumper cars. The Kamikaze was another one of those that was not bolted to its trailer so there was a "no single riders" rule. The Eli wheel was ddm. It was a pretty good carnival imo.

Thanks for reading.

Thanks for the TR. I was wondering if you knew more about the Kamikaze not being bolted to its trailer. Is the no single rider rule the carnival operator's rule? Or did the manufacturer make that rule? I'm partly wondering because I operate a Kamikaze... but it's a park intstallation.

It was the op's rule as this is only the second one I have run into where no aingle riders are allowed.