Travel

Ready, set, fun!

This summer, roller coasters grow wings.

At amusement parks across America, “winged coasters” are this year’s new fad in pants-wetting thrills. Picture it: a coaster car that straddles the rail, with riders soaring along either side of the track. Europe got the first versions last summer. This year, it’s our turn.

The leader this season is none other than Dolly Parton. Her $20 million Wild Eagle, which has four inversions and uses the Smoky Mountains as a lift hill, started flying at Dollywood, near Gatlinburg, Tenn., in early April. (Parton has thus far refused to ride it, slyly claiming she doesn’t want to lose her wig.) America’s second winged coaster, X-Flight, opens May 16 at Six Flags Great America outside of Chicago, and Skyrush, a $25 million coaster with partial winged seating, becomes Hersheypark’s tallest, fastest, and longest coaster on May 26.

SeaWorld San Diego installs a winged coaster of another sort. Manta, conjuring the profile of winged stingrays, is a sit-down family version of the belly-down, grown-up one that its sister park in Orlando got in 2009. This one begins with a launch tunnel lined with 270 degrees of projected images of rays, and just to hammer the theme home, wings on the cars will dip into lagoons as it soars above.

And in North Carolina, a tribute to wings of yet another kind: Carowinds changes Charlotte’s skyline with a 310-foot-tall carousel, WindSeeker, that hoists seated riders to the top of a tower and spins them around in the sky — all in the name, as if you couldn’t guess, of honoring the Wright Brothers’ triumph at Kitty Hawk. Closer to home, Six Flags Great Adventure in New Jersey adds something similar, the 24-story-tall SkyScreamer, on May 17.

Many other parks are keeping their budgets earthbound. In a recession, it’s safer to open a water park, which brings in the income of a second ticket, than to lose your shirt investing millions in a single ride, so this year many parks are taking a breather by fluming it up. Legoland Florida, and SeaWorld San Antonio both add wet parks, while Kings Island in Ohio, normally known for its adrenaline rides, instead invests in doubling the size of its existing slide park.

Six Flags Magic Mountain outside of Los Angeles, usually at the head of the pack in spare-no-expense thrills, is building economically, too. It’s using two empty sides of its 15-year-old, 400-foot-tall Superman roller coaster tower to create the world’s tallest vertical free-fall ride, Lex Luthor: Drop of Doom.

Never mind that everyone shows up to theme parks in cars. Busch Gardens Williamsburg’s blockbuster addition is about them. Its German-made roller coaster Verbolten (opening May 18) has two high-speed launch sections and hits 53 miles per hour, all under a heavily applied Autobahn backstory set in the Black Forest.

But America’s most impressive summer opening happens in Anaheim. Ironically for a theme park that was built in Disneyland’s former parking lot, Disney’s California Adventure is hoping to put its mediocrity permanently in reverse with the June 14 opening of Cars Land, a mock Radiator Springs area based on the two Pixar movies. The park, fumbling along since its 2001 opening, has been under the jackhammer for years, and Cars Land, a desert-like landscape studded with tumbledown body shops and neon signs, will increase California Adventure’s 55-acre size by another 12 acres – 12 acres that go a long way towards turning the park into an actual destination.

Its centerpiece, Radiator Springs Racers, promises to be an exhilarating two-car ramble along banked turns and straightaways using the same vehicle technology as Epcot’s Test Track — think slot cars from your childhood. Luigi’s Flying Tires is a bumper car variant that’s like riding on a cushioned air hockey puck, while Mater’s Junkyard Jamboree is a twister, noisier version of The Whip from Coney Island’s heyday.

To weed out the park’s original, ill-advised, “Up With California” interpretation of the state right outside the front gate – a project that excited no one except honcho-at-the-time Michael Eisner – other sections of California Adventure underwent radical surgery. A 3/4-scale recreation of the ornate Carthay Circle Theatre, where ‘Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs’ premiered in 1937, will serve as a Spanish Colonial-style, Cinderella Castle-like symbol of the park — or as Walt used to put it, the central “weenie” that draws guests to explore deeper. That’s joined by two Red Car Trolleys transporting guests down a mockup of an idealized 1920s Hollywood thoroughfare, Buena Vista Street, the sort of place that a struggling young Disney himself might have been familiar with.

Added to the other additions over the past few years — the Little Mermaid ride, Toy Story Midway Mania, and the stunning World of Color lagoon spectacular, for example — California Adventure is starting to measure up against its sister park, Disneyland, as a place worthy of devoting an entire day to see, making Anaheim increasingly worthy as a destination for East Coasters curious about life beyond Orlando.