In honour of International Rollercoaster Day, I went looking for an explainer/review with on-ride footage of perhaps the scariest rollercoaster I've ever been on and this Coaster Studios video from 2022 is pretty good. It goes into some of the pros and cons that line up with what I can remember but also acknowledges that it's a great ride that has to be experienced first hand to truly know what it's about.
A few years ago my husband and I stopped off in LA for a couple of days on the way to our honeymoon destination (yes we're extra because yes, it was Hawaii.) It was by that point the furthest I'd ever travelled away from the UK and the biggest time jump I'd experienced. If you want to cure jetlag then few things do the trick like a huge shot of adrenaline...
The first thing to mention is that the UK is fairly crap for thrill rides, as in there are only a wee handful of parks that have anything actually decent. And even then because you're never too far from a residential area there's only so tall we can build them or even if they're tall they'll be a lot shorter than rollercoasters elsewhere. Until I went to the USA I don't think I had experience so many HUGE rollercoasters that last more than a couple of minutes.
My husband had actually been to Six Flags Magic Mountain as a teenager so he'd ridden X2 before. He warned me that it was pretty intense and I won't lie, seeing it in person sufficiently intimidated me. But I was determined. I spent so much of my childhood and teenage years letting my mum get in my head when SHE was terrified of something. Being on a plane, driving a car, going on a rollercoaster - all things that she refuses to do herself and got in my head over it.
I don't remember much about waiting for this ride. I know we were in the queue for quite a while because it was July, it's one of the most popular attractions in the park AND as the video explains for a rollercoaster its capacity is on the garbage end of things. Necessary and in-built delays in a dispatch sequence add up, meaning the queue doesn't go down quickly.
What I do remember is realising how vulnerable your lower body feels once you're sitting back strapped into those seats. You realise that your legs are going to be dangling and the only part of you being held in is your torso. I've experienced OTSRs and lap restraints, X2 restraints are mind-bending in ways that beats both of those. The only ones that rival it are flying coasters, but that's mostly because of how weird it feels going up a lift hill with your face pointed at the ground.
I remember the ascent up the lift hill, facing backwards. I was nervous so when we got to the top and rolled over that first wee bump I tried to say "no no no no" in the style of that recurring Family Guy joke. My husband didn't hear me, the chain and then the train itself was making too much noise.
The seats flip you around a few times, the first one being on that first vertical drop. I think it was going on this that finally cured my aversion to Oblivion at Alton Towers. There's not any further to go on the scary scale than being thrown headfirst down a rollercoaster drop.
The one clear memory I have is when the seat flipped me again toward the end and my lower half lifted out of the seat. My legs fell back down in a way that meant I no longer had the wee blue hump that is supposed to sit between your thighs. The last part of the ride was really uncomfortable because my thigh kept pressing into the hump, but those mind-bending restraints had my upper body stapled so well that I couldn't twist my waist to get my leg back where it should be. Definitely put a downer on what was an overall amazing experience.
But the rough ending couldn't override how indescribable it is as a ride experience. It's certainly firmly in my top 3 rollercoaster adrenaline rushes. Other than the typical screaming I also LAUGH when I'm going around a ride like this, and once I'm walking off it at the end I continue to giggle and shake. I know it sounds awful but I actually enjoy it and, as someone who has never touched drugs, this is about the only high I will willingly experience.
I doubt I'll ever go on it again. It's very expensive to get to the west coast of the USA from here and this felt like a once in a lifetime trip to us anyway. But I'm glad I forced myself to go on X2. It's probably one of my "daft wee things that are NBD to most people" moments that I'm proudest of having achieved.
