Silver Dollar City
Branson, Missouri
March 25 & 26, 2011
Page Seven
During most of the year you can't see most of Thunderation's layout with all of the foliage on the trees that cover it's hillside layout. Being laid out on the hillside helps make Thunderation in my book the best mine train I have ever been on. The ride doesn't start out with a slow roll to the lift hill. It starts winding journey down the hill building up speed as it goes. The helix in the middle of this photo just keeps going on and on getting tighter and tighter as you speed through it like a whirlpool. At the center of the whirlpool Thunderation takes you underground and out even further downhill to another set of turns and hills all taken at an unrelenting pace. The speed and intensity way down there is fantastic and they could have ended the ride there and I'd be satisfied but we haven't even hit a lift hill yet so there's more to come.
Thunderation's lift hill is about three quarters of the way through the ride and instead of dropping you off into the station like on it's sibling Adventure Express at Kings Island there are a few more big thrills in store for you once gravity takes control again.
The big thing that I was told by everyone about this trip was not to miss the Marvel Cave Tour. So Bond and I lined up for the longest wait of the day which was about twenty minutes, popped on Netflix on my phone and watched Ghostbusters while we waited.
I've done a bunch of caves from the unending length of Mammoth Cave to the touristy cheesiness of Meramec Caverns to the unguided Ava Cave in Southern Illinois (where Carrie and I crawled around in and got covered in mud on our first date - hey that's what I call romance) so I was expecting Marvel Cave to be your run of the mill tour cave. I was wrong.
You enter Marvel Cave through it's only opening to the outside world which is this crack at the bottom of a sinkhole. What you see once you look down will make you go "wow".
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Paul B. Drabek
