Uhmmmm....let's see...good news...cheerful stuff...
I know, I've got it! I FINALLY found ONE specific case where waiting in a long line
may actually have a beneficial effect. Personally, I never thought I'd ever see how that could happen, but it appears to be true. To explain, I gotta tell a story, don't worry, it'll be short(ish).
We just got back from a family trip to the Kingdom of the Evil Mouse (aka Disneyland). For whatever reason, my wife just adores the place and seeing as the kiddo is kindergarten age we're in the window where it's more or less unavoidable anyway.
We had some family who were interested in going along, so we rented a condo within "walking distance to the park". Of course, "walking distance" is a VERY subjective phrase, and in this case it turned out to be about five miles round trip.
Oh well, I guess we all could use some extra exercise seeing as we're going to be living on cotton candy and crappy theme park food for the next few days. The pedometer built into my phone (whoda thunk?) says we walked about FOURTEEN MILES the first day, including back and forth from the condo. Gee, I wonder why my feet hurt?
After various cousin's broken arms and unexpected surgeries for Auntie pop up the week prior, we ended up with a bare minimum of extra family members joining in. This turns out to be somewhat of a blessing in disguise seeing as the "luxury condo" is dirtier than a Pakistani-run hotel in the low-rent district.
You can hardly tell the color of the stairway wall through all the greasy handprints, for example, and the carpet is better off not discussed at all...yuck. We better damn well get our "cleaning deposit" back, seeing as we had to clean the bathtub ourselves before we could use it.
Weather-wise, it's a good thing we routinely pack raingear on our trips because that week the temps in legendarily "sunny Orange County" are in the low-to-mid-fifties, and it's raining on and off. Not the warm weather and sunshine we expected; in fact, it's warmer back home up in SE Alaska!
On the positive side, it doesn't take much bad weather to keep Californians hunkered in the bunker at home, and the crowds are pretty sparse. We never waited longer than 15 minutes for a ride, and most of them were more like five minutes. It literally took longer to thread your way through the "people maze" than it did to wait in line, those things can be pretty confusing when there's nobody to follow and all the shortcuts are roped open.
We'd bought the three-day park pass, but after a couple of days with basically no waiting in line you've pretty much seen all there is to see at Mickeys joint. The upshot is that I ended up taking the older kids (our exchange student and a couple buddies) to Knotts Berry Farm on Day Three instead. For those of you who've been there, I don't have to explain that the roller coasters at Knotts are WAY bigger than the Disney variety.
They're faster, taller, rougher, tougher, have more loops and whirls and high-G turns and all that stuff that's designed to agitate your breakfast and toy wickedly with your sense of balance and equillibrium. And there's almost nobody at THAT park EITHER....
With literally NO waiting in line, you can just go from one ride to the next to the next to the next to the ...ooohh...suddenly I don't feel so good...
Well, to make a long story short, perhaps a bit of time waiting in line for giant roller coasters
ain't such a bad thing after all.
Even getting a late start, we'd had pretty much our fill of giant roller coaster pretty early in the afternoon. The mid-day meal of greasy fried chicken, while tasty, was in retrospect not perhaps the wisest decision either.