The nice thing about growing up in southern Michigan is that you're close enough to Six Flags Ohio and Cedar Point for it to be a reasonable day trip affair, even though we totally had our own stuff like Great Michigan Adventure everyone kinda knew Cedar Point was the place to be. Millennium Force was bonafide big deal when it was built, but Top Thrill Dragster had a unique sort of mystique to it that I still think about. The theming is right there in the title and is fully reflected in the design: there's no loops, no inversions, no fuss, no muss. You go from a dead stop to extremely fuckin fast, rocketing up a single basically-vertical incline, crest the top, and then come screaming back down with just enough runway to ensure that airbags aren't required for the stop, although your ears might be ringing a bit. Except - and this isn't an official feature or anything, but anyone who rode it will tell you about this - sometimes it didn't work. Sometimes, and I don't know if this is for weight-related reasons or mechanical failure, it wouldn't quite make the initial ascent, leaving everyone in the car plummeting back down to the starting side backwards, unable to see their destination. The wild part is they'd shoot you back up again afterwards, so those folks basically got two rides for the wait of one line. An unthinkable value! I never had this happen to me while I was on it but I've waited in line for the thing often enough to see it with my own eyes, and I'm not afraid to admit that I took part in some last-minute logistics to try and intentionally engineer a passenger payload of sufficient weight to cause it, but I have to assume the workers by then were wise to such antics because they were much more strict about who got to sit where on any given go. Still, a guy can dream.
Eventually a piece of the Dragster came off during operation and hit a lady in the head so they closed it down, but a cursory search has revealed to me that they're actually building a Dragster 2 on that spot now, that's gonna be 420 feet tall. I'm far outside day trip range these days, but if ever there were a reason to head back...