io, whaaaaa?

[tosei]

there isn't much of anything in des moines. We went to ADVENTURELAND, which answers the question "is there a crappier regional theme park in the midwest than Frontier City?" with a resounding YES, GOD YES. It's kind of endearing, really. The roller coasters were ok, but they didn't seem to have been well maintained in the 40 years since they were built, and would periodically make disconcerting noises. Also this dude behind us in line for one of them said something to the effect of "do you remember when the chain on The Dragon snapped? We were here when that happened, like 30 people were hurt". Pretty awesome. We did ride one awesome ride, one of those that shoots you into the sky and drops you. Those are always cool. Anyway, it was actually pretty fun; if we hadn't been to better theme parks in the past, I'm sure it would have seemed awesome. We haven't been to downtown Des Moines, but it doesn't really look like there's much there. Of course, it is a really small city, only something like 200,000 people in the metro area, and I'm sure it's a better place to live than it is to visit, but really the Des Moines Tourist Board seems to have it's work cut out for it.

Now we're gonna go eat dinner.

Next update: Downtown St. Paul