So my life has changed quite a bit in the last few months, but I still live on the road. In a change from the cruise ship life, where I would visit different countries every day, I now live on a train and I visit a new city each week. It’s an interesting change. Unfortunately, my job takes up a ton of time, so I don’t have the same freedom to explore that I did on the ship. That being said, my boyfriend and I have my car on tour so we travel overland (the circus term for people who have to get their car from one place to another while the train is moving), which is letting us see a lot of interesting little bits of Americana.
Our first very exciting stop was on the way to Norfolk, Virginia from Youngstown, Ohio. An excellent website I found called roadtrippers.com told me that “The World’s Slowest Rollercoaster” was just an hour out of the way on our trip in Johnstown, PA. How could I resist that?
Turns out “The World’s Slowest Rollercoaster” was a bit of a gimmick. The place is actually the world’s steepest vehicular inclined plane – but it’s still a “world’s ________” so I was content. For a mere $4.00 per passenger (or $6.00 per car), you can take the five minute ride up or down the vehicular inclined plane ($4.00 will buy you a roundtrip, actually). The plane was actually built a long time ago because the lower area of Johnstown is in a flood plane, and in an emergency, they needed to be able to move most of the town up to higher ground very quickly.
I’m sort of a connoisseur of weird roadside attractions and I was actually very pleased with this one. The drive up the mountain to where you get to “The World’s Slowest Rollercoaster” was a little adventure. Next to it, there’s a little gift shop with every little item you can imagine emblazoned with “The World’s Slowest Rollercoaster” (including the shot glass I bought to start my new collection – I couldn’t resist it – it was slanted), cheap 5 and 25 cent candies, snacks and soda. At the bottom, there’s a little park with weird sculptures you can walk through. There’s also a poorly blocked off cave, which I suppose you could explore, although trespassing warnings and alarming evidence that someone may be living in there dissuaded us from doing so.
Check out more about The World’s Slowest Rollercoaster here.
A Sherpa of the World Spills All 