Rollercoaster recommendations for wimps
I went to Knott's with some visiting family members this past week. It's the "cheaper Disneyland" of Buena Park - a budget theme park located in the exact same part of the region, with better rollercoasters and worse signage and strange, abandoned attempts at its own IP development hiding here and there among decades of weird old-west animatronics.
The history of Knott's is fascinating - the wikipedia page for both Knott's Berry Farm and the boysenberry are fascinating. Basically, this park has its roots in a chicken dinner restaurant located on a berry farm which was growing a nearly-lost, just-barely rescued-from-extinction, blackberry-raspberry hybrid plant.
Many things in the park are, of course, berry-themed. But the park's main theme is... old west gold miners? There are gold miners and cowboys everywhere. There's also a dark ride all about gold mining where you ride a train through a creepy cave, looping repeatedly through an enormous, multistory chamber full of terrifying mannequins:
The main thing at the park, though, is thrill rides. I am brain-meltingly terrified of heights, to the point where I feel uneasy if I have to stand on a chair, sometimes. The ride up a rollercoaster is usually so bad for me that I have to keep my eyes closed for the rest of the ride. It's not that swooping around on the track scares me - I'm not afraid of speed - but going high up in the air causes me to collapse into a state of terror where I'm unable to properly enjoy the rest of what happens on the ride. The terror is not so much mental as physical - I am fully aware of how safe I am. I just have an aversion to the feeling of being scared by heights!
So I tried to only ride rollercoasters at Knott's if they were older, or less high off the ground. If this is what you want, I recommend Pony Express, Jaguar, and Coast Rider. I did keep my eyes fixed on the floor of the coaster car during the hill climb for both Jaguar and Coast Climber. Pony Express was the only ride I was able to do with my eyes open the entire time, and it was also far and away the best of these three. Everyone's bar for this stuff is in a different place, though.
But right off the bat, as soon as we got into the park, I actually rode Ghost Rider anyway, despite knowing I'd hate the climb. It's a wooden coaster which is apparently the longest wooden coaster on the west coast. It takes 2 minutes and 40 seconds to finish a ride, which is actually an extraordinarily long time to be on a rollercoaster.
And since it's wooden, it's loud and bumpy and physically demanding in a way that some steel coasters are not. I spent the entire time with my eyes closed, holding my glasses onto my face with one hand. When I got off, my husband asked me what the red dot on my forehead was - I guess it was the spot where I'd been mashing my hand into my face.
Anyway, here's some pictures of a rollercoaster I didn't ride. This is the Hangtime, a surfing-themed coaster with a "steeper than 90 degree" drop:
Knott's!! It's got berries, chicken, and rollercoasters that make you feel like you've been beaten with a pipe. What more can you ask for?!