Angola, Indiana – Sunday, July 6th, 2008

The dried grass, clear blue skies and faded, sunbaked paint reminded me of what the quintessential Midwestern American outdoor entertainment park was all about. Even compared to the standards of most small Midwestern parks, this place would be considered quaint and humble. Raised over an empty field between farmlands and small thickets of maple and poplar trees, hand-built by an army of two, a short drive south of the Michigan border off the 150 exit on I-69 in Angola, Indiana was Fun Spot.

Three years ago my dad and I paid our $16 admission tickets for our first and only visit to a park a mere hour and a half drive from our Lansing, Michigan doorstep (even nearer than the much larger roller coasters in Muskegon, Michigan or Sandusky, Ohio, which we visit on an annual basis since the mid-1990’s), and the park was essentially ours for the next three hours. This was not a place where one is ever in a need to hurry, in fact our principle worry was over whether we would run out of things to see and do within fifteen minutes, and whether it was awkward how few other visitors were joining us on this lazy Sunday morning, as we were the sole objects of attention for the numerous friendly but otherwise bored park staff.

Three years later, as I sit and type these words, Fun Spot continues to sit where it always has, under the same bright blue Indiana summer skies that have always been there, only this season the employees, deer, tigers and the occasional few patrons are all spending their afternoon elsewhere. Fun Spot is an ex-amusement center, the only hope that remains being whether a buyer will be found for several of the rides or if scrap metal prices are the best the owners will do. They join the list of businesses claiming to be victims of the recession. Sometimes I wonder if these recessions would even exist if people didn’t collectively believe they exist and then adjust their behavior accordingly, but apparently the effects of economic downturn, whatever the causation, was enough for Fun Spot to say “enough”, and there ended their story.

Of course none of this was on our minds at the time. In fact, after several rides on the coasters we even decided that the park would be worth making another quick stop to again in a couple years should we ever be passing through the area on the way to other parks with some extra time to spare.  The primary attractions of interest to us were the Pinfari Zyclon and the Arrow Dynamics Afterburner shuttle loop, of which the latter wouldn’t operate until noon. The former wasn’t one of the better examples of this type of roller coaster, mostly owing to the rolling stock. The single car trains lack the airtime on the drops that the two or three car models have if you sit in the back seat, and a rather hideous makeshift over-the-shoulder restraint system had been added; I recall this augmented technology required a lot of duct tape. Since most of the ride was straight drops and constant radius turns it didn’t matter too much until the very end of the layout which included a small, fast and poorly designed s-bend around the supports and back to the station. In general I like drops and descending helices so it was worth several rides, in part because you could grab a handful of American flag while on-ride if the wind was blowing right, and because there was little else to do during the first two hours.

One of the other attractions was a so-called House of Glass, a rather feeble walk-through attraction that would have been challenging if the glass walled maze had been highly cleaned and polished, but unfortunately the suspended grit always tipped us off which passageway to take and which would result in a face-plant. A number of other carnival flat rides were scattered around the field and between the plain asphalt midways; a Flying Scooters was most likely to please the traveling enthusiasts, but I most wanted to try the HUSS Troika and Schwarzkopf Bayern Curve they had placed on the open grass in the field next to the Afterburner. Both were closed. A height and weight restriction also prevented me from boarding the Safari Kiddie Coaster (an Allen Herschell Little Dipper model), not that that was any great loss.

Like the ride park, the attached zoo was a similarly simple affair, and I’m hopeful that since the closure of Fun Spot most of the animals have moved on to better (or larger) homes. A number of big cats resided here; lions, tigers, and a black panther all either paced in their cages tirelessly, or rolled belly up to soak in the sun. I believe most of these animals were rescued either after suffering injuries in the wild or from regional homeowners wanting an exotic pet and then neglecting to properly care for their specialized needs (sadly this happens much more often than most of us would ever guess). While the wide open spaces of rural Indiana might have made a good setting for an African veldt, the only other animals Fun Spot had were several tropical birds and a collection of deer… possibly collected locally? For whatever reason their pen had a big old boat in the middle of it but the spotted fawns were adorable, either intrigued by the movement and smell of the human beings or they thought we had food to give them, as they all followed us around the barrier.

Finally at noon the Afterburner opened. Despite being Fun Spot’s star attraction there was no pathway leading to the entrance, you just have to walk across the worn-out dirt pathway in the grass to reach the little concrete pad demarking the entrance stairwell. This was the fourth Arrow shuttle loop in operation around the world, and the second of three I would go on that I generally liked. The most hated part about these coasters is the climb to the top, but once up there we were allowed to ride as many times as we wanted before going back down. I elected to ride four times. There’s a small electric launch out of the station, the four-car flame-emblazoned train scurries down a sharp drop (airtime for everyone, especially in the back), through a very tight, disorienting loop, then up an opposing raised hill (airtime for everyone, especially in the front), where a long straight away gives one time to wonder just how close to the edge you’ll get before the brakes engage.

Wham. We’re stopped.

Rather than hurry with the return trip, the actually have an employee sitting under a small canopy sipping Gatorade who will check if everyone’s okay and ready for the launch backwards. It was rather unusual to have a mid-ride conversation, and the extra time spent waiting for the reverse launch allowed me to soak in what a beautiful day it was, surveying the fields and farmland stretching for miles ahead.  Eventually the return electric motor kicks in and gently pushes the train to about ten miles per hour in the reverse direction; those in the front are treated to an even wilder burst of backwards airtime before hitting the loop (also more intense backwards) and the final weightless crest back into the station. The operators don’t really ask if you want to go again but if you stay seated or move to a different row, that much is assumed.

 We planned this to be a quick stop on the way to Indiana Beach for the newly-opened Steel Hawg, but halfway through our visit we called that park and discovered it would not be operating so we decided to postpone that trip for later next week (it would be closed for that visit anyway), hang out in Fun Spot for a little while longer, and then hit the road back to Lansing. We were back in the dark air-conditioning of my grandparents home in time for lunch.