Enter Cool Country and the first ride you’ll see on the right is the Muddin’ Monster Race. The park’s description may lead you to believe this is one of their more intense flat-rides, a high-flying companion piece to the swings right next door. The ride area itself is very well done, with tire-tracks embedded in the concrete, the queue housed under a barn roof, and the passenger vehicles featuring a surprisingly realistic splattered mud paint job. I was somewhat apprehensive on first boarding this since my previous encounter with a HUSS Swing-Around left me feeling quite nauseated after just a few minutes, and I almost never feel sick on rides.
However this is actually a HUSS Bee Bee, a family version of the ride I remembered, and I was rather disappointed when I found it to be a very tame, stomach-friendly ride, in which the seats were hardly pushed to a 45 degree angle and the slow revolution speed didn’t increase the excitement either. While family-friendly rides like this are always fun, the Just-A-Swingin’ next door more than has those elements covered and a ride with a name and look like Muddin’ Monster Race needs a bit more kick to it. As I recall this flat was late to open during the soft-opening for no apparent reason, so perhaps the ride program is in some sort of ‘safe-mode’ for the time being as the park continues to tinker with it.
Next up is the area’s second flat ride, Just-A-Swingin’. As it turns out, this was the perfect ride to help beat that tired, hot late-afternoon lag common to many extended amusement park visits. Feeling rather exhausted from the Carolina heat, with the sun coming in at just that angle where it hit the back of my already burnt neck, getting a nice breeze and up off my feet left me very refreshed and ready to make a mini-marathon of the Eagles. This is a very nice swing ride, featuring a fully covered queue complete with fan misters, and the swings themselves get some good height and tilt going. The rotation speed was quick but nothing too intense, and to further add to the family friendly element were double-wide two person chairs on the inside row of seats. 
I had forgotten why these are so popular at parks and was pleasantly reminded.
What’s for lunch? For me it was pulled pork sandwich dressed with a Carolina Vinegar base and a side of corn on the cob and mac’n’cheese at the area’s main eatery, the Rockabilly BBQ. The price: about $10 per person. While I wouldn’t call it the steal of a lifetime, when you compare it to other amusement parks I found their offerings to be quite exceptional.
The sandwich was fantastic, not in the least bit dry, with the vinegar adding that special ‘zing’ that’s almost impossible to get out of amusement park food. 
Later at Carowinds I was reminded how normally the best you can do is low-quality, bought-in-bulk food, so it was very refreshing to actually get a good meal inside the park in which the higher price wasn’t clearly all mark-up for the park’s own profit.
Between the Rockabilly BBQ and the Ice House is a strange statue the park calls the “rock-cow-billy”, which resembles a bovine version of Elvis and squirts people both from its udders and its rear end. There are all sorts of displays and other interactive features throughout the area, but none quite so curious as this one.
Of course in the Ice House located behind it is one of the park’s main shows, Country on the Rocks. This 25-minute ice show is located in the far back end of Cool Country in an authentic ice house that was re-used when the park bought the land, and runs about four shows throughout the day between noon and six in the evening. From the outside it makes a pretty nice backdrop for the rest of the environ, and despite its somewhat weathered exterior appearance the interior was very comfortable and high-tech. The show begins with a music video showing the skaters getting ready, and then the screen retracts and the skaters take the ice.
The skating here was surprisingly professional. Most amusement park ice shows feature pretty beginner level skaters obviously pulled from whatever local skating club exists and as a result you get a fairly cheesy show that’s not entirely reminiscent of some sort of Waiting for Guffman On Ice. My younger sister has been figure skating for the past several years and so my mom knows inside and out all the technical skills that go into figure skating, commenting on how some of the soloists were capable of double jumps and combination spins in a very tight area. The show itself seems to consist of a collection of about ten or eleven country-rock numbers running back to back that don’t form any cohesive storyline but the quality of the performances as well as the stage decoration and overall energy of the show made it so it didn’t really matter. Overall it was a pleasant surprise, and I’d recommend that if you see one of the park’s shows you make it this one, as it offers more than an air-conditioned reprise from the summer heat.
Finishing the review for this environ is Cool Country’s star attraction, Eagles: Life in the Fast Lane. I was continually calling this one ‘Midnight Rider’ throughout the day. Not only does that name fit the theme better but it rolls off the tongue much easier. It was closed at first arrival due to issues with the speaker system on the trains, but they got it rolling less than an hour later and I must confess, for a bare-bones mine train, Hard Rock Park was really able to make it feel like a first-rate attraction.
One thing of note is a new locker system at the ride’s entrance. Unlike Six Flags or Cedar Point
where you have to pay a dollar to get a locker token that’s only good once, Hard Rock Park has a special electronic set-up where you get your locker via touch screen, and instead of a key you enter a 6-digit password, and then the computer unlocks an available locker for you, no keys or tokens needed. Best of all, since you have to go back to the computer when you’re done, this system allows the first two hours of usage to be free, with an hourly charge being applied to items kept for any longer. However one down side is you not only have to remember your password, but also the number of your locker, and chances are even if you did bring a pen and paper to write this info down (I didn’t), they’re getting locked in your locker as well.
The entrance to the ride is a fairly inconspicuous pathway on the left side of the CC Trading Co. souvenir building, with a rumbling motorcycle situated right in front as well as the standard ‘For Your Safety’ signs. The queue begins outdoors as it parallels the first brake run, with a small section of overflow switchbacks set behind a small grove of trees. The queue crosses under the track, running through the middle of the ride area and under the dual lifts allowing for some close-ups of the action if it weren’t for the tall fences, eventually entering the station. It splits between a room that contains a series of gently sloped switchbacks plus a flatscreen TV playing videos of Eagles concerts for busier days, or a simple stairway in a narrow hallway. At the top of the stairs where the two paths meet
is a boarded up door for an ‘employment office’ with some fire and heat effects blazing behind. A quick left and you’re in the station, able to choose your seat. The ride has two, 22-passenger trains, although only one was on the tracks that day (which was more than enough capacity… later that evening I couldn’t get an off-ride photo without waiting several minutes for the train to go by because I was the only person in the area that had been riding it!) Sitting in the station you can see the other curving tracks that cut through the building to lead to the second lift hill ahead of you, and projected on the wall behind it are silhouettes of mice scampering across a beam, a very clever effect. Unlike some parks that seem to think guests are safest when they are pinned down by their restraints (really the reverse is true when you
consider the risks of bruising or other internal injuries caused by a too-restrictive restraint on a bumpy ride), the attendants here let us set the restraint at a position that was comfortable for us without then pushing on it with all their weight, but they didn’t let anyone by with too loose of a restraint, which I think shows a rare dedication towards both guest comfort and safety. The only real discomfort is that the seats are a rigid plastic that aren’t formed as nicely as they could have, but they’re still pretty good.
The all-clear is given, and our mine train takes right off with the first chords of the Eagles coming in loud and clear on the on-board sound system. Off of the first lift hill the train makes a spiraling left-hand helix under the opposing lift hill, before making another banked right hand turn around. The first half of the Eagles
is mostly an unfocused collection of swooping turns with no big drops to speak of, although as they gradually work their way back down to ground level you’ll noticed that each progressing curve seems to be taken just a little bit harder and more intense than the one before it. The ride is fairly smooth although there was much more of a rattle than I was expecting, and the trackwork seems reminiscent of something made in NoLimits with the HSAK and AHGed with longish segments but a low heartline value. Working its way back towards the loading station it ends the first half with two more abrupt dips (offering some brief out-of-seat experiences especially in the back of the train) in between some fast curves, then a smooth left turn into the first set of brakes, which consists only of three strips of magnetics, no pinch calipers
or tires for blocking.
I think this is where the song selection really does help make the ride experience something more than just a standard mine train. Instead of simply having an empty lull in the middle of the ride the music is queued so it also changes pace into a guitar solo and midpoint to the song, and effectively turns this lag into anticipation for second part of the ride. It helps that the lyrics don’t start until the approach of the second lift hill to also help distinguish the two halves of the ride.
The train rolls off the top of the second lift hill, where there is a small rise over the track from the first lift,
and it then makes a descending 540 degree right hand helix which creates a good sensation of building speed before making a sudden left curve dive into what is clearly the fastest point of the ride. There are two more inclined curves which are taken at a fast clip before the ride and accompanying music dive down for the final sprint to the station, a series of tightly paced skips mixed with jolts to the left then the right, all while hugging the ground and dashing beneath overhead track. The train slides into the final magnetic brakes and offers one last surprise to finish the experience on a high note: a metal eagle sculpture erupts right beside the brake run with a huge burst of flames, the heat of which can nearly be felt from the midway.
Let there be no mistaking that Eagles: Life in the Fast Lane is a moderate family coaster. It needs far more before it can even begin to possibly be considered a four-star attraction, much less a ‘great coaster’. But it has a great element of re-rideablity and it needs to be ridden several times in order to fully appreciate some of its subtler elements that make it so good, such as its slight pacing changes in an otherwise uniform ride experience or the ways the music can build anticipation and highlight certain changes. This is a small ride of smaller pleasures that might not leave you very impressed the first or second time around, but if the lines are short and you come back again for thirds and fourths, especially if you can experience it after nightfall, I think you’ll find this one almost as much fun as that big bad beemer across the lagoon. If there ever was such a thing as a Must Ride three-star coaster, this is it.
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