It's my birthday

Well, it's my birthday today. And what I wanted to do was go to the Santa Monica Pier and ride the Ferris Wheel.


Now, I'm a person who likes amusement park rides, and who isn't afraid of heights, and who likes to take a dare.

[The Man I Love] is a person who doesn't like heights, and doesn't much like amusement park rides, especially the ones that flip you around a lot.

But he took me to the Pier and rode the Ferris Wheel with me anyway. Because he loves me.


So we stood in line and watched the giant wheel spin above us, the canopied gondolas rotating past, while overhead the roller coaster twined in and out and around. Because Pacific Park occupies such a small piece of real estate, the rides are close to one another.

While you stand in line to buy tickets, the giant green dragon swingy-thing ride sways up over your head. The roller coaster threads over, under, and around the Pacific Plunge. There's an old-fashioned Scrambler there, like I remember from county fairs in the '60s. It's all so close, so immediate, and contained on this narrow wooden structure reaching out into the Pacific Ocean.

Then we got in and ascended - it was smooth and gentle, and sometimes you could barely sense that you were moving - except the gondolas that were below you soon were above you.


At the top of the circle, the shore stretched away to the north, and to the south.

As the gondola descended again, you could look through its structure to the high rises and hotels on the Palisades, and the huge complex of Cirque de Soleil's striped tents on the beach.



You could smell the salt ocean, hear the screams of the roller-coaster riders, and see the sun sparkling off the water.

It was pretty cool. I wanna do it again.

Except not for my birthday. Next year, I think I want to sky-dive for my birthday.