Nature Cruise is one of the eight water rides located in Brookwood Gardens. We had previously said that there were seven water rides because we tend to leave this one out.





Out of all the water rides in the park, this one has the distinction of being the only one where riders don't get wet. Some executive members initially argued that the whole point of a water ride was to get wet--they were the same people who added squirting mechanisms to the submarine ride to simulate pipes bursting underwater--but it was inexpensive to build, and they needed a new ride to distract guests from the unfinished roller coaster that had been heavily advertised and then delayed for the third year in a row due to budget constraints.

Park management should have foreseen that, since the ride was dirt cheap, the experience was dirt. The entire ride consists of sitting in wooden rafts, which slowly cruise around a meandering track filled with water, and looking at trees. No other scenery, just trees. While it sounds peaceful and calming, guests have stated that so is sitting on a park bench, and that they'd rather look at the panoramic view any bench has to offer than to sit in a sluggish raft that smells like turnips and drift through murky water with dead rodents floating in it. Sometimes the rodents in the water aren't completely dead, and they gather up enough energy to climb up onto the raft and die on a rider. Then there are the aggressive ducks who claim the water as their home and attack anyone who dares challenge this fact, and occasionally a group of hornets will build their nest in or atop one of the rafts. It's all part of the experience.

In 2007, a pine tree fell on the ride and crushed two riders. The ride was closed, and the scene was investigated to determine why the tree had fallen. The following day, the tree had already been removed and the wood had disappeared, which baffled park management. It was discovered later that a man whom security believed to be an entertainer dressed as a lumberjack was an actual lumberjack who had cut down the tree and harvested the wood. It was reported that he sold some of the wood to a chainsaw carver, who turned it into a beautiful statue of a grizzly bear, which currently greets hungry patrons at a steakhouse a few miles from the park. As they always do, the families of the two victims found out about the bear, so he was renamed "Steve" after his original name "Killer" was deemed inappropriate.

Nature Cruise has the lowest ridership out of any ride in the park, averaging fewer than 10 guests per day, and has been voted Brookwood Gardens' worst ride every year since it opened. In 2014, it celebrated its 17th consecutive win, and surpassed the trampoline in the tool shed as the worst ride in Brookwood Gardens history. There would be more screenshots of it, but the photographer was fired for taking pictures of this lousy ride immediately after he captured the second image.

Speaking of awful, further along the path, we find ourselves at another food court. If Brookwood Gardens has taught us anything, it's that people will buy anything as long as it's sold in a pretty building.



Out of all the food courts Brookwood Gardens has to offer, this one is unique because it's the only one with a ride running through it. Sky Sailor, which, according to Sky Sailor, has to be a part of everything, casually strolls through the top floor of the building. Guests have not missed out on this opportunity. When riders approach the floored area, they will often jump from their cars and try to race the car they were in to the other side and hop in at the very last second, which is easy to do because the cars don't have restraints. Some of the overzealous yet nonathletic guests, after failing to reach their car while its still over the platform, will leap from the platform to try and catch the back of the car, only to catch the top of the ground or the front of the pole instead. In the spirit of George of the Jungle, the closest support has a sign on it that says "Watch out for that pole!", but it has been ultimately an ineffective warning, as those who jump from that side have a difficult time avoiding the pole while in midair, as admirable as their attempts may be.



From the back, diners are rewarded with a beautiful vista of a pond, which was built mainly to keep the ducks out of Nature Cruise. Many of these aquatic birds have relocated to this pond, and as a result, before the windows were added, guests would feed the ducks from the food court. This harmless feeding turned to target practice with chicken bones, so dark glass panes were added shortly after the pond was added. Guests still try to feed the ducks and try to hit them with discarded food, but because of the darkened, reinforced glass, which has led many guests to believe that they're merely feeding the ducks at night, the projectile nourishment never makes its way anywhere near the pond.



The food court is sometimes referred to as "Triple F" because of the three items they sell: fries, fried chicken, and lemonade. Rumor has it that the moniker also surfaced because all three food stands would frequently receive that letter as a grade after inspection, but records can confirm that two out of three of these eating establishments have never received anything lower than a D. However, upon sampling food from all three eateries, one can figure out right away which one regularly receives the lowest of letters. The majority of guests will tell you that the fries are stale and the lemonade has been severely watered down, but the fried chicken is in a class all its own.

The process of cooking the chicken is considered unique. While unique is often a good thing, sometimes it isn't. The chickens used are all free-range chickens, stolen from sustainable farms by trained livestock thieves. Brookwood Gardens employs more livestock thieves than they do handymen and ride mechanics combined, which is an unfair statistic because many of the ride mechanics and handymen work as livestock thieves at night. While they used to snatch the birds from factory farms, animal rights groups protested until the poultry bandits agreed to only purloin fowl that are allowed to run free. Stolen chicken is said to taste better than earned chicken, but this may be nothing more than an old adage, as there is no way of knowing whether these pilfered birds are diseased or otherwise unfit for human consumption. With the standard of hygiene demonstrated by the park's culinary staff, all the birds might as well be diseased.

Outside of the amusement park business, the Brookwood Gardens corporation makes most of its money in the honey industry. Honey has been the driving force keeping the park alive and safe from bankruptcy and serious lawsuits. As a byproduct of this sweet, delicious elixir, the chicken is fried in bee oil. When asked what "bee oil" was in an interview, a Brookwood Gardens executive explained that it's extracted using a process called "juicing the bee", which is a patented process that involves harvesting dead bees and "mining" them for oil. Since none of these insects live forever, it's considered a sustainable method and has been commended by local environmental organizations, though never by the health department.

To give the vendor more time to sell the chicken and stand motionlessly in front of the register for hours at a time, all the chicken is fried in the morning before the park opens. The excess chicken that hasn't been purchased is left out overnight and resold the next day. Sometimes, when the clerk working the stand is tossing the chicken into the hot fryer from ten feet away, which has somehow evolved into standard procedure, one or two pieces will hit the rim of the fryer and bounce into one of the paper food trays. When the trays are filled one by one with fried chicken, the clerk will see that one is already occupied with the uncooked chicken and think nothing of it, resulting in one guest every few weeks receiving a piece of totally uncooked chicken. This food stand holds the park record for food-related fatalities, and one of them even prompted the health department to shut the stand down temporarily. When you serve chicken that hasn't been cooked at all, and you kill the health inspector, attracting customers becomes increasingly difficult. When it happens twice, it becomes virtually impossible. Only in Brookwood Gardens can you kill one patron on the spot and have the next guy in line order the exact same thing. We're thankful for our loyal, birdbrained customers.



Several lemon trees have made the area surrounding the pond their permanent home. These trees are the source of the lemons used to make all the lemonade sold in the park all year. Since there are only about fifteen of these trees, very few lemons are used to concoct the mostly organic lemonade available year-round. The main ingredient is water, and by "main ingredient" we mean that the vats are filled with water from a garden hose and one lemon is squeezed into each of them. Several pounds of refined sugar are added, followed by a touch of yellow food dye to create the illusion that it's lemonade. A similar process is used to make the french fries.

My goodness, you really do have a sense of humor my friend!

On second thought I think I'll pack my meals when I visit...

^ TRAITOR! WE HAVE A TRAITOR! xD

Adjacent to the lush forest pond and across the path from the Rocky Mountains lies Egypt, which, in Brookwood Gardens, consists of a whole car ride.



Built in 2001, Pyramid Pickups was squeezed into an unoccupied 10x12 space, in RCT2 measurements, which, in the 1960s, was home to a wooden Wild Mouse roller coaster called "Wild Mouse". After a few years of operation, a rodent infestation caused the ride to close, ironically citing wild mice as the reason for closing Wild Mouse. An exterminator was hired, and his initial approach was to "smoke them out" by lighting pieces of firewood with lighter fluid and throwing them at the roller coaster. His method worked, and every wild mouse was burned to a crisp, including the large one made of wood. So, for over 30 years, the space was unoccupied, disregarding the man who was raised by wolves. His name is Richard.



The pyramid was actually built in 1998, as was the building with the rooftop sphinx that formerly housed a small cafe serving traditional Egyptian cuisine, which is what Brookwood Gardens claimed King Tut's Deep Dish Pizza was. Ancient astronaut theorists flocked after seeing photographs of this pyramid and claimed that it was built by aliens to serve an unknown purpose, while citing the immaculate construction and lack of tool marks as evidence to support their theory. It was actually built by a guy named Steve, who took the construction comments as compliments, but the theorists brushed this off as "mainstream archaeology" even though there is documented proof that Steve and his crew constructed it in 1998, including some video footage of them building it.

To symbolize the construction of the pyramid, management built a ride honoring the contractors. Guests ride in red pickup trucks, which all bear the logo of Steve's company, while they drive around the pyramid and pretend that they're transporting building supplies around the pyramid construction site. Photographs of Steve, his red truck, and construction workers building the pyramid line the walls of the station to show riders who the true architects of the Brookwood Pyramid were. Not extra-terrestrials. Not ancient Egyptians. Steve.



Since the ride uses pickup trucks as cars, naturally some problems arose. Since security doesn't pay much attention to this corner of the park, especially this ride, guests would frequently climb the stone walls and jump in the back of the trucks to hitch a ride to an unknown destination, which was usually the station. Sometimes these guests would take it a step further and "hijack" one of the trucks, threatening the current rider and forcing him or her out of the vehicle. These hijackings would occur once or twice a week, so without putting up any signs, management installed an electric fence atop the limestone walls that will deliver a 10,000-volt shock to anyone who attempts to enter the premises. Now the only successful hijackers are the ones who manage to scale the sphinx building and jump down onto the adjacent colonnade ruins, but these incidents only occur every few months, so the executives ultimately determined that preventing them would be "just another waste of company funds".

Ooooooh I am sooo excited! YAY!

It's been a while since we've seen an update, but those of you who have been paying attention to Build It have probably already spotted the first Brookwood Gardens coaster to be publicized, Rambler.









Constructed in 1930, Rambler was the first ride built in Brookwood Gardens, and is therefore the oldest standing ride in the park. Although it isn't the fastest coaster you'll come across within these gates, its rickety and unpredictable layout has rivaled those of other notable coasters from its era such as the Crystal Beach Cyclone.





The property owner, who is now the CEO and still owns the park after 86 years, designed this rickety ride with the help of none other than John A. Miller. Not John A. Miller the roller coaster architect, but John A. Miller the local lumber thief, who would loot lumber yards late at night and sell the wood. Due to the onset of the Great Depression, most of his former customers could no longer afford to purchase the wood at the prices he demanded, so the owner paid him 12 dollars to steal the wood and build the coaster, with the help of a gang of disgruntled architects who were wanted in seven states for building illegally. The gang, including Miller, was caught the following year while constructing a windmill on a baseball field, so the world never saw another coaster built by John A. Miller and his crew.



Despite its horribly unsafe construction and the safety standards that didn't exist at the time or were completely ignored, Rambler holds the distinction of being one of only three roller coasters in Brookwood Gardens history to boast a zero-fatality record. You may lose your voice screaming, or your neck may hurt for two weeks, but when you ride Rambler, chances are, you won't die.



Download Rambler

Updates will continue within the next few weeks. In the meantime, here's Sugar Rush.





The second roller coaster to open in Brookwood Gardens, the first Sugar Rush opened in 1940. The original track and supports were made of wood, and it originally ran single cars instead of seven-car trains. The property owner designed the track upon request, and construction rights were granted to the craftsmen in exchange for all of the profits, which the property owner didn't initially think would work but was quite pleased when it did.





It was constructed by a group of loutish bobsledders who wanted their own bobsled track but could not find a good one in the state of Oklahoma. It was not built by engineers or anyone who knew anything at all about physics, and this was made obvious when, during the initial testing phase, the bobsled car didn't make it up the first hill. Since the sledders were as stubborn as they were terrible with physics, they greased the track with pomade in an attempt to speed the train up. Surprisingly, it worked, and during the following test, the train flew up the first hill and right off the track. Instead of just using less pomade, they sprinkled sugar along the track in the hopes that the friction would keep the train from flying off again. Despite everything we know today about physics, it worked like a charm, and the instances of train leaving track were decreased just enough to open the ride to the public.





In 1962, a maintenance worker accidentally poured kerosene on the track instead of sugar, and, realizing that he had poured sugar into all of the park's 19th century English lamps (Brookwood Gardens always ran on a budget), lit a cigarette while he sat on the track and contemplated his foolish blunder. The entire track went up in flames, and the maintenance worker, MacKay D. Burns, was immortalized as "Crispy MDB", with a nearby restroom named in his honor.





In 1985, a safer version of the old track was rebuilt using steel, and the remaining wooden supports were refurbished with steel supports added. The original method of slowing the train down was to add more sugar to the "brake" areas, but the state, the IAAPA, and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms all stepped in and demanded that actual brakes be installed in the new track. Since the ride reopened, the train has only flown off the track 12 times, compared to 51 times in its original 22-year run. Sugar is still sprinkled on the track to keep the tradition in place, and the number of guests run over by the trains while attempting to lick the sugar off the track remains at the same eight it was in 1962, thanks to the placement of a heavily armed security guard. The three patrons who tried specifically to lick pomade off the track between 1951-1958 luckily never made contact with a bounding bobsled.



Download Sugar Rush

Crispy MDB, eh? Is that a reference to Chris MDB? Sounds awfully similar... hrmmm..


'Notha great narration.