For those of you who are geographically challenged look at a map find New York state look due North East and you will see my home province of Prince Edward Island. PEI is best known for Tourism, Potatoes, and Anne of Green Gables. In the Tourist Mecca of Cavendish there is a little amusement park called Sandspit which has bought old carnival style rides. The entire location may be 5-10 acres including parking lot. They have bumper cars & boats, Tilt-a-Whirl, Ferris Wheel, Scrambler, Go-carts, Rok & Rol, Train, few kiddie rides, ball room, mini-golf, and a gem of a coaster called Cyclone. No PCW for almost 2 weeks and the Reid’s at this point were suffering from PCW withdrawal and in desperate need of a coaster fix.

Parking is free and Sandspit offers a bracelet for $15.00 including tax or single ride tickets. The bracelet is best value because you easily get your money worth. They have go-karts for an extra charge, I think it was $5.00 per ride. Even though all the ride are used carnival type rides they seem to be very well maintained and in good looking condition, fresh paint etc. I didn’t go on their spin and spew rides because they run them to long and I would be spewing. My son, Nolan, had his fill of Tilt-of-Whirl and may not be getting back on one too soon.

Cyclone, I think, is an old Schwarzkopf Wildcat portable steel coaster. It has single cars which hold four people each and there are about five of these cars and they really look like cars. I would guess that the age of this coaster is around the 1950’s. I heard somebody saying that the coaster was bought about five years ago from an eastern US state. I could only see two sets of wheels and could not see the third upstop wheels on the trains. My boys were studying the wheels and could not see the third set either. The running wheels were steel and shaped to the track and not plastic. The trains were manually pushed by the operators from unloading to the loading areas. The lift hill gave a good kick when it engaged and the lift was a real chain. It is hard to describe the actual ride but, it is like a Wild Mouse ride without the hairpins. The neat thing is that they didn’t mind you taking a camera on the ride and I got a few good shots. My first on ride photo’s. I probably could have taken my camcorder on also. We probably had 15-20 rides on Cyclone. The stupidest thing I saw was the maintenance guy greasing the brakes on the track when the ride was still in operation. He really was putting himself in danger. His arm or clothing could have easily got stuck and he would have been blasted by a car entering the brake run.