On a cloudy Saturday at around dusk on April 30th, I headed over to the St James Parish Festival in Springfield, NJ. I had been to this fair once before six years ago, but I’m no stranger to the church; I’ve been to two christenings and some other happenings as one of my cousins is a member of the church.

I got to the fair at around 7:30pm. The fair wasn’t all that crowded for a Saturday night. Maybe more came out during the day, or maybe it was the relatively chilly temps, I don’t know. The rides were brought in by Tommy’s Midway and the fair had…

… Trip Report: St James Parish Festival 2016

This off season seemed to just race by this year, more so than past years. I guess it’s because my last amusement related visit was late December with a trip to Six Flags’ Holiday in the Park festivities. Fairs and carnivals start around here in early April, but this year was particularly cold at the start of April…like, colder than December which was strangely warm.

Anyway, my first fair of the year was the Middlesex Fireman’s Fair in Middlesex, NJ. I headed over on Thursday night, April 21st. The rides were brought in by Campy’s Blue Star Amusements and had…

… Trip Report: Middlesex Fireman’s Fair 2016

5 Lesser Known Huss Rides

Posted by on April 4, 2016 | 13 comments

Quick! Name three Huss rides!

All right, so either you just said “what the hell is a ‘Huss’ ride?” or you spat out the three big rides manufactured by Bremen, Germany based Huss Maschinenfabrik: Top Spin, Enterprise, Break Dance. Pirate and Rainbow would have also been acceptable answers, albeit amusement ride hipster responses. All of those rides should be familiar with theme park fans in The States as nearly every major park has at least one of them.

Huss was arguably the top manufacturer of flatrides from the mid 70s to 2006 when they entered insolvency. 1985 to 1996 in particular saw Huss debut a flurry of new rides while churning out new units left and right. With all of the rides Huss produced, there’s bound to be some that didn’t sell that well. I don’t want to call them flops, but some just didn’t sell well for one reason or another. Let’s take a look at some of them!

… 5 Lesser Known Huss Rides

The DoD3 1.4

Posted by on April 1, 2016 | 3 comments

dod3_2005It’s been especially quiet around here and a lot of it is because for the past few weeks I’ve been revamping the website in preparation for a domain change. I’ve been calling the site “The DoD3” for a while now and I decided to finally pull the trigger on changing the URL to thedod3.com. In spirit it’ll always be Domain of Death 3, but I’m sure the URL was off putting to some. I thought about changing it to something more descriptive than “The DoD3”, but why even? I’m way past the point of wanting to turn this motley little site into a stately hub of amusement/carnival articles.

The DoD started as a personal site that happened to have a lot of amusement park related stuff and turned into me trying to shoehorn it into the online amusement universe. It’s been slowly nudging back into the former and that’s kind of the way that I want it to go from here. Obviously I’ll still be talking a lot about coasters and carnivals but I’ll also put up an “off topic” post now and again.

Below is a gallery of this site through the years; version 1.0 to 1.3. Things sure look different than back in 2005! I’ve even added some new awesome features that I’m sure you all will like!

1.0
1.1b
1.2b
1.3

And yes, I know the date. This isn’t an April Fools Day joke!

Yes it is.

No it isn’t.

Edit: Dance party is over 🙁 I quite like the design though, so I guess that’ll stay!

Wildwood February 2016On February 20th, I headed down to the southern shore points of New Jersey to walk around and take in the off season sights. I left at around 12pm on Saturday for my first stop, the Wildwoods.

I arrived at around 1:20pm. It was in the mid-50s that day and there were quite a few people on the boardwalk for a day in February. Sam’s Pizza Palace, one of the few food joints that was open on the boardwalk, had a big line of people waiting to grab a slice. This is something you might see in August, but in Feb? According to their Facebook, they had only started opening the week prior for weekend operation until the summer season starts.

… Trip Report: Winter Jersey Shore Trip 2016

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