Rick Mathews has spent most recent weekends driving thousands of miles. Sometimes he flies somewhere and then drives. Sometimes he has several flights in a weekend between all that driving. This was what was required during the home stretch of his years-long quest to ride every roller coaster in the United States. On Sunday, Mathews hit his goal. His ride on a kiddie coaster at Yesterland Farm in Canton, Texas, was No. 1,091. Mathews has now been on every roller coaster in the country that allows adult riders.
His ride on the Road Trip Roller Coaster was not supposed to be where he finished his mission, but plans change on a journey of this size and scale. Mathews wanted to end in Texas, where his project began; he did, but not the way he’d planned it. Austin's Circuit of the Americas is building an amusement park adjacent to the race track, and unexpectedly announced that a roller coaster in that park, Circuit Breaker, would open for ticket holders during the F1 race last weekend. So Mathews’ flight to Dallas was followed by a three-hour drive to Austin. He bought an F1 ticket, rode Circuit Breaker, then drove back up. The limited operating hours of Yesterland Farm meant he’d have to save his last ride for Sunday. Road Trip Roller Coaster would be the final one.
Mathews always knew his quest, if completed, would end in the fall. Places like Yesterland Farm are why: Its fall festival is open just 28 days this year. There was just a brief window in which Mathews would be able to ride this and other seasonal coasters. He’d gotten the farm’s three other coasters in earlier Texas swings, but Road Trip opened in 2023. He’d have to go again. These types of kiddie coasters dot the country, where they run alongside corn mazes and pumpkin patches for just a few weeks each year. They were some of the hardest for Mathews to check off his list, simply for time reasons.
His final ride in the journey was on a kiddie coaster Mathews described as “relatively standard.” This is both subjectively and objectively true: Mathews rode a coaster model called the Little Dipper, which was produced primarily by the Allan Herschell Company from the 1940s to the 1960s; there are 169 of them in the Roller Coaster Database. Yesterland bought its model from a guy in Iowa who had been keeping it in his backyard.
The coaster is just 15 feet tall. But if you look at Mathews’s face riding the final coaster in his journey, you’d swear he were on Kingda Ka. “It was thrilling for children. For me, it was just thrilling,” he says. “I was going over the lift hill. I had friends with me to celebrate that I had done all of ’em. It was finally done. It was over and complete.” He logged his efforts on Coaster-Count, a German website that uses geolocation in an attempt to keep coaster enthusiasts honest.
Setting a goal to ride every roller coaster in the country requires a person to set some parameters. Mathews wanted to ride every coaster available to the public, and decided he’d also ride every children’s coaster that would let him on. Most were accessible, and allow adults to ride with a child. Some coasters were simply closed to him; they had a maximum rider weight and the operator wouldn’t budge. Larger companies generally wouldn’t let him ride the kid coasters; smaller operators were more willing to look the other way. He told me that he thinks there were about 10 he couldn’t ride.
Road Trip Roller Coaster shared a feature Mathews noted in many kiddie coasters: It was painful. “The one I just rode,” Mathews says, “it is a very violent coaster. It shakes you back and forth in the car. And that can be a little scary for kids.” His 13-year-old daughter will ride the big coasters with him, but skips the ones aimed at kids younger than her. Road Trip Roller Coaster is at least 55 years old and was in a dude’s backyard for at least some of that time; it is going to toss you around some. These coasters were actually some of his worst experiences, Mathews says. Newer family coasters, which as a general rule have spent less time sitting in Iowa backyards, offer much smoother rides.
Roller coasters have always attracted thrill seekers, and Mathews describes himself as an “adrenaline junkie” who treasures the experience of being in a controlled environment that also offers a real sense of danger. “You feel like you are out of control and the coaster is whipping you all over the place and lifting you out of your seat,” he says. He likes to get the restraints as loose as possible to increase this feeling, hunting for “airtime”—moments when the coaster literally pulls you out of your seat.
But his love of roller coasters develops out of an even bigger fascination with amusement parks. Larger parks, like Disney or Universal, are designed to appeal to a mass audience; they are destinations in themselves. Smaller regional amusement parks aren't like that. “It’s all very hyperlocal,” Mathews says. “A park in Utah is very different than one in Virginia. A lot of them are built for the local audience, and it's just somewhere where everyone’s happy and they’re having a good time, and you can see it.”
Mathews told me that he had a lot of fun on this quest. He met a lot of fellow coaster enthusiasts along the way, some of whom have become his friends. But he admitted that it became a slog over the past few weeks, and he's not planning to keep his number current to keep up with new coaster construction. He spent the last few weekends driving hundreds of miles, or hopping on flights and then driving hundreds of miles, just to knock off the final coasters on his list. Because of unexpected closures, he had to fly into Chicago three times in the past five weeks in order to hit his goal. The 39-year-old works in event planning, so he travels a good deal for work and had banked plenty of airline and hotel points. He ended up cashing them in to finish his project.
Mathews already has a new goal in mind, however: He wants to ride all the wooden roller coasters in the world. He has 19 left, and 18 of those are in China. The other is in the United Arab Emirates; he’s traveling there to ride that one on Thursday. He’ll be in China in December to start collecting more “woodies.” In a few years, he’ll have them all. Let’s fucking go.
