Roller Coasters for the Rich

In between my time at Newsweek and Bloomberg, the Official Blog Spouse and I did something unusual: we took time off. It was our first vacation since our honeymoon ... at least, the first vacation that we've had that the demands of work didn't effectively cancel. Since we're both transplants to the District of Columbia, we decided to spend our vacation touring the Commonwealth of Virginia... or more specifically, the Old Dominion's theme parks. We were gone for seven days, of which three were spent either riding roller coasters, or sliding down water slides.

Almost none of those days, however, was spent standing in line. Being roller-coaster fans with an economic turn of mind, we were very excited to learn that both Busch Gardens and Kings Dominion offered customers the opportunity to jump the queue, for a price ranging from $20 per person (at Water Country USA, the Busch Gardens water park) to $55 for the roller coasters. This is real money, of course, but it wasn't prohibitive; it was less than we were spending on hotels and food, or for that matter, the theme park tickets.