Certain people get together with their childhood friends every year. Others have a regular family reunion at the cabin on the lake. Then there are the folks who never miss their annual show, convention, or sports event together. It’s a very cool thing indeed to have a unique event that you do again and again and again with specific individuals like clockwork every year, both because you enjoy doing it so much and because you enjoy hanging out with them so much. Especially if that’s one of the few times—or perhaps the only time—you get to see them. Well, cabins and shows and sports events are great, but the something special that I look forward to every year is more of the hurtle-down-a-400-foot-drop-with-naught-but-a-tiny-metal-bar-between-me-and-the-heavens variety. And the person I can count on every single year for God only knows how long to hurtle with me is Dave Becksvoort!
Every fall, Dave and I meet whilst it is yet dark, somehow take a different way through Toledo each time, pay our Ohio Turnpike dues, eat obscenely unhealthy fast food and buy extra for dinner to avoid the obscenely more expensive obscenely unhealthy fast food inside the park, and then finally gloriously gaze in wondrous awe at the mass of sprawling, twisted steel track that greets us over Lake Erie at Cedar Point! Always with pre-bought tickets in hand, as close to opening time as possible, we shamelessly power-walk to our first ride, having most of our daily coaster agenda planned by the time we enter the line. Then around 1am, when we have closed out the park with a final 92mph Millennium Force trek into darkness, we somehow drag our sorry old carcasses home without dying and decide to do it all again next year.
It’s something very special, and I am very thankful to Dave for it. But the best part about it all is that this post for Dave and our annual pilgrimage fell on the same week without me planning it one bit! Roughly 90 minutes ago I bought my ticket, and in roughly 90 hours, we’re gonna get to the point once again! Thanks man.
There’s a unique and exciting thing you do with religious regularity as well, so who is the person/group who never fails to enjoy it with you? Heal their hereafter today with some thanks for something so special.
I like to ask whomever I’m thanking for a cause they’d like me to share with the world, and Dave’s is the Lakeshore Pregnancy Center. LPC desires to compassionately come alongside those facing unplanned pregnancies to help them work through many difficult decisions in the most life-giving ways and aid them with whatever needs they have. It’s a local organization in West Michigan, and I’ll join him (not just on coasters!) in encouraging you to learn more about LPC here.
