October 9, 2024 2 min to read

The Special Sauce at the Fall Festival

Seriously speedy slides.

A fun story about my experience at a fall festival.

The Special Sauce at the Fall Festival

This past weekend I went to a pumpkin patch fall festival and they had a big slide that you go down in a tube. At the bottom there was a guy in a cowboy hat giving out tubes to ride the slide. I asked the guy what the trick is to go fast. He said to ask the guy in the red shirt at the top of the slide for the “special sauce”.

When I got to the top of the slide I saw the guy in the red shirt. His job was to wet the bottom of the tubes, help people into the tubes, and then to push them down the slide. I told him that the cowboy hat guy said to ask for the special sauce. He got really excited then brought out a huge bottle of dish soap, which he lathered onto the bottom of my tube. When I got into the tube he said “My goal is to get you all the way to the fence.” What he meant by that was that the bottom of the slide dropped you off before this patch of grass, but some people who got a lot of speed could slide out a few feet onto the grass. At the end of the patch of grass was the fence which was maybe about 20-30 feet past the end of the slide. He was going to push my tube really hard to get me to that fence.

Then he pushed me and I went super fast. I mean really really fast. Another reason I got so much speed was that I was using my body weight to sort of steer the the tube so that it went straight down the slide without bumping into the walls of the slide, which from my observations of previous slide riders, appear to slow down the tubes a lot. It was exhilarating for the first few seconds of the slide until I shot out the bottom the patch of grass and realized I probably did pick up enough speed to crash into the fence, at which point I started to mildly panic.

Luckily I was able to slow myself using my feet and hands before I suffered any injury. All in all it was a great experience, if I ever go on that ride again I will surely ask for the special sauce.