On New Year’s Eve, we went to the boardwalk and rode on the two open roller coasters and the bumper cars. I like amusement park and water park rides so long as they aren’t too tall and don’t turn me upside-down. My husband and our younger son, my companions that day, go for extreme rides, not that we have those in Santa Cruz. They also like horror movies.

So my husband was happy to find that Las Vegas, where we celebrated our 26th wedding anniversary this past weekend, has three of the four tallest thrill rides in the world. (They were the tallest three until China built a taller one in 2012, a good example of the way America became less great during the Obama years.) All are on top of the Stratosphere tower, above the indoor observation deck at 108 stories. That’s where I stayed, curled up on a sofa that was really not sufficiently far from the alarmingly prow-shaped windows. I ventured up the stairs at one point, realized the upper observation desk was al fresco, and retreated.

My husband rode all three rides. There’s Big Shot, a 160-foot spike that shoots riders up at 45 mph then lets them drop. There’s Scream X,  which “catapults” victims 27 feet over the edge, facing out, then lets them hang there; my husband nabbed the front seat. Then there’s Insanity, a variation on the hanging chairs that spin: these are heftier chairs and they aren’t attached by chains, which is good because they also spin 64 feet over the edge, at 40 mph.

He decided not to go for the bungee-like Sky Jump–too expensive.

Happily, I was back on terra firma when I read that Insanity froze in 2005, leaving the riders hanging from the chairs for 90 minutes. Visions of this kept me up much of the night, remembering the time I was stranded for 15 minutes or so on the chain chairs at Six Flags New England, probably around 15 feet above the ground. The ride stopped spinning, but didn’t lower. It was the strangest psychological experience I have ever had: I had to work very hard to master an overwhelming urge to release my seat restraint (easily done, on this tame ride) and jump down. I desperately wanted out, and I had to reason with myself continuously to stay relatively calm. As I remember, I was more disturbed by being confined than by the height, though I was very aware I was dangling when the ride wasn’t moving.

I haven’t ridden a swing-type ride since.