Who Is XScreamThrills?

With the new direction of my blog and the shift of it’s primary focus from just weddings & engagements, I felt like it might be helpful to officially introduce “XScreamThrills” – my husband, Derrick. He will be authoring most of the upcoming posts you’ll see about roller coasters and together we’ll be co-authoring a lot of posts about our experiences at parks as a family, as well as sharing our best tips & tricks for visiting amusement parks.

If you’ve been reading my blog for any length of time, you’ve definitely heard of my “roller coaster obsessed” husband, Derrick. And if you think that that “title” is just something cute to say, it really is not “cute” in any way, shape, or form. On the day Derrick & I met, one of the very first questions he asked me was, “Do you like roller coasters?” It was a defining question for us – to this day, we still joke around that if I had answered, “No” or even an unenthusiastic “Sure” – Derrick probably never would have pursued getting my contact information. Roller coasters mean that much to him.

Let’s back up a bit though: roller coasters are not a new obsession to my husband. He has loved roller coasters since he was a little kid. He might not have actually ridden his first coaster until he was 13 years old, but he has been utterly smitten by the designs, the engineering, the mechanics, the g-forces, and the science behind these wooden & steel beasts since he was a young boy. And unlike most “obsessions” that ebb & flow thru a person’s life, his love of roller coasters has simply never diminished. In fact, it has only grown.

And thus, XScreamThrills was born.

And guess what? It was entirely my idea. (Yes, I take full credit.)
I’ll be 100% honest, I was tired of Derrick pouring all of these facts & statistics & news updates about roller coasters into my brain every single day. So, one day, I had the brilliant idea to suggest that he start a roller coaster centered Instagram account. It would be an outlet for him to spill roller coaster stuff into. He loved the idea, and after brainstorming ideas for a few days, he came up with “XScreamThrills”. I loved it and he jumped head-first into creating an Instagram account dedicated to roller coasters.

It was perfect. I combed thru my hard drives for photos of coasters (thankfully, I was able to come up with a pretty good initial stockpile) & he went to town writing all about roller coaster statistics, his experiences, and his love of these scream machines. His account began to grow & he began to “meet” other ‘grammers who also had a love of roller coasters.

For a time, it was perfect & enough. But, it didn’t take long for it to not be enough – and he began to have a desire to do more. So he turned to YouTube. He began creating roller coasters using a program called NoLimits2 and publishing those creations. Again, for a time, it was enough, but before long, he began to dream bigger. He set his sights on publishing “real life” content – videos & narrative about actual real parks and his own experiences in those parks & on real roller coasters.

I’ll never forget the day that Derrick said, “We need to get season passes to Kennywood.” “We do?” I asked. “Yeah, if I’m going to keep moving forward, I need to be in a park on a regular basis, taking video & creating content.” Getting season passes for Kennywood last year was a game-changer for us – well, mostly for me. I realized just how serious he was about this & began to take this “hobby” much more seriously. This was not just an Instagram account to keep him from talking my ear off about roller coasters any longer – this was a dream come true.

So, if you think we’re crazy with all this talk about roller coasters & amusement parks, well, we are. If you think it’s nuts that we center almost all of our vacations around amusement parks, that’s okay! It’s just who we are & what we (mostly Derrick) loves. We just got home from our first big trip of the summer – going to 4 new parks across 3 different states over the course of 5 days. Derrick rode his 200th roller coaster on this past Saturday!

So, there you have it! That’s just a little bit about who XScreamThrills is & an introduction to the roller coaster & amusement park content that we will be publishing here, alongside wedding & love stories. We’re so excited to branch my blog out in this direction & can’t wait to take you along for the ride.