What do you do when the kids are sent home from school weeks early, and family fun parks are closed? Maybe you get out the inflatable pool or set up the badminton net, and then turn green with envy over the guys who have their own backyard theme park rides. Homemade roller coasters and other rides are a real thing, if you have the time, the room, a few extra bucks, and the will to make it happen, which means that grandpas are way ahead of the rest of us. And now there are enough backyard roller coasters on the internet to allow a few builders to rise above the pack, like engineering professor Steve Dobbs, who now has an entire theme park in his backyard.
Over time, the park grew into an entire backyard amusement park. “I have grandkids and they love Disneyland, so I thought that a good way to spend time with them was to build a little amusement park in my backyard,” Dobbs says. “Dobbsland” — as it would come to be called — now has nine rides, all in his backyard.
In addition to the train, Dobbsland has a princess castle and a Winnie the Pooh ride, complete with an animated Pooh and Tigger. There’s also a roller coaster built by his engineering students at Cal Poly Pomona, who offered the idea of building a coaster for Dobbsland as their senior project last year. He’s also built a submarine ride out of a trash can and a Star Wars ride — complete with laser targets and a lightsaber battle — out of a swingset.
Read how Dobbsland and three other backyard parks came about at Mel magazine.
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