This has been a bit of an unusual summer. For no particular reason, my wife Marie and I have decided to ride every roller coaster we can.

While the goal is, of course, to have fun, I’m finding the experience strangely educational.

By my estimation, we’ve already been on 4 percent of the operational, non-kiddie coasters in the United States. Still a long way to go. When my 20 year high school reunion comes up three years from now, we’re seriously considering doing a big road trip from my current home of Cleveland to my childhood home of Tulsa, hitting all the parks we can along the way.

Of course, said road trip is dependent, among other things, on how sick we are of roller coasters by 2015.

I don’t see that as too much of an issue; in fact, if anything, this summer has made me like roller coasters of all kinds more.

Part of it is the mindset I’m in when I enter a park. If I get to pick what coasters I’m going to ride, I start trying to evaluate them in terms of this one-dimensional scale of I’ll hate it / I’ll love it before even getting in line.

Case in point: up until this year, I hated wooden roller coasters. I didn’t like how bumpy they were. I liked the smoothness of steel coasters, the openness, the sensation of flying.

If I go in trying to evaluate a wooden coaster on a scale from bumpy to frictionless, it will get a low score every time. And because I’ve been concentrating on just that one scale, I’ve missed things that are uniquely appealing about wooden coasters: the way landscape and trees can be part of the ride design; the way all those wooden supports create this interesting volume through which you travel; trying to wrap my head around the idea that almost a hundred years ago, people were riding these.

On a scale of short to tall, steel coasters will usually beat wooden ones. On a scale of slow to fast, steel probably wins again. Every modern wooden roller coaster has exactly zero inversions.

On any of these scales that I am used to thinking about, either because of personal experience or because theme park marketing fluff likes to harp on the biggest, fastest, steepest coasters, wooden coasters don’t measure up.

But if I’ve already decided to I’m going to ride everything at least once, my mindset is a little different. I forget about the scales. It’s easier to just go in with an empty mind, free of preconceptions or that laundry list of specific things I and copy writers like and do not like about rides.

It’s easier to just absorb the experience for what it is. And that’s a skill that’s worth practicing.