Googoo Lake

Geauga Lake has so many pronounciations that I decided to call it Googoo Lake, at least then people would know what I meant when I mentioned it, instantly replying with "you mean jeearga" or "you mean "geearga". The park is actually well located beside the lake of same name and features a water park at one end.

The park's entrance used to be through the wooden coaster but as the park increased in size, its entrance had to move further and further out.

The park welcomed us with a breakfast and an opportunity to ride 2 rides before the public were allowed in: X-Flight and Big Dipper. I took this pic close to the breakfast area because I'd not seen this ride themed like this before, very smart!

X-Flight is a flying coaster but not the same type as Superman. In this one you wear a harness, which you think may pop open at any time! Once you overcome that worry the ride is quite enjoyable, although its not as smooth as the one I had ridden a few days earlier.

I was very fortunate with the timing of this shot don't you think? ;) Once again it was a hot day but we had a cloud free day to take plenty of pictures, which I did!

Some members seems a little reticent about flying. When I first rode this type of ride (Stealth in California) I remember that when you were lowered down your head was bounced off the headrest. Fortunately here the mechanism was smoother and we didn't get that.

Its fair to say that once the fear of the restraints was overcome people did relax a bit more. An instance where the second ride is the best one maybe...

Actually Big Dipper wasn't that bad a ride but having a bias towards the Steel Coasters I didn't spend too much time here.

Somewhere in the world there exists a perfectly smooth boomerang coaster. This isn't it but like the one at Lake Compounce, its damn close!

When the park was owned by Six Flags they opened this ride and called it Superman Ultimate Escape. Under new ownership the ride changed name to Steel Venom but the paint job remains.
This is actually a great ride, and perhaps the best one in the park.

I'd only ever ridden one of these in Japan before, and that was the practice attempt at what would be the proper ride. This one had more punch and an excellent stopping moment on the back spike that caught us all by surprise.

Thunderhawk is the park's brightly coloured SLC. Most hated it but I liked it a lot. Enough to run back at the end of the day to ride it one more time before I left.

The Villain is quite a big wooden coaster and it doesn't run smoothly at all. I had been warned to not ride it in the back but I chose to, so perhaps I'm to blame for my biased opinion of the ride. The whole area around here is nicely themed however.

Interesting Sign #18
"Keeps arms legs inside at all times"
What are "arms legs", and what should we keep them inside? Our clothes? The station?

Is it a wooden coaster if it has steel supports? One for the obsessives to argue over.

Double Loop is the auspicious name of this ride. "Double Concussion" might have been more appropriate. It really does crunch your neck as it goes through the elements. Considering I already had a bad neck, this made it worse. Yes, my own fault but even those people who were OK were complaining when they got off this. Needless to say I only rode this once.

Beaver Land Mine Ride is the park's Kiddie Coaster. That's "Kiddie" as in "children" Martin. Yes, I rode it too. Well it was there to be ridden.

Actually it wasn't too bad a ride, certainly better than The Villain.

The Dominator is an excellent Floorless coaster, and well done to the ride operators for really keeping this ride moving all day. I've never seen a park that kept two trains running even though there were only enough people in the station to fill one train. This meant that you could turn up at any point in the day and be guaranteed a walk-on, to the front row if you were so inclined. Well done Googoo!!





Raging Wolf Bobs is the park's other wooden coaster and is probably the more enjoyable of the three.

One of the new attractions that pretty much every park had was the "Fool the Guesser" game, which is actually just a clever way of selling tat at higher than normal prices. If the guesser does guess correctly then it's a total fluke, 9 times out of 10 they'd get it wrong. This was my favourite stand however because of the absolutely stunning girl running it. She'd cheekily ask if you want to play as you walked past, without making reference what is was you'd be playing with.

At lunch we were joined by Snoopy who at one point humped one of the Germans!!

The park has a big wheel and an observation tower, both of which allow you to take really good pictures of the park. Actually, this was a very photogenic park. Not all the rides were slapped on concrete and they were all contained within the park (unlike Kingda Ka for example). This mass of yellow is Thunderhawk and Dominator.

This is Villain, Double Loop and the Log Flume. The latter ride was really enjoyable because you could pay to fire water at the people riding it. We were poised to get Chris and Tim but when they saw us at the cannons they ran out of the queue line. It was another Chris that ended up getting soaked in the end. Sorry about that!

Steel Venom and Head Spin.

Having done all the rides surprisingly quickly I thought I'd head over to the other side of the park to check out the water park area. The ride has 10 coasters and we'd done 8 by lunch, that's how quiet the park was.

This is the funnel slide, which I was going to definitely ride on this trip. However it wouldn't be at this park as I didn't bring my water gear with me thinking that I wasn't going to have enough time to do all the rides. How wrong I was.

Nice use of colour! I wonder if the water slide is sponsored by Crayola?

Dino Island is a rather bland simulator movie thing that I'm sure I've seen before. It's the one where you have to capture a T-Rex whilst the island he's on is undergoing a volcanic eruption.

The park doesn't have a water show or stunt show but it does have a lumberjack show, which I had never come across before. It's a series of games between two teams that has them chopping trees with axes and chainsaws and running on logs. All very lumberjacky indeed.

Actually to be honest it was quite entertaining, perhaps because it was so different to what I'd seen before. These guys had ridiculous balance, there's no way I could run 50 metres on logs.

The water park was really impressive and I was especially blown away by how thorough the life guards were. They weren't just sat in chairs but were actively patrolling everywhere constantly looking into the water. The park were constantly testing the staff with a doll that they'd sink into the water for staff to spot. The whole seriousness of it all was very impressive.

OK, so I didn't film this in slow motion but feel free to sing along anyway. "One night to be confused. One night to speed up truth. We had a promise made. Four hands and then away". This is the childrens playground area that features a lot of ball projecting cannons.

This is the Big Dipper taken from the observation tower.

The park has a really nice layout making the most of the lake.

As a final test I took this pano from the walkway that goes over the lake. The original is made of about 10 pictures, what you're seeing here is the web-friendly low res version. I was quite chuffed with this as I managed to get nearly all the rides into the one pic (Bobs is hidden off to the right)

I really liked Googoo Lake. I think we were spoiled by the park's hospitality and the lack of people in the park with us. I was dreading this park thinking it would be too busy to get on everything but as I stated earlier, most of the rides were done by lunch time. A lot of the group ended up in the waterpark, in hindsight I'd have liked to have done the same as it was a really good looking one.

Time for arguably the best park in the world, Cedar Point