Malcolm's America Trip

Introduction

2006-07-01T11:59:00.000-07:00

The Summer of 2006 saw the European Coaster Club travelling to a large number of parks around the Eastern half of the United States. The trip would take us from New York, up to Cedar Point in Ohio and then south to Georgia, taking in nine states and about 25 parks.

One of the problems I had with the trip itinerary was that no time was spent in New York except at parks, and as I had never been there before and wanted to incorporate some sightseeing into the trip I decided to stay in the US and make my way back up there.

Fortunately I had a friend in New York who was happy to spend some days with me travelling up from Georgia to his home town. As if 20-odd parks wasn't intense enough, I decided to visit a few more on the way back to New York.

So here's a report of the entire trip, which I hope you will enjoy.

Note:
Please take this report in the spirit intended. If you're unhappy with anything I've written let me know and I might change what has been said but based on negative feedback the last time I did this I have no choice but to be a little more careful with some of my observations.

Also, should you like the pictures I've posted and wish to have high-resolution ones then I'm happy to share as long as the reason is a good one!

Lets start at Coney Island

Coney Island

2006-07-01T11:58:00.000-07:00

Within an hour of finally making it through American immigration (always one of the longest queue lines on these trips to the states) we had arrived at the first park of the trip Coney Island. Actually Coney Island is the area, Astroworld and Deano's are the two parks situated here. The temperature was very hot for the time of year, something that would accompany us for most of the trip. We had also arrived on memorial holiday weekend so there were plenty of people in the parks, fortunately this didn't continue for much of the trip.

We had come to this park because the Coney Island Cyclone is perhaps the most famous coaster in America and because the trip organisers liked the idea of being in a park within an hour of the flight touching down, something that you can't do in most countries.

This is a view of the parks that met us having stepped off the coach. We were also met by the local ACE rep who distributed free ride tickets and information packs on the Cyclone. We also had a radio station broadcasting from the park that interviewed a few of us.

This is the Coney Island Cyclone, which is now an American landmark. I hope this ensures its future. Its a shame we can't do the same with the scenic railway coaster in Margate (a coaster that is under the threat of demolition even though it has been listed). To be honest I didn't like this coaster at all, it was a little too rough for me. Although the station operations were very efficient at getting the trains out of the station, they were very rude and perhaps fitting with the preconceived ideas I had of New Yorkers. Not an environment I wanted to subject myself to for too long.

The parks here also had a good number of dark rides, something we would come to miss at other parks on the trip. The ghost houses, of which there were three, were all pretty good in the classic ghost train style.

There were also a good number of spin rides, although having just stepped off the plane I gave them a miss, preferring to let my body adjust to the change in time zone. Considering the number of people in the area, the rides were being run very well and queues were being kept to a minimum. I think this was because the rides make their money on the more people they get through them, so they're run better. The big parks that work on an entry fee have your money once you've paid to get in so there is no incentive to run their rides well; something we'd come to realise.

Here's Deano's Wonderwheel, which it claims is the only one with moving cars. Maybe when it first opened they could claim that, but on the last trip to the U.S. we rode another one at Disney's California Adventure. In the UK we have the Pepsi Max Big One still claiming it is the biggest coaster in Europe and that isn't true. So this wasn't the first time I'd seen this.

This was actually the first coaster I rode on the trip. With the majority of the club heading over to the Cyclone, a small number of us chose to head the other way and do some other rides first. This kiddy coaster differs from most in that it has a turntable station and two trains, again probably to move the paying punters through it quicker.

Coney Island is on the Atlantic coastline and being the tourist I am I had to have a quick dip in the sea, if only to say I've been touched the Atlantic at both sides! Considering it was a holiday weekend I was expecting the beach to be swamped with people and although there were a lot it was still empty in places. Perhaps they were finding the heat too much.

There were two other coasters in the area. We were allowed to ride this one, Deano's Serpent but there was one called the Dragon Wagon that we found but couldn't ride because we were too grown up, in size not mentality perhaps.

A shot taken from the Wonder Wheel with the tenement blocks and the Cyclone in front of them. If it wasn't for the observation tower, this may have been a nice shot!

The Coney Island Cyclone! Just look at the pandemonium on the station platform. Where do you stand, it just looks like a free-for-all, which I found out was exactly what it was.

Interesting sign #1
"Your Mother doesn't work here. Please clean up your own mess".
Well its to the point and in fitting with the New York Stereotype and to be honest seemed to be working, as there was no mess in the station. To be honest there was no time to do that as they were moving you through the ride so damn quick!

One of a few coasters on the trip where you didn't need air gates to keep the people back. The aggressive tones of the station staff was more than a replacement.

Once you had finished your ride you could immediately pay another four dollars to move into the front seats before the train loaded up with more people. I don't know if this is a good way to do this or not, again I wasn't around long enough to see if it worked or not. When the queue got to a long length (and having seventy-plus enthusiasts turn up at once would do that) they very quickly put on the second train.

Interesting sign #2
"Don't even think of parking here"
Succint and too the point! They don't even tell you what will happen if you do. No mention of towing or clamping or anything. Perhaps the tone implies the worst and your car will be stepped on by the Staypuft Marshmallow Man. I watch too much movies.

Having ridden it three times and coming to the conclusion it was a piece of crap I chose to take some pictures of it instead.

Interesting Sign #3
"Big Ass Prize"
Only in New York!

This was the first time I had seen a train in New York and one of the things I had wanted to see here was the graffiti that had made the city famous in the 80s, particularly the painted trains. Alas as I was to find out later the city has spent a fortune on plants designed to clean train carriages and in doing so has all but won the battle with the graffiti artists, which is perhaps good for the city but bad for the fans of the art, which is what I consider it to be.

Interesting Sign #4
"Bump Your Ass Off"
This was actually advertising the dodgems, which makes a lot of sense when you understand the context.

An absolutely stunning paint job on this bike. I have a dream to ride a Harley across America so I'm attracted to amazing bikes like this. The rider who was close by didn't mind me taking pictures but did have a "bloody tourists" expression on his face.

Just along the boardwalk from Coney Island is the world famous Nathan's, home of the hot dog world championships. To be honest I found them really bland but I guess if you're trying to eat four-hundred in a minute or whatever it is they do here, then they're not going to be spending enough time on your palette for you to taste anyway!

OK, here was another place where you weren't supposed to park but the sign was clearly being ignored. Perhaps the wording wasn't blunt enough, after all there weren't any parked vehicles by the other sign.

Having spent a couple of hours at Coney Island it was time to head out of New York and into New England. Its great to see parks, if you can call them that, thriving like this but I don't know if it was coming to the park immediately upon landing or not but I wasn't ready for riding. Maybe I was being unkind to the Cyclone, the majority of people enjoyed it, it just wasn't my cup of tea.

Lets travel North to Six Flags New England

Six Flags New England

2006-07-01T11:57:00.000-07:00

The first of the big parks was Six Flags New England in Massachusetts. The Six Flags chain has recently taken on a new CEO, Mark Shapiro who has started making changes to these parks to appeal to a more family orientated audience. As it happened he was actually visiting this park on the same day as us. From an enthusiasts point-of-view the Six Flags chain gets a negative perception for their poor operations and cost cutting ,so it would be interesting to see if the parks had improved compared to the last time I was in the U.S.

The park had allowed us to ride its Superman ride before the public were allowed into the park, but before doing that we all had to be given season passes. We had thought this would be a nightmare doing us all at once but they proved us wrong moving us through the processing centre with military like precision and getting us to the ride ahead of time, Great stuff!

Even better was that they then started the ERS (Exclusive Ride Session) earlier too. This park definitely had their customer focus hats on today. Superman has been ranked by fans as the #1 steel coaster on the planet so we were all looking forward to this coaster a lot, and boy did it not disappoint. Really smooth, lots of airtime and fun to ride.

The only downside to having such a great coaster at the beginning of the trip is that it could be forgotten in all the other rides we'd be doing later. However I think its fair to say this wouldn't happen this time around.

This morning ERS actually served as a taster of a second ERS the park was giving us, as when the park closed we were being allowed to stay and ride it some more! It was already going at great speed at this time of day, we couldn't wait to see how it rode at night.

Although the train looked empty, the majority of us remained on the ride for the ERS. The park had put on two trains for us and we did have to run around the exit lane to re-ride. Some people liked this ride so much they were sprinting back to the station hoping to jump into the train they'd just left, and in most cases they managed it!

If you want a good stomach work out try to hold a flying position over the front of the car. Ouch!

One of Shapiro's first changes was to introduce costumed characters into the parks. I felt sorry for whoever had to do this as it was way too hot to do this for any length of time. It would be interesting to know how much weight is lost doing this, if its a lot I might volunteer!

With the park open and the public heading over to Superman, we took the opportunity to start nailing the rest of the park. First up was the Batman coaster, which unlike most Six Flags parks where Batman is an inverted coaster, here its of the floorless variety.

Fortunately with no queue we could avoid cattle grids like this. One thing we were noticing with this park was that there was very little places that offered shade. Could you imagine being stuck in this for an hour with the sun shining down on you?

It was nice to be in a park with some nice steel coasters instead of crappy old wood. As much as I like wooden coasters (some not all) I much prefer big steel monsters like this.

Because there was no queue the opportunity was taken to ride in the front, where the floorless effect works best. Jeff and Andy give it the thumbs up.

No thumbs ups from these guys, just jazz hands!

Actually I liked it too, a pretty decent ride for its type. The loop was nicely intense for first thing in the morning.

Another criticism thrown at Six Flags parks is that there is very little theming and coasters are often just plonked on the land. In their defence at New England this isn't that prevalent an issue and there is some nicely themed parts to the park.

This is "The Great Chase", which is the park's kiddy coaster. What you're chasing isn't made clear and thinking about this kept me occupied for all of a minute.

This is Mr. Six Pandemonium, a coaster that is likely to feel the Shapiro effect more than any other. He apparently doesn't like the Mr. Six character and has ordered its removal from the park, which I agree with; a creepy pensioner isn't going to attract people to anything, except a creepy pensioner convention. However Shapiro does like this ride, saying it appeals to the family demographic more than any other in the park. So expect to see more of these pop up in other parks.

Thunderbolt is the parks baby wooden coaster and surprisingly a very good one. Like the Cyclone it follows a figure of eight layout. Unlike the Cyclone its fun to ride and comes into the station with so much speed that you want it to keep going.

Here's a photo of Superman taken from the one shady place we could find that wasn't indoors. If I could suggest anything to improve this park it would be to provide more cover. In fact thats exactly what I did do, following a quick trip to customer services. The black asphalt was starting to melt in places; that's how hot it was!

During lunch we had the central pavilion to ourselves. This is a lovely area in the middle of the park with eating areas and a stage, which was going to be used later in the evening for an American Idol gig of some sort. Today was Justin's birthday so the park had got him some stuff and made him stand on a table to celebrate.

In an attempt to cool off we made our way en mass to the park's rapids ride. Given the temperature we wouldn't have minded getting a little soaked.

Interesting Sign #5
"Your gonna get soaked on this ride".
Gramatically incorrect. I like the way someone had gone to the trouble of scratching the correction into it. If I had heeded the warning instead of picking up on the grammar I may have not have ended up as soaked as I did. This was a very wet rapids.

This was the park's big wooden coaster, named rather unimaginatively "The Cyclone". I can't remember much about this one other than it wasn't as good as the Thunderbolt, but I'm sure it would be better than its namesake.

The ride underwent some design changes and the first drop is not now as steep as it used to be.

It would appear that given all the rides this park has to offer, some club members still longed to ride Superman one more time.

Somewhere in the world there exists a perfectly smooth boomerang coaster. This isn't it.

Is this my favourite coaster? I'll hold judgement til the trip is over. Its still early days.

This was our first stunt show of the trip and to be honest it wasn't that exciting. I don't know if the threat of litigation has meant they can't do as much as they want but the show left me a little bit empty. However shortly after I took this one of the cycle riders clipped a plant pot during a jump and fell in spectacular style. Having checked this with other people who saw the later show, I think it was unintentional and as such the best stunt of the day.

The other kiddy coaster, which is like all others of this type. Very long, quite nosey and not too bad to ride at all.

Riding this again in the evening I decided I did like this a lot. It was crazy fast later in the day and everyone was coming off laughing, before going back round for another go.

Wheeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!!!!

Six Flags New England was a great park with friendly staff and very good operations. If this was a sign of how Six Flags had turned the corner then I wouldn't be having any bad words about the company from here on. However as we were to find out SFNE was the exception and not the norm.

Lets head a little bit south to Lake Compounce

Lake Compounce

2006-07-01T11:56:00.000-07:00

Lake Compounce was the next park on the trip buried in the middle of Connecticut not far from ESPN. We were here to ride Boulderdash, a coaster that is always highly rated and what I had lead to believe was unique with the way it hugged the side of a mountain (I would realise later in the trip how wrong I was).

Another early start to day but this time it would be a wooden coaster that we'd be having our ERS on. Lake Compounce famously send the trains ride twice during their ERS, something that I hadn't seen before.

We would come to realise on the trip that various polls are used to determine the ranking of coasters. Personally I use Mitch Hawker's as its scientific (read "a bitch to fill in") and voted for by the fans.

Boulderdash hugs the side of the mountain and having all the trees and rocks fly past really adds to the sensation of speed. This had been a coaster I'd wanted to ride for a long long time ever since seeing it on a documentary.

I absolutely loved this ride, but a lot of people didn't. Apparently in the last year it has developed a couple of kinks in the track that can hurt the rider if they're not ready for it. Once you'd ridden it a few times you'd learn to prepare for them however and the ERS was great.

In all I rode it twenty times during the ERS. Now I don't usually count but seeing as how people were gradually dropping out of the ERS and the trains were running with empty seats I remained on the ride all hour. It's funny how I seemed to hate those that others liked and liked those that others hated. I guess I'm just a little messed up!

After the ERS was over a group of us headed along the lake's edge to the rapids ride. This weather stone was first seen at this park but a couple of parks later in the trip also had them. I'd never seen them before and found them quite amusing.

The rapids were notorious and once again Malcolm the Water Magnet got soaked. However on this occasion, everyone in the boat got soaked, I just happened to get it first. The final turn featured a massive wave that I think got Chris.

Or was it Mick that got it? Hmmm...

Interesting Sign #6
"Proper riding position - Feet below knees".
I have to admit I've never seen anyone try to sit in a cable lift with their feet above their knees!

The cable lift had been recommended by those who had been to the park before. On the way back down you get a really nice view of the park. In order to do that you had to ride the lift up. There isn't anything at the top other than a guy reading a book and a turn-around. The possibility of an alpine coaster being built would be great I thought. On the way up we were told to look out for wild animals.

I just didn't expect them to be of the stuffed variety.

Here's the view on the way back down. Does look good, unfortunately the potential for getting a nice shot of the park disappeared as I could hear the Boulderdash train coming.

Which I got, woohoo! This ride isn't easy to photograph because it is hidden in the trees so your grateful for fate smiling on you and giving you the chance of a shot like this.

Having ridden the cable car it was time for lunch and more "staff in costumes". It was nice of the park to have them join us for lunch, I'm just not sure the heat was the right conditions for them. The same as yesterday!

New to the park this year was Thunder and Lightning, a pair of powered swings that were quickly popping up in parks around the world, but in particular the U.S. This ride was a lot of fun and better than the one at Thorpe, which I had admittedly ridden when it was running on half the air it should have done. As it was to turn out this was one of the better run ones on the trip.

Interesting Sign #7
"Please Remove Earrings".
This was on the entrance to the park's Boomerang coaster. A warning that should be on all rides of this type. Somewhere in the world there exists a perfectly smooth boomerang coaster. This isn't it.....but it was close and the smoothest I'd ever been on!

A new kiddy coaster gave some enthusiasts an opportunity for a new credit. I doubt it was as exciting as they're making out. Actually I rode it soon after and it was!

I didn't realise that this park was the oldest in America opening in 1846. Throughout all of our day at SFNE we were reminded that it was the 45th birthday of Six Flags. 45 is nothing compared to 160 yet this park wasn't making a big deal out of it.

The park's water park was popular with the heat as high as it was. I hadn't brought any water clothes to the park so couldn't take part and as we were only there for the morning I might not have had time to dry off.

Lake Compounce was a really nice park, and we could have done with a little more time there as I had to forego a couple of attractions. I did love Boulderdash however and even if it doesn't rank so highly this year compared to previous, I'll be ranking it quite highly!

Back south to a surprise park!

Clementon Lake

2006-07-01T11:55:00.000-07:00

The first surprise park of the tour was Clementon Lake, home of the coaster formerly known as Tsunami but now going under the moniker J2. The park is small in size and serves the local community pretty well, at least given the number of people enjoying themselves when we got there, late in the evening.

People gathering patiently waiting for the J2 ERS. For me this was the worst coaster on the trip, it was just too violent a ride for me and I was having to fight with the ride or else I think the vibrations would have caused my mandible to detach from my skull. The park had been up for sale for some time and I think the park had invested in this ride to boost the likelihood of a buyer being interested. Whether they had maintained the ride as much as they should have isn't so clear.

Having said that it is a lovely looking coaster that totally dominates one end of the park and the skyline. If only it rode as well as it photographed.

As hard as it is to believe the most fun ride in the park was the Big Wheel. It didn't offer anything that any other wheel offers other than the most amusing ride operaters of the trip. The girl controlling the gates was telling the girl controlling the wheel when to stop and when to go back or forward a bit. Because she couldn't get the wheel lined up correctly they resorted to trash talking each other, in a friendly way I might add. "Don't you be saying my ass is big" was perhaps the best insult traded.

The park did have another coaster called Jack Rabbit that was quite well known. If they're not looking after J2 then this one didn't stand much of a chance either. In fact its nothing more than a pile of wood that happens to look like a coaster. Its very unlikely that this will ever open again.

I think its sad that in the age of political correctness this ride had to be renamed. It was Tsunami before the other one hit, and unless the park owners consult clairvoyants, it was nothing more than a coincidence. It's a shame that this one had to change when there are still countless Tornados, Hurricanes and Cyclones still out there.

As with all the parks we'd been to so far (except Coney) the park had invested in adding a water park to the main park, and just like elsewhere the heat ensured it was well used.

Either they're not maintaining the theming under the Jack Rabbit or they've accurately recreated the day Geronimo's wife was crapped on by a rather large seagull.

I had a moan in an earlier post about the number of participants in the ERS decreasing as it went on, and rather hypocritically this was exactly what I had to do here. I did give the ride a second chance but came off just as put off as the first time. There were a good number of people who liked this ride, and hats off to them. It just wasn't my cup of tea (or should that be "bottle of J2, Oh!") . Someone had said that The Voyage was a longer version of J2. I hope not!

Interesting Sign #8
"Riders seated in last car must be 54" or taller!"
This is perhaps the only ride with this rule, it's because the forces at the back of the train are very strong and too much for most.

I don't ever see myself going to Clementon Lake again, at least not in is current form. There's just nothing there to excite me, sorry!

Back north to Six Flags Great Adventure

Six Flags Great Adventure

2006-07-01T11:54:00.000-07:00

Our second Six Flags park of the trip was one of their biggest, Great Adventure. On the last trip to the U.S. Magic Mountain was the biggest park of the trip, and GA would have been it on this trip if we hadn't included Cedar Point on the itinerary. Having been given a great welcome by the New England park it would be interesting to see if we'd get the same from this one.

The park had expanded with two huge rides in the last couple of years. Kingda Ka is the biggest and fastest coaster on the planet and was the main reason for coming to this park. Following a recent spell of downtime it was reported to be up and running. The other coaster and new for this year was El Toro, which we weren't going to get to ride because it was still undergoing testing.

Well here was SFGAs welcome to the club, a security vehicle in hot pursuit of the two coaches. This didn't bode too well. Perhaps SFNE was a fluke! Clearly our early arrival for the exclusive ride session on Kingda Ka hadn't been communicated to everyone.

This had the potential to be the high point of the trip, quite literally. At 128 miles an hour and 450+ feet high, nothing was going to top this for speed or height. To be honest the ERS went really really well and we all got plenty of goes on the ride. I deliberately waited for the front row to see the car in front launched and then get launched soon after it.

The Simms boys seem excited and reticent before being launched. You can tell this is their first go.

It's all a little too much for Bart! The ride is great but my God, that launch is something else. Although my glasses had a strap I really thought they were going to destruct. If you don't ride this in the front row the car vibrates quite heavily. Also rather surprisingly I felt the launch on the smaller rides such as Stealth at Thorpe Park was more punchier. I guess because it has to get you up to a reasonable speed in less time than this has to. With the ERS over, it was time to explore the rest of the park whilst the public flocked to queue for this one.

Great American Scream Machine is a copy of Viper at Magic Mountain with the same layout and probably the same roughness. It was still undergoing morning warm up at this point so I would be returning later to see if that was the case.

Once again the park was deserted, partly because it was still early but also because with Kingda Ka running, the crowds were making their way to that. This was one of the advantages to getting the big rides exclusively before the park opens.

The park did had little touches of theming but not all them were well thought through. How did this boat sink into the grass for instance? QuickGrass?

Before Kingda Ka was built, Nitro was this park's big steel coaster and having loved Silverstar in Germany was quite looking forward to riding this one. The ride this year has been sponsored by "Driving Force" a fly-on-the-wall reality show featuring John Force and his racing daughters Ashley, Britney and Courtney. Sounds made up by the people responsible for Smash Hits but apparently they're real people.

The ride had a great ride-ops team who would poke fun at Kingda Ka. The guy on despatch was called Adrian and from the UK. He took time to talk to the riders, without impacting the despatch time and was really friendly. He was accompanied by a young lad with pink manga hair. Something we didn't see again until Kentucky Kingdom.

Viper gives the ride the thumbs up. Relishing having the row to himself he shouted "Billy no-mates" to us as the ride left. Getting a ride this good to yourself should be considered a good thing! Hurrah for empty parks.

Its fair to say that a lot of people on the trip liked this ride. There were one or two that didn't but what do they know ;) In hindsight this was one of the best rides on the trip, in my opinion. Kingda may have been faster and taller, but this was longer and was more fun to ride.

The Batman ride is the same as every other batman, except the one at SFNE. It's a really fun ride and quite intense in places. However the operations here were the complete opposite to Nitro, with staff that were disinterested in doing their job. I was close to jumping out of my seat and checking everyone's restraints myself they were that bad.

I first rode this kind of drop tower in the 90s at Magic Mountain and although the blow to my head failed to put me off riding them in future I had learnt to keep my head back. However I was so focused on doing that on this occasion I fail to remember what the ride was like.

The Chiller ride is notorious for only running one half, usually the red at any one time. People in the club had visited this park on a number of occasions and never seen the black train running. Something to do with the amount of power required to run both rides, or something. Why invest in the ride if you're not going to run it? So it came as a nice surprise to hear that they were going to switch rides part way through the day from the red, to the black.

A word to the wise, when you're about to be launched its advised not to heckle the people in the queue line. Doing so may result in your head being thrown into the headrest without you being quite prepared for it...............Martin.

The park has one indoor coaster, Skull Mountain, that was an alright ride but a good respite from the sun. Rather strangely there are signs in the queue line warning people susceptible to strobes not to ride, quite odd when you realise there weren't any, unless they had been turned off on the occasion we were there.

For me the most amazing ride in the park was the big wheel. Rather interestingly I said the same thing about Clementon. This didn't have the same problematic ride operators as the other park but offered some stunning views of the park, and it was for this reason that I liked this.
Here is Nitro and Batman at one end of the park. It was the other side of the park that was to blow me away however.

Rides everywhere! Just creeping into the left is Superman, then the Great American Scream Machine, Kingda Ka standing quite majestically over everything else, Rolling Thunder dwarfed by El Toro and Medusa in the far right corner of the park.

Here's El Toro, the new ride for this year. It did look very impressive.

A rather strange name for a ride I thought. If you could have a fantasy fling who would it be with? Angelina Jolie, Jennifer Connelly or Madchen Amick for me! Alas this was just one of those rides where you're stuck to the inner wall of a spinning cage.

Another stupid name for a ride. This is Blackbeard's Lost Treasure Train, one of the smaller coasters for kiddies. We didn't have to look too hard to find the train however.

There it was coming into the station, just as we got to it. Perhaps the ride should be renamed "Blackbeard's Found Treasure Train".

Another place to escape the heat was in this take on the Madhouse rides such as Hex, which we have at Alton Towers. This is themed around Houdini and him helping you to escape from a spinning room. SFNE had the same ride but didn't have half the effects running that this one did. This was actually pretty decent! For a country that doesn't appear to do Dark Rides, SFGA had surprised me with this one.

Prior to coming on this trip I had ridden 2 flying coasters: Stealth that used to be in California and Air at Alton Towers. Superman was the same system as the latter using a neoprene vest and ankle clips to keep you restrained during the ride. The ride itself is much longer than Air, which is great but was much more intense going through the pretzel loop, and actually quite unforgiving on the chest. A big boo to the park for having us queue in the heat with insufficient shelter and then having the cheek to send staff up the queue line selling frozen drinks. If you're killing us because you can't shade your queue lines properly at least give us water for free, we might not think of you as money grabbers then.

Interesting Sign #9
"For your riding comfort it is recommended that earrings are removed before riding".
Another earring warning, can only mean I was about to ride one ride in this park.

The Great American Scream Machine. Yes there was a lot of screaming on the ride, coupled with several Ows and Ouches. Like the drop tower, if you kept your head pushed back you could through this relatively unscathed.

Fancying a break from riding (are you mad? you all cry). I thought I'd check out the new bit of the park around Kingda Ka and El Toro. Kingda Ka takes its name after one of the tigers that the park look after. The animal show wasn't too bad, they don't have the tigers doing circus style tricks. Instead they do stuff such as chasing balloons, the kind of thing tigers are famous for doing in the wild. As you can see you are encouraged to get close to the animals, just as long as you keep that 20 high foot wall of perspex between you and them.

This is the shot that everyone took of El Toro. My only hope would be that the ride would open before I left the country and that I would have a chance to get back. I don't know if it was part of the testing or not but a few rides around this part of the park were closed, including the mine train type ride on the right and the wooden racer Rolling Thunder visible just behind El Toro. This did annoy a lot of people in the club as a sign of the Six Flags we know and hate.

Medusa had also been closed but when I got to it it had just opened up, so a walk onto the front row ensued and I was able to enjoy what is a really good ride, but then its hard to get bad versions of these.

Interesting Sign #10
"2 weeks til El Toro is unleashed".
This sign had apparently been up for a couple of weeks already.
You could however buy the El Toro T-Shirt today, if you so wanted. Cynical marketing? Nah, surely not.

El Toro had featured in a documentary on new wooden coasters along with The Voyage and Kentucky Rumbler. In that program the ride builders of El Toro made a big deal about how quick it would be to build El Toro due to its world class manufacturing techniques. So it seemed a bit strange that this was the last to open as the other two had already been up and running for a few weeks.

Leaving the "Ghost Town Coaster" part of the park where very little was running. I thought I'd check another bit of the park. Along the lakes edge they were trying out a new sports stunt show. Before it started we were warned that at any time a director may call "cut" and ask for bits to be redone. I thought this was a much better way to test things, admittedly a stunt show is a different beast to a new coaster, but you ask anyone if they'd like to be a test dummy and I'm sure they'll say "yes". (How prophetic that assumption was as I'd come to find out in Holiday World).

The stunt show featured skateboards and BMXs in the foreground and a whole array of waterborne vehicles on the lake. The strangest had to be this inflatable raft thing that they could jump and catch the wind with, at which point they were flying it like a kite.

Interesting Sign #11
"Warning Underground Flammable Storage - No Smoking"
Now I'm sorry, but if you don't want people to smoke just say so. Don't try and trick them by saying that there's a slight chance of them blowing themselves up if they do. If there was really something flammable beneath the sign wouldn't you fence it off rather than cover it with wood chips?

Here's proof that the true to their word, the park did indeed open up the other side of the Chiller Ride. To be honest I preferred this side, it was like a baby Kingda Ka where you go under the top rather than over it.

All in all, I have to say that I did like SFGA although there were some usual Six Flags habits that detracted from the day. Having to pay for cold drinks in scorching hot queue lines and the closure of a significant number of rides for example. But the park does have a great array of rides and I'm gutted that with all our red tape we will never have a park like this in the UK.

I've had enough of the east coast lets head inland to Pennsylvania and Dorney Park.

Dorney Park

2006-07-01T11:53:00.000-07:00

I hadn't really heard too much of Dorney Park until they opened Hydra last year. I didn't think it had any world class rides, being one of those parks in the Cedar Park chain that hid under the shadow of it's bigger Ohio brother. I was going to be proved wrong however.

Being the first Cedar Fair park it was time to buy the second season pass of the trip. This one would get us into Geauga Lake and Cedar Fair later on. Once again we had a head start on the public being allowed to ride Hydra before the park opened. Apparently a "Dorney" is a place frequented by bees, but it was bigger beasts we were hoping to encounter today.

Hydra stands on the site that used to belong to Hercules a large wooden coaster that divided opinion of those who had ridden it. The new ride is a floorless model, the third of the trip but unlike the other two this had a very unique layout using the side of the hill on which it was built really well.

It is perhaps most famous for it's Jo-Jo roll, a barrel roll that you go through immediately having left the station and before the lift hill. This is a very strange element and does feel really odd taking it at the slow speed that you do. The ride is actually really decent and I liked it a lot. It did pick up speed during the day apparently although I didn't go back to it once the ERS was over.

This was the most popular coaster in the park with the public even though there was a larger one just behind it.

Steel Force has been open for some time and is similar to Steel Dragon, a coaster in Japan that had been closed and we could only look at when we visited there in 2005. On this occasion we could ride it and I really liked this ride. Looking at it, it reminded me of the Big One at Blackpool which is a horrible ride. This however was really smooth and once I realised I didn't have to brace at the bottom of the drops I had plenty of goes on this one and enjoyed it a lot. Oh, and thanks to the park for giving us an ERS on this one immediately after Hydra.

Following the demise of Hercules, Thunderhead is the park's remaining wooden coaster. I thought it was alright but I think this was the first coaster on the trip to claim an injury within the club. I think someone injured a rib, and another came off complaining of headaches. Odd Arne seems to think its alright, but this before the train left.

Steel Force is a German made coaster that is great and I was quickly realising that this park was very understated and had a really good selection of rides, they were showing me that faster and higher doesn't necessarily mean better.

One thing that scared me a bit about this ride is that the exit bridge comes extremely close to the passing train as I think you can see here.

The park also has a mouse coaster but it is a little temperamental on the day we were there. I think it broke down 3 times, the last time with our club members on it when they should have been making their way back to the coaches. As such, not everyone got to ride it.

When I was queueing up for the mouse ride being the attention freak that I am, I noticed something peculiar with this ride that a lot of people may have missed. Some of the cars were themed to be cats and the other were all mice. This made the idea of the mouse coaster a lot more fun because you now had some cars chasing all the others. I hadn't seen this being done anywhere else. Admittedly in this pic you have a cat chasing a cat.

Now for the highlight of the day Talon, the park's inverted coaster. This ride was great and a lot of fun, once you found the entrance that was.

Plenty of Gs, a unique layout and an excellently paced second half made sure that when I came to rank the coasters at the end of the year, this one would be well up the list.

The park had also thought about photo opportunities. Here rather by accident, I got a couple of other club members going through the helix.

Dorney Park surprised me, I thought it would be an average park at best but I hadn't appreciated Talon or Steel Force and how good they would come to be. It's a shame that we left this park as early as we did, we could easily have spent the rest of the day there and not have been bored. However we had another surprise location to hit next; one that would divide the group...

Lets go to PTC

PTC Factory

2006-07-01T11:52:00.000-07:00

The Philadelphia Toboggan Company/Coasters (PTC) are the oldest makers of wooden coaster trains in the world and as we were close to them on the trip, the organisers thought it would be a good place to stop for a non-park surprise.

Originally they made rides as well as trains. Thunderhawk at Dorney was made by them and there would be others later on in the trip. Nowadays they focus on building new trains and refurbishing existing ones. It is fair to say they are kept busy.

Well, it would appear that it is not just trains for wooden coasters that they deal with, this one is for a steel train. No idea why it had been thrown out though.

The manager of PTC, Tom Rebbie gave us a welcome and introductory speech. To keep myself entertained whilst this was going on I thought I'd continuall flick Jeff's ear until he turned around to have a go, at which point I'd take his picture. All quite juvenile admittedly.

They had laid out some of their trains for us to crawl over, this one from a ride we would be doing towards the end of the trip.

I'm not sure I'd be looking forward to riding any of these anytime soon. These were actually some of their older trains that they had also put out on display.

I joined the club for the socialising and travelling aspects not necessarily to know the ins and outs of coasters, so this wasn't really my ideal place to be. To pass the time therefore I thought I'd see how many "dog" references I could find around the PTC factory. Here we have a "safety dog" and a "chain dog", whatever they are. That's two already!

Can I count "scooby-doo"? Well its my little game, so yes I can. That's three.

Aha! Here's four! A "husky" ladder.

and that was it for my little dog game as I couldn't find anymore. I spent the rest of the time sat outside the factory with some others reading an ACE magazine that had been kindly given to us. In the evening we ended up at a bar nearby where the PTC people laid on some food and drinks for us, most appreciated!

Oh, and it was on the way to the bar that I managed to walk into a sign, in full view of everyone. One of my moments of stupidity on the trip that fortunately no-one took a picture of.

Like I said earlier this wasn't my scene but I didn't have a problem with going as I knew other people would be interested in this and the club aims to please everyone, not me. If we'd have had the choice of staying at Dorney I would have done so but it did give me a chance to rest my feet and chill for a bit. I can say that I have visited PTC but it's not a place I'd personally hurry back to (geez, that makes me seem so ungrateful!)

Time to enter west for Knoebels

Knoebels

2006-07-01T11:51:00.000-07:00

I had heard a great deal about Knoebels and was quite looking forward to this park (actually I was looking forward to all of them). This is a family run park that has been open since the mid 1920s and has grown in size since. It contains a large number of older type rides, similar to Blackpool in the UK. Unlike Blackpool however this is buried within some gorgeous forest scenery.

The first thing that surprised me about this park was that there was no big entrance gate. You just come off the freeway and you're in it. They don't bother with fences, their park is completely open.

Some had travelled to the park by coach, some by school bus (and there were quite a lot of them) and some had even travelled by golf buggy!.

Actually it belonged to Rick Knoebel, son of the family who had come to welcome us to his family's park.

Soon after we were also joined by his father Rick. In fact I have to say the entire family were all really welcoming and friendly. It was great to see them joining us for lunch later in the day and eating the same food as us. I hadn't seen that before, that I recall.

One of the most refreshing things about this park is that it is under the trees so we had plenty of shade, something that the big corporate parks failed to deliver. To me one of the best things about America is its nature, particularly its forests. I had done a tour in the 90s where I spent time in Yosemite and Big Sur and fell in love with this aspect of the country. Seeing views like this reminded me of that.

As well as being open to the public, the park is also open to the elements and is prone to flooding. This tree marks the heights that the floods have gotten to. Fortunately the park has recovered every time. A few weeks after we left the park they were hit with another!

The park is famous for a couple of things. Firstly it has a great ghost train dark ride, which didn't scare me but was quite fun to ride. Yvonne, who is scared of these things was "encouraged" to ride this, which she did. I had been told that there was one bit that would guarantee to scare me but it didn't, sorry chaps!

The park also house the Phoenix coaster, the first large-scale coaster to be relocated. It originally lived in Texas but was brought to this park in the 80s.

It's a really really fun ride with plenty of airtime and a joy to be on! I can fully understand why so many people like this ride. Like Thunderhawk at Dorney, this was made by PTC.

The park has a second wooden coaster called the Twister. This one is bigger and faster than the Phoenix but isn't as much fun in my opinion. It features a 2 part lift-hill, which I hadn't seen before on a wooden coaster.

The Scandinavian contingent seem pleased to be riding this, although I don't think the first drop out of the station is quite as scary as Odd Arne is letting on!

The ride does feature a pair of great big helixes that circle the station, perfect for photo-opportunities.

The park is currently bringing back The Flying Turns, a ride that used to be popular in the early 20th century but became extinct as more conventional rides became more popular. The park invited the club into the site to delay construction and take pictures.

"It's wood Jim, but not as we know it!"

Here's a photo of the shot of the group shot.

As well as the coasters the park does contain a big selection of older style rides. If you were looking for a museum of old rides then this is a good place to come.

Like Lake Compounce there is a chair lift that you can ride up to the top of nearby mountain and on the way back down you can take pictures of the park. Because the park is under the trees you can't take detailed pics, but it does give you a chance to get the coasters. This is the Twister, the Phoenix is over to the right but its not easy to shoot it as the trees on the mountain block the view to it.

The park has a single steel coaster called The High Speed Thrill Coaster. It's a weird beast powered by an engine that throws the train at speed up and over the lift hill. It's a kiddy coaster apparently but I thought it was quite crazy for adults too!

The land that the park is built on used to be a mining site, and a museum to that sits at the back of the park. It's actually quite informative, as well as having some nice air conditioning.

Stefan and Dirk enjoy the kiddy parachute drop ride.

Here's proof that the park doesn't have any fences around it, with the steam train ride running alongside the mountain road that you drive to enter the park.

This is just a helter skelter but when you're as heavy as I am you end up with something that is stupidly mad! I thought I was going to fly out onto the road I was picking up so much speed going down it.

I had never seen these rides before, although we do have something similar at the local gym just not on a track. Give the kids a work out whilst they enjoy themselves.

Conventional kiddie attractions also exist such as this interactive puppet show!
It was soon time to have our ERSs and the park had rather kindly given us both wooden coasters, starting with the Twister and finishing up with the Phoenix.

Twister was flying in the evening.

and the Phoenix was giving even more airtime than earlier!

Knoebels is a lovely little park, with some great rides. Admittedly they're not world class attractions but sometimes you don't need to have that to have a good time. The location of the park alone is reason for me to come back to it!

Lets head into Amish country for surprise park #2

Dutch Wonderland

2006-07-01T11:50:00.000-07:00

Time for another surprise park as on the way to Hersheypark we stopped off at Dutch Wonderland. This was going to be a brief stop off as they only had a couple of rides, as this was very much a children's park not one for adults, and definitely not one for two coaches worth.

The park was opened in the 60s as a children's kingdom. In 2001 it was bought by the same company that owns Hersheypark, so today would turn out to be Hershey day as we'd be heading off there next!
The Sky Princess is the park's wooden coaster and was the first to be built by CCI (this was the reason for coming here). CCI had become really good at building wooden coasters such as The Raven (which I had yet to ride) and Tonnerre de Zeus (which I don't like) . This ride was actually not too bad but what it lacked in thrills it made up in purple paint.

Joust was the park's other coaster, a little steel kiddy ride. I don't think the ride operators could really believe what they were seeing with so many adults going nuts on their rides.

The ERS became one that took place on both rides and we had a good time, it was a nice way to start the day and set us up nicely for the main park later in the day.

Following the ERS the park staff gave us a quick tour of the rest of the park. This park had more of those hand cranked trains that Knoebel's had, so they weren't as rare as I'd thought.

New for this year was a little splash area for the kids to play in.

The park was quite nice and we spent the right amount of time here, i.e. very little time at all. The tour ended up at the souvenir shop and exit so taking the hint we left a little earlier than originally planned. Admittedly the rest of the park wasn't open yet so there was nothing for us to do. Anyway, it was time to go to Hershey Park.

North-west to Hersheypark we go!

Hersheypark

2006-07-01T11:49:00.000-07:00

Hersheypark started out as a small park built for the employers of the chocolate making plant next door. However it soon became so popular that it was opened up to the public. It now houses a decent number of rides and is quite a large park, and quite an effort to get around due to a sizely hill in its centre.

This was by far the busiest park with coach loads upon coach loads of kids visiting the park at the same time as us. We later found out that the park was running a promotion where kids who turned up before a certain time would get in either for free or very cheaply. So we had a lot of schools who saw the opportunity for a day out. Great!

We had no choice but to formulate a plan on where to go. Unfortunately we couldn't get a morning ERS so we would have to join the crowds in queueing for the most popular rides.

So the first ride of the day turned out to be one of the best ones, their fairly new coaster Stormrunner. After queueing for 90 minutes I eventually got my front row ride, and wow! what a coaster. Using the same launch system as Kingda Ka, this one differs in that it has more than a top hat and actually has some unique elements in its layout. I would have liked to have had another go on this but I wasn't going to queue again when there was so much of the park to see.

Somewhere in the world there exists a perfectly smooth boomerang coaster. This isn't it

I've seen these Virtual Reality games before but I've never seen one where the participants have to jump up and hump the seats, which was what these people were up to.

The Wildcat was a pretty powerful wooden coaster but had a jump on a banked bend that I didn't find too comfortable. Never seen that before and never want to again!

The mouse turned out to be a pain to ride because it kept breaking down. Everytime I got to it I couldn't get on. It was near the end of the day that I eventually got to ride it, and it was OK.

In the UK, rapids rides would have waterfalls like these that would turn off when you got close. Not here however, so there was no way I was going to ride this one. The weather did take a turn later in the day and the rains got quite heavy, so I got wet anyway; the other downside to this was that the rides were closed as soon as rain started. This bad weather worked out to be a good thing as it lead to a lot of the kiddies leaving early.

We got stuck in the queue line for Rollersoaker, which turned out to be a blessing as it meant when it started up not all the water effects were running and there were no public around to shoot our train with the water cannons. This ride is a lot of fun though and should be included in all water parks. Its strange though that for a ride that gets soaked deliberately they can't run it when it rains. C'est la vie!!

The nicely named Sooperdooperlooper was the first full circuit looping coaster on the eastern half of America trivia fans. It was also a pretty good ride. This park was starting to go up in my rankings, it had lots of great rides.

Another B&M Inverter can also be found at this park. The Great Bear isn't bad, it has a unique layout but some of the pacing is a little out. It has lengthy straight bits where you think there could be room for some twists. It does however have the best start I've ever seen on these rides, replacing the normal turning drop with a "treble clef" helix element.

The new ride for this year was the peanut butter themed "Reese's Xtreme Cup Challenge". It was rubbish! The guns wouldn't shoot straight, it was too short and it was just disappointing considering the hype the park gave it in the run up to its opening. Even a consolitary free chocolate turned out to be crap, some people didn't even get that!

With the rain hitting the park in waves, the ironically named Storm Runner was closed longer than most of the rides in the park. A lot of club members were afraid they wouldn't get to ride it. I'm glad I chose to join the queue and get it out of the way first thing, before the rains hit.

Stormrunner is the first of these rocket coasters to have inversions and this is one of them, the strangely named Flying Snake Dive. Its actually rather strange to go through, you've barely got over the top hat hill and you're flying into this one.

The rains opened just after this train had launched, I hope it wasn't too painful for those who got on it.

Lightning racer was to be our evening ERS but I thought I'd ride it anyway, and I'm glad I did as the rain prevented it from running when it was time and we ended up not having it. The ride is perhaps my favourite in the park. When it was announced that we were having an ERS on this and not Stormrunner I was a bit perplexed but having ridden both sides (and winning the races I might add) I can fully understand why it was chosen. It's great fun throwing abuse to the other train and getting it back.

The Comet is another old PTC wooden coaster (boy did they leave their mark on this state) and like the others was a lot of fun to ride. I nearly forgot to take a picture of this one and had to run back to get it, which is why its so dark!

Ponchos aren't designed to be worn back-to-front as Andy demonstrates!

We had 10 hours or so at Hersheypark and I thought it was going to be too much time. As it turned out the rain triggered ride downtime meant we still had to rush about to get all the rides in. Stormrunner is a great ride and at this point was my favourite of the trip.

West to Lakemont if you please...

Lakemont

2006-07-01T11:48:00.000-07:00

Lakemont is a very small park and we were only going to be here for a few hours. It's home to the oldest surviving coaster in the world, Leap the Dips.

The park has been up and running since 1894, a very long time indeed! It has a small selection of rides ranging from the lazy crazy golf to the coasters and one very intense spin ride (more on that later).

Whilst waiting to get in the club entertain themselves with displays of their double-jointedness.
The park had rather kindly given us 5 rides to play on before opening up to the public: their four coasters and that insane spinning monster.

Considering its age Leap the Dips runs really well. I wasn't expecting the most amazing coaster and it isn't but there are a lot of worse coasters out there.

Really nice trains too, I do like sofa seating on the rides.

I had seen pictures of this before coming on the trip but didn't realise I would get to ride one. It's best described as a coffin helter skelter attraction. You each get into your own metal box before being lifted up the centre of the tower and sent spiralling around the outside and hitting the final drop with a clunk! A little too claustraphobic for me to be honest.

Florian models the other steel coaster in the park with an as exclusive ride session as you could ever get. I think he liked it!

PTC have also had their influence here with the Skyliner coaster. This reminded me of the Phoenix in the way it runs, it didn't use the figure 8 layout, going for a more out and back but it was smooth and pleasant to ride. There were also some very nice looking ride ops here, which most of the club noticed!

Next to the park is a baseball ground. The park had come up with an ingenious way of cheering on the local team.

They added a message to the side of the trains!

I'm quite a fan of crazy golf and had so far played at Knoebels. This one had been themed around a train station and was more of a challenge than the other course. It offered a nice break from the riding.

This is the G-Force monster that I rode (first mistake) immediately after lunch (second mistake) with Tim Herre (final mistake). After being severely stapled into the car the ride started and as it spins you get to choose whether to give yourself negative or positive G's depending on the position of the car. I could just about taking this like a conventional loop, but like the pretzel loop on Superman, going the other way was quite a challenge. With the blood rushing to my brain I am glad to say I survived the ride, as did Tim.

Lakemont, cute park with a really nice character to it. Something that a lot of other parks had so far lacked.

Westward ho to Idlewild

Idlewild

2006-07-01T11:47:00.000-07:00

The other small park of the day was Idlewild buried deep woods of Pennsylvania. This park was the most efficient of all the parks in getting us in quickly. They had guys waiting at the first entrance to the park armed with wristbands and factsheets who boarded our coaches and issued them all as we drove into the park. A nice touch!

On entering the park everyone headed off towards the rides. Our little group thought the majority had gone the wrong way so we went off towards the other side of the park. It was after about 10 minutes that we realised we were lost inside Storybook Kingdom and we had to ask for help to get out, which Little Miss Muffet kindly agreed to do. I'm sure she wasn't expecting to have to speak to lost Europeans today. Actually this was nice having live actors in the park playing the roles of the stories being told nearby.

Tim tries to draw the sword from the stone, safe to say we're not going to be having a King Tim on this occasion. You can sleep easy now!

Interesting Sign #12
"Grass, Grown by the inch - Killed by the feet.
I liked the way the park had put some effort into the smallest details, even making their signs fun.

Interesting Sign #13
"Smoke free zone, Childrens' lungs at work".
Even this sign was well done, and it was nice to have it at little kid height. I guess they've done this to subconciously bring the adults to the kids level.

It was on the way out of storybook kingdom that we spotted the sign, had we seen it on the way in we wouldn't have gotten lost. Ah well, at least we got to see that bit of the park, which reminded me of Efterling, which has a similar childrens story book area.

Interesting Sign #14
"Fanny's Fudgery".
This is just wrong, plain wrong. But then I guess the American's don't have the same meanings to the words as we do. It reminded me of a great story about R&B singer Sisqo that I won't mention on here.

The park did remind me of Knoebels in places with rides buried inside the trees.
I was starting to like this park for the same reasons that I did that one. Location location location! The park is actually owned by Kennywood, which we would be visiting tomorrow.

Interesting Sign #15
"Please check all guns with bartender".
A different approach to gun crime, why bother investing in state-of-the-art metal detectors when you can just put up a sign and ask them to hand them in ;)

The Hootin' Holler section is located in the centre of the park, seperating Storybook Kingdom from the coasters. It contains a few rides including an old style madhouse and Confusion Hill, a really good lean-in optical illusion walkthrough where balls roll up hill etc.

A nice sign put out for us by the park. Rollo coaster is a fun little ride that hugs the mountainside exactly like Boulderdash at Lake Compounce. Actually this one was built first and was the inspiration for that coaster. Guess who made this one? Yup, PTC again.

Taking pictures of this one was just as difficult as Boulderdash as half the ride was higher up the mountain where you can't get your cameras.

The park has a strong educational aspect to it. How better to have a history lesson in a theme park than use the rings from a large, and now cut down, tree.

You can tell a good park by who original the old rides look. Many parks have this caterpillar attraction; not many of them still have the canopy running.

Interesting Sign #16
"Smokers and chewers will please spit on each other and not on the stove or floor".
You tell 'em! Disgusting habits both of them.
I wonder if locals who chew tobacco are also included in this?

Another reason for visiting this park was to visit the mouse that used to live in Alton Towers before being moved here. Having never ridden it when it was in the UK it was great to be able to ride it here. It is a great ride made even better by being in amongst the trees.

The ride has a strange banked lift hill, which I later found out was due to it being inside a rotating tunnel, when it was at Alton. It added to the rotating effect. After that there are plenty of hairpins and drops, all of them very smooth. It's hard to choose the better coaster, this or Rollo.

Idlewild was the one park on the trip where there wasn't enough time in the itinerary to enjoy it properly. I would have liked to have spent more time taking in the smaller attractions and just enjoying the park, but it wasn't to be. Next time perhaps!

All signs point to Kennywood.

Kennywood

2006-07-01T11:46:00.000-07:00

Kennywood is another park that is held in high regard by fellow enthusiasts. Opened in the late 19th century the park has grown from strength to strength collecting awards along the way. It is one of the few parks that allows you to bring in your own food although it does make some very nice fries. If someone comes up to you and says "Kennywood's open" they aren't advertising the park but telling you that your flies are undone!

An early start as we were going to have an ERS on Thunderbolt, one of the parks wooden coasters. I can only assume Jeff skipped breakfast and was finding something else to eat when this was taken.

The stand out coaster is Phantom's Revenge, a huge green steelie famous for its second drop which dives through the wooden Thunderbolt coaster.

And so it was onto the ERS, Thunderbolt, a coaster that rates quite highly but it won't be by me.
It differs from most rides in that it drops straight out of the station rather than off a lift hill. The park uses the terrain really well in its ride design.

Interesting Sign #17
"Smaller Riders Enter First".
The ride features a lot of right hand turns so if you're on the left you're going to be squished by the person next to you. For this reason they also don't allow riders to ride on their own. Quite odd!

It was on this ride where several people injured their ribs. It was also on this ride that I injured my neck in what I'll forever call "The Tickling Incident". If you're ever riding this ensure that when your arms are up in the air, the person behind you doesn't tickle you because if you crunch your neck (the usual reflex action when tickled) at the bottom of a drop, it'll hurt. In fact it got so bad that I was close to sitting out several days worth of rides, I'm glad I didn't because it was almost a week before the pain went away. Apologies to anyone who had to listen to me grumble about it, but it was bloody sore!

Leaving the ERS I went onto Phantoms Revenge. This used to be a large inverting coaster called the Steel Phantom but it underwent a design change a few years ago into the great ride it is now. Although it doesn't turn the riders upside down anymore it's very smooth and a joy to ride.

As you can see from this pic we were still at the mercy of the elements and the big rides were all closed down when the storms came in. The park did have an indoor coaster so I headed over to that.

Nice ornamental gardens along the way. Phantom's Revenge closed shortly after that train returned back to the station.

This is Exterminator, the rides indoor mouse ride. The barrier is just theming however the ride had been closed, not due to the weather, but due to a "technical issue". So all the coasters were down, so I thought I'd go and ride the drop tower, which was running. In hindsight this wasn't the cleverest move as I got completely soaked.

In the end I hid from the rain inside the Noah's Ark attraction. A really good walkthrough ride, that originally opened in 1936 but which was rebuilt sixty years later. I did get wet on this but being soaked from the drop tower I didn't care.

At lunch we were joined by the big cheese people in the park. One of the guys tried to test us by being able to identify the countries where our local parks were. However he failed to identify the accents of some of the group so the test was quickly abandoned. It was a nice welcome however and they were willing to answer any questions we had on their park and its history. Here Justin is handed a sign to "poomwhuuax", which I think means good luck in Inuit.

Racer is a one of only 3 mobius coasters in the world. We have one in the UK (at Blackpool) and there is one in Mexico (not been to that one yet). For those that don't know the mobius rides are ones where you leave one station and arrive in another. So the red train above would end up where the blue train is and vice versa. As a racer however this wasn't very good as one train seemed to have a clear advantage each time.

Now Jack Rabbit, Jack Rabbit, Jack Rabbit. This is the one ride that had me screaming expletives on the trip, and I apologise to Tim Galvelis and his Father for having to listen to my outburst. I was fortunate to get a back seat ride and they were sat in front of me. Towards the middle of the ride there is a double drop where I swear I thought I was going to be launched out of the ride. Oh my god! It was mental. Considering this ride is 85 years old, I was totally blown away by it. Definitely the biggest surprise of the trip.

More nice ornamental theming...

In the afternoon I had another go on Phantom's Revenge. I do like this ride!

As well as having new rides the park also has some classics such as this kiddy whip ride.

The newest ride for this year was another powered swing this one given the unimaginative name "Swing Shot". Only one side was running on the day we were there. It was an OK ride but not as good as the one at Lake Compounce.

Even so, it was still really popular with the public. The guy responsible for this ride, Stan Checketts was inspired by his childhood and trying to get as high as he could on a swing. A truly inspirational guy that takes simple ideas and makes great rides from them. I just hope his childhood didn't feature seeing if you could endure chinese burns...

Late in the afternoon we were given a guided tour under the Thunderbolt coaster. Taken into small groups we were shown bits of the park that the public don't usually get to see.

Inside the Thunderbolt ride and the group pose for another group shot in front of the sign. I got it in front of the car. Why wasn't I in the group shot? I really didn't want to be photographed in front of this ride.

Here's a shot from the back side of the station of the train going down the second drop.

and here's the big turn around on Phantom's Revenge.

and here's a shot of the next group waiting to be allowed into the back area. I took this by putting my camera over the gate so if you're one of the people waiting who was wondering who was doing this, now you know!

The longest queue of the day was for the Garfield boat ride. In the past it has been the tunnel of love and similar attractions but on this occasion it's a 3D boat ride themed around the dreams of the big fat cat. I couldn't get the 3D effects to work and so wasn't pleased with this ride.

It was on the way out of the park that I noticed this sign welcoming us to the park. Most people missed it completely. With about half an hour left before departure I thought I'd grab some food and take some pictures outside the park.

All signs point to Kennywood, a great park with some stunning rides.

The swing running at full power hits an angle of about 120 degrees.

Kennywood is a really really great park and for Jack Rabbit alone I will not forget this park in a hurry. I should also commend the security at this park as they were the only ones to spot a marker pen in my bag. Not something I was doing as an intentional test but when you have gone through security barriers and the guards take a quick look in the main compartment without checking the rest, its good to see a park be a little more thorough.

Time to enter Ohio and the unpronouncable Googoo Lake.

Googoo Lake

2006-07-01T11:26:00.000-07:00

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

Cedar Point

2006-07-01T11:25:00.000-07:00

And so it came to be that we arrived at Cedar Point. One of THE parks to go to if you consider yourself a coaster or theme park enthusiast. Pretty much every documentary program on the industry will vist this park. It is the biggest in the world in terms of number of attractions and houses around 16 coasters (depending on how you define them)

This was the view from the hotel window. Top Thrill Dragster, the first coaster to pass 400ft, standing quite majestic against the night time sky. We were going to have a nighttime ERS on this later but we would have an hour or two to get some of the rides out of the way before that took place. The view from the hotel was the only good thing to say about Breakers, where we were staying. The customer service was truly lousy. It's a shame because it had been hyped up as being THE place to stay, I'm sorry but the Econo-Lodge a few nights earlier showed true customer service doing all they could to help us enjoy our stay. Hotel Breaker's attitude was that they had your money and so didn't have to treat you with any proper kind of respect, a great shame!

The first ride of the night was on Magnum XL-200, the first coaster to pass the 200ft mark. We had a great ride accompanied by some really friendly riders who kept telling us about how great this ride was. Actually it was running really really well and I enjoyed it a lot. Usually on trips I don't mind where I ride, not being too picky about waiting for the front or the back. However on this trip I had wanted to ride in the front on both Kingda Ka (which I achieved) and Dragster so I headed over to the ERS a little early to ensure my place.

The evening ERS got off to a bad start when after queueing at one of two gates for a length of time we were told we were on the wrong one. After a little haggling for place I eventually got to the front for my ride.

What a ride it was. The launch is a heck of a lot smoother than Kingda Ka, and the ride was better as a result. In fact the whole Dragster experience puts this way above Kingda Ka. You can walk around the ride, which you can't do on Kingda. You get a much better idea of the speed because you can watch it from the Grandstand, you can't do this on Kingda. This has theming, Kingda doesn't really. An excellent ride with a superbly run ERS after which it was time to try to sleep as we had the whole of the next day to get around the rest of the park.

The morning started with an ERS on Millennium Force, or MILF as we had nicknamed it. This was the first coaster to break the 300ft level (do you see a pattern with this park and its records?) . Its an alright ride but not amazing. I guess if I had ridden this before Dragster I'd have been impressed more than I was. Perhaps I was starting to get coaster burn-out and having too much of a good thing.

Raptor is a really good inverted coaster and was a proper way to wake up following MILF but I was more impressed with the cheeky operations banter on this ride. "Raptor is an inverted coaster which means your legs swing freely. Please do not take this opportunity to kick the ride operators", "but I didn't", "I know you didn't sir, this was just a general announcement I make on a regular basis to the entire station".

A local school had come along to cheerlead and play music. I think there may have been a regional competition of some kind as there were lots of kids in t-shirts advertising various bands and choirs.

It's another of those pictures that most people take when they visit a park. Dragster shot through the legs of Power Tower. I wonder how many of those people included the bin in their shot however?

I actually rode the Corkscrew the previous night and had no intention of doing so again today. That's how good it was. I hadn't however taken a picture of it because it was so dark, which is why I took it the today.

Mantis is the park's stand up coaster, and its alright but not great. I'm not the greatsest fan of this kind of ride to be honest, although I will make an exception for Riddler's Revenge at Magic Mountain.

Apparently the original name of this ride was going to be Banshee and there was a whole lot of marketing paraphernalia that had to be destroyed when the full connotation of the name was discovered and the decision made to drop it. (Hearing a banshee's cry was an omen of an imminent death in one's family)

Demon Drop is the park's Freefall tower and has apparently been up for sale for over a year, although a buyer hasn't been found yet. If they did get rid of it would its count of coasters go down or stay the same? Another question for the obsessives to argue over. It was quite rough to from what I remember, even with me keeping my head back.

Wildcat wasn't a bad ride. It looks old and crappy but it rides surprisingly well.

Blue Streak was a pleasant enough wooden coaster. Although the park was busy (apparently this park is always busy) the queue times weren't too bad. For the most part operations were really efficient and moving the punters through the rides at a decent rate.

The park is right beside a really nice beach that I took a walk along later in the day. That's Magnum in the background.

Disaster Transport is an indoor bob-sled ride. This had one of the longest queues of the day and contained what I think is the worst thing to have in a park; hidden cattle grids. Just when you thought you might be getting to the front of the queue you'd enter an other room and see more queueing that you couldn't see before. The ride however was really fun and although short it was good enough to make you quickly forget about how long it took to ride it.

Junior Gemini is a kiddy coaster and the park enforce a rule that adults must ride with kids. As I don't have any of my own and have no plans to abduct any it meant that I had to ask the kids if I could ride with them. In the end I did get on the right but felt a bit bad for having done so.
If you're wondering what Martin is up to here, there was too much space between the kid next to him (yes there is one) and the lap bar so he had to ensure she didn't fly out.

The overbanked turn on MILF

It was at Cedar Point that I reached my 500, which I'm sombrely celebrating here. "Why didn't I make it MILF or Dragster or something other than Woodstock Express?" you may be asking. Well I'm not that fanatical about it, that's why. I didn't plan it this way, it was just whatever coaster I ended up on at the time.

[subsequent to this picture being taken I realised I'd miscounted and it was Gemini Jr that was my 500, ah well!]

Dorney Park and Cedar Point both had this trampoling thing where you could bounce into Snoopy's bum. Why you'd want to do so I have no idea, but it seemed popular with the kids playing in it.

Gemini is a really fun racing ride and when it opened was the first coaster to go over 100ft (Yep, Cedar Point had the full set). People move through the ride really quickly here, the operations were perhaps at their best on this.

New for 2006 is Skyhawk the largest version of the Screamin' Swing ride built so far. It seats 40 people at a time and is about 120ft high. However this was by far the most disappointing attraction in the park as the program they were running it on was extremely short, I can only assume to keep the people moving through it at a decent rate. You'd barely swung one or two times at the maximum height and you brought to a stop. Very disappointing!

Proof that the restraint can fit all body types.

Iron Dragon had been down for sometime during the day so as soon as we saw it running again we headed over to it and got it out of the way. Again the ride operators were quite amusing on this ride insisting on say "bye bye" several times as the train left the station.

With the new ride, the park have decided to not go for the 500ft record, choosing instead to head off in what they're calling "a whole new direction". Rumour has it going underwater, but we'll have to wait and see. It is obvious that there's a whole load of landscaping going on and when welcomed to the park, the guy there made mention of a coral area, which would add to the rumour.

Mean Streak was alright but a little disappointing considering its size. I would come to find out later that this would be a good big wooden coaster when compared to some others. Again kudos to the ride operators who launched a train then immediately stopped it to confiscate a camera that someone had smuggled on. We asked the operator if we could take the camera and run their film out with stupid pictures. She said it would be a great idea but she couldn't.

The park has a train ride that takes you through some bits of the park that you can't get to on foot. They've themed a lot of it with skeletons for some bizarre reason, but it did explain the gunshots we could hear around the park. Some of the sets feature skeleton gunfights.

Dragster by day, just as impressive as dragster by night.

MILF

Some nice 50s theming. I couldn't work out why the mechanic was working on an engine on a car that is just theming, and which doesn't actually move.

As with the Corkscrew ride I had ridden Wicked Twister the night before, and really liked it a lot although I preferred Steel Venom as it had one twisting spike and one straight that they'd stop you on. This featured twisting at both ends so they couldn't do the stop trick on this.

Again the ride operators were superb on this ride. At one point the operator put out over the tannoy "If you're happy and you know it clap your hands", and when you clapped your hands she launched you. Very childish but a lot of fun!

The green forceful monster that is Raptor

Unlike Skyhawk, MaxAIR was running on an excellent program, perhaps the longest I had ever experienced on rides of this type. It seemed odd that the approach was so inconsistent between these rides. Perhaps its related to how popular the ride is, although this did have a decent number of people queueing for it too!

MILF and Dragster taken from the wheel.

A little Cedar Point Pano made from 3 pictures this time.

In the evening we had another ERS on Magnum, but I didn't go to it. The pace of the trip coupled with the heat had taken its toll and after having a little nap at 6pm, I chose to stay in the hotel room to take the opportunity to catch up on sleep. Yep, I arrive at perhaps THE best park on the planet and I take the opportunity to spend it asleep in the hotel room. From what I've heard I wasn't the only one that did this however.

Cedar Point is a great park and I think its far to say THE best park on the planet, definitely in terms of customer service (although being told you're on America's Roller Coast did grate after the 200th time). Not all the rides are world class but there's a good mix and unlike some parks in the UK, there's a decent mix of rides to eat the public up. They don't just rely on the large number of coasters that they have. Top Thrill Dragster was one of the highlights of the trip for me. I knew that I would come to prefer that to Kingda Ka, and the park proved me correct.

South to Wyandot

Wyandot Lake

2006-07-01T11:24:00.000-07:00

After the day at Cedar Point, the pacing of the trip took a turn for the worst. Up until that point the parks had all been fairly close to each other, particularly through Pennsylvania. Now the parks would become more further apart, meaning more time on the coach, early starts and late arrivals. To help us get an opportunity for some rest we had an easy half day at Wyandot Lake.

Wyandot Lake is a Six Flags park but an announcement had been made by Mr. Shapiro that it would be sold off. Fortunately there is a zoo next door that has bought the park. It's primarily a water park with a few park rides added to it to add a bit of variety to the day.

Interesting Sign #19
"No active swimming or horseplay".
Isn't all swimming by definition "active"? When they build a lazy river, boy do they enforce it as such.

The single coaster in the park is the Sea Dragon, which Justin is modelling beautifully here! Olov clearly is feeling the effects from the early start, either that or he made sure he made the most of his time in Cedar Point. The ride is alright. You can't read it from this shot but the water cooler in the background had been adjusted to read "Sea Dragster", trying to ride on Cedar's coat tails perhaps?

As well as the coaster there is a small selection of spin rides.

I was riding this one with Chris who was on another arm of the ride and I kept laughing at him. Understandably perplexed he asked what I found so funny. Then I told him how cool it would have been to have been armed with water balloons or eggs and to be able to release them just as he flew past. I'm easily amused!

The water park part of the park (try saying that when you're drunk) is actually really impressive. They actually have two water parks, seperated by the coaster.

The most popular attraction in the park was the go-kart racing. After a quick go it was time to leave however as we were to make our way to King's Island.

Wyandot is an alright park and it is good to see that its future is secure. A significant amount of cash has been earmarked to make improvements to the park, which can only be a good thing. Lets see how it develops under its new owners.

South West to Kings Island and make it snappy

Paramount Kings Island

2006-07-01T11:23:00.000-07:00

We were going to spend a day and a bit at Paramount Kings Island. The chain had recently been put up for sale by the owners and bought by Cedar Fair and although it was too soon to see how this would affect the parks, we could get an idea of how they might change from speaking to the staff. I had only ever been to Paramount's Kings Dominion and had really liked the park, so it would be interesting to see how this one would compare.

We arrived late in the evening for the first part of our visit to this park.

We were welcomed to the park by Maureen who works in the parks PR department. If I was to say she was the most enthusiastic person I'd ever come across I'd be understating the fact significantly. She reminded me of the women in the Terminator 3D pre-shows. "Super", "Awesome", "Really Neat" etc... We were provided with VIP passes and lanyards, and ponchos for the wimps, it was just about to rain as we arrived and Maureen didn't want us getting wet.

The plan when we first arrived was to head over to Son of Beast and ride it in the back seat. However as we got to the entrance it had been closed down due to the weather. So after rocking out to the cheesy but entertaining School of Rock show, we headed over to Flight of Fear, which was running. Just like PKD it has a really clever queue line, and the ride itself is just as confusing as I remember. At times its hard to tell when you're upside down and when you're not.

With the rain starting to subside we had a go on the Racer, the parks racing wooden coaster. Where one of the trains if facing backwards. This is the conventional train where riding in the front means you're riding in the front.

This is the other side, now if you're riding in the back are you riding in the front too?
Too paradoxical for me to try to resolve at this time.

Unlike Lightning Racer at Hersheypark the trains here although they left together never returned together or in anything remotely like racing. I think at the turn around one side was just considerably slower to the point that the race was all but over.

In the evening the park gave us an ERS on The Beast which is the longest wooden coaster in the world both in length and ride time. You can't see much of the ride from the park as it goes out into the trees so you have no idea just how long it is until you ride it. When you do so you also realise why it has the record for ride time, the ride has been over braked to the point that all of the fun has been taken out of it, at least in the first half of the ride. The second ride is a lot more fun. The ERS was disappointing to most people because of the braking. You really wanted the brakes to be opened up to see what this ride was designed to be like, but it wasn't to be.

The next day we were welcomed with breakfast around their latest coaster The Italian Job.

They even went to the trouble of theming the breakfast table for us!

The ride is a lot of fun and what it lacks in height and inversions it makes up for in it theming with the trains made to look like the minis from the film, and you driving around a carpark, through a roadblock into a factory where you're shot at by a helicopter with explosions and water sprays, before diving into a tunnel and out through the movie poster.

The ride is a lot of fun, although it appeared that not all the effects were working. I thought, and I might be wrong, that the cars fishtailed into the bends to simulate skidding and headlights should come on through the tunnel. Neither of this was happening today.

I'm not sure why Mark and Jenny are looking so happy. Their drivers aren't looking at the road in front of them. Because this ride is so heavily themed expect the licence to be bought by Cedar Fair rather than have them re-theme it.

After having our fill of mini driving we headed off to Tomb Raider, a dark ride that uses a 3-row top spin in an enclosed room to provide its thrills. The ride is actually very clever and completely disorientating as you spin around the insides of a temple being bombarded with water and fire effects.

With the two most popular attractions out of the way it was time to hit the rest of the park. First up, back row on the Son of Beast. Now a lot of people were adamant they weren't going to ride this today as it was in their words "a piece of shit". However with rumours of Cedar Fair talking about getting rid of it, they gave it one last go. Soon the fastest, tallest and only looping coaster could be no more...

And it wasn't that bad. Yes it was a little shaky in places but nothing like J2. I tend to find those rides that people say are rubbish to be OK. SLCs and Goudrix at Parc Asterix for example. I've never had problems with the, and I didn't really have problems with this. The one complaint I did have is the angle that your legs are forced to bend at when you're in the trains. They've raised the floor or something that ensure your legs are at 90 degrees. Not that comfortable to be honest!

The Top Gun coaster at this park is an old style suspended coaster, but not a bad ride. It's a shame it is as short as it is as by the end of it the cars were swinging from side-to-side quite a lot.

This is the children's go-karting area themed around the Tom Cruise classic, Days of Thunder. I found it amusing that the majority of kids could barely see over the steering wheels so I had no idea how they knew when to turn. If there are cars that need the floors boosting its these, not the Son of Beast ones.

Face Off is the park's inverted boomerang. It was a bit too shaky for me.

Interesting Sign #20
"Ohio State Law Forbids Dropping Objects"
Now I can only assume this is a joke as this sign is found in the queue line to the park's drop tower.

Adventure Express is the park's mine ride and its really well themed and goes on for ages. It does have a rather anti-climatic ending where after going up a lifthill surrounded by stone statues banging drums, a voice booms out "prepare to meet your doom", at which point you turn into the station and are told to "exit to the left". Where was the doom bit?

The park has a huge children's area themed around Nickelodeon shows. It has actually been voted the #1 kids park in the world, which is surprising as its all a bit too bright and in your face for my liking. I much preferred Storybook Kingdom at Idlewild, at least it was educational.

They have a kiddy inverted coaster though called Runaway Reptar which is a lot of fun.

The cutely named "Fairly Odd Coaster" is very good too! I didn't know that Fairly Odd was a reference to a show, I guess I'm not as "hip" as I thought I was.

The Scooby Doo shooting ride was a nicely themed dark ride but my gun wasn't very accurate, so I didn't score that highly.

For those that want to escape the rides, the park does offer some nice gardens and landscaping.

In the afternoon the park allowed us to walk amongst The Beast ride, which was a great thing to do as I mentioned earlier, you just can't do this usually.

I think it was good for the riders too, the last thing they expect to see is a bunch of people armed with cameras waiting for them to come flying past. A nice surprise for them. Actually from down here the ride seemed to be going a lot faster than I remember when I was on it. Maybe the braking is a good idea after all...................Nah, definitely not.

The Beast's first drop, looks like it goes into a cave, but it's just a fake piece of rock wall to give the effect.

Vortex is a massive looping coaster, and it was a little rough in places but nowhere near as bad as I'd expected having ridden other similar rides.

Aero the Airbender, is apparently a TV show in the U.S. In the UK, I think it would be given a different name due to the reinterpretation of the word "bender". This is a fairly new ride that split enthusiasts into whether it was a coaster or not, and whether or not to add it to their counts. As it turned out, it made no difference to me as it broke down when I was at the front of the queue so I didn't get to ride it anway.

And just like Kings Dominion the park has it's Eiffel Tower replica and fountains as the centre piece to the park.

I really liked PKI, it's very close to the sister park in Virginia both in ride quality and hospitality. It will be very interesting to see how this park takes shape once Cedar Fair start to make their changes. It was also here that I bought my third season pass of the trip as I was planning to visit Carowinds and PKD later on.

Is it Christmas already? Well we can only be headed to Holiday World

Holiday World

2006-07-01T11:22:00.000-07:00

I think its fair to say that along with Cedar Point, Holiday World was the most looked forwarded to park on this trip. It's a family run park with a great selection of wooden coasters. We had included this park on the trip for it's new coaster The Voyage, which had opened a few weeks prior to us flying out. Holiday World was America's first "themed" park, beating Disney by about a decade apparently.

For our stay in Indiana we were put up in Santa's Lodge, a Christmas themed hotel that celebrates Christmas day every day of the year. Whilst we didn't get presents we did get some of the most welcoming hospitality of the trip. Take note Cedar Point Breaker's people.

The park wasn't too far away and after being welcomed by one of the Koch family who own the park we made our way in. Some headed straight for the new coaster but I, and a few others thought it would make sense to ride the coasters in the order they were built as we knew there was a danger that The Voyage would blow the other two out of the water, so we wanted to get positive first impressions of those before we rode the big one.

But before doing the wooden coasters we ran over and got the Steel coaster out of the way. It's called The Howler and its only a kiddy coaster at best. We took the ride to its literal translation and spent the duration of the ride howling like dogs on heat. I'm not sure what the operator thought of us!

First up, The Raven, which opened in 1995 to much acclaim, jumping to the top of most enthusiasts lists at the time. A great little coaster with punchy airtime and some very powerful turns. People say it's similar to Megafobia in Wales and I guess it is, both having given me "whoa" moments during their runs. One thing I noticed however is that when I first saw this coaster on a documentary years ago there was mention of the Edgar Allen Poe poem in the theming. It wasn't there anymore, I wonder if they removed it for a reason?

There was a bit of a delay caused by them only running one train. Having seen how efficient these rides can be when run properly this caused some disconselation amongst some of the group who's stance was that if the second train isn't running, it should be being worked on til it is. However the park staff did explain that people are so relaxed down here that waiting for some time is the norm and no reason to kick up a stink. Indiana ideologies clashing with our's perhaps. Having said that the operations were great with staff happy to take your bag whilst you got into the train. I'd only ever seen this in Japan before.

Next up was The Legend, themed loosely around The Legend of Sleepy Hollow the premise being that when you approach the top of the lift hill you're chased by werewolves until you out run them and return back to the station. What it actually means is a solitary "awhoooooooooo!" noise playing at the top of the hill and you being dropped into an insane ride with strong laterals, good airtime and some strong helixes. It's a fun ride but more physical than The Raven.

With Raven and Legend out of the way and us buzzing from having done them it was time to ride The Voyage, the park's new coaster and magnet to enthusiasts the world over.

Standing 163ft high and with three hills over 100ft in height, 24 seconds of airtime, 5 tunnels, the steepest drop (at the time it opened), the third longest track and 3 90 degree banked turns thrown in for good measure, we were promised a superb looking ride that should have had enough to please everyone. To be honest I didn't like it the first time I rode it basically because I didn't know the layout. There was one bit that caught me totally off guard where you're banked to turn left but the turn goes to the right and I kept getting a strong lateral force into the side of the car because I wasn't positioned correctly. Once I got used to that element however I was very impressed with the ride. Unrelenting is definitely the word that springs to mind for this ride.

It certainly seemed very popular with everyone riding it. The thing just seemed to have so much pace to it. Usually when cars are returning to the station all the energy is used up but this had so much they extended the track beyond the station into more turns and drops and even with that it still comes into the brakes hard.

As well as having great coaster the park also has what is perceived to be the best water park in the U.S. It was here that I eventually rode the funnel slide and what a bizarre ride it is too. Having got into the raft and down the first drop the slide is absolutely massive, and whilst going up the side I experienced some suction that started to pull my shorts down. So whilst fighting with that we also spent quite a lot of time rocking to and fro inside the funnel before making our way out through its exit. A great ride that I enjoyed a lot.

There were also plenty of smaller water parks for the kids. This was definitely a "family park"

It was during our end of day ERS that we started to get problems with the ride. As our train approached the top of the lift hill it stopped and after waiting for a very tired ride op to climb the lift hill and check our restraints we were eventually sent on our way. During the day The Voyage is great, but at night it is something else. On the return leg the train hits a triple drop element that had the whole train cheering immensely when we emerged out the bottom of it. This is definitely my number 1 wooden coaster and the hype it has been getting is justified. Unfortunately the next train also stopped so the park had no choice but to close the ride, they did however re-open both The Raven and The Legend for some night time riding.

The Raven was just as great a ride at night as during the day but not seeing where you were going made it something special.

The Legend seemed to have more of a kick to it so late in the evening but still very enjoyable. Not getting the full night time ERS was a shame but every cloud has a silver lining and I ended up getting night time rides on all 3 of their world class coasters!

The next morning we had to give the coach drivers a rest so we made our way to the park on foot, with the assistance of a police escort! I don't think any of the drivers would have missed Dave in that shirt anyway.

Interesting Sign #21
"Santa's Medical Center and Vein Center"
So this is what Father Christmas gets up to the rest of the year, he sorts out old dear's varicose veins! Actually "Santa Claus" is the town we were staying in.

The morning started with the opportunity to walk the maintenance tracks beneath Raven and Legend before being given a morning ERS on The Voyage. I think you can tell from this picture how hot it was today because people were fighting to stay in the shade.

Although the rides were being tested and had no passengers, it was nice of the park to give us this opportunity. In the Red Corner is the Raven flying past the lake.

and in the Blue Corner it's bigger brother, The Legend.

The morning ERS started exactly as the previous night's had finished with the train stopping at the top of the lift hill each time. The park had been trying all night to fix the problem and it only appeared to be happening with a fully loaded train, empty ones went over every time.

I did manage to get this nice shot of one train making its way back as another headed out. It all looks like it is running smoothly but it wasn't and the park were getting frustrated by it. At least those that didn't get to ride last night were given the opportunity to do so today.

A great ride!!

After the morning ERS we were going to be given a guided tour to the back end of The Voyage ride but with the ERS being cancelled, we headed out earlier than planned.

Some of the banking that the train undergoes is quite insane. When you go through the 90 degree turns, they're incredibly smooth. I'm wondering if we'll be seeing a ride that goes beyond 90 anytime soon?

When you're riding the coaster it's easy to think that the terrain is flat, but when you come to walk it you realise that it isn't. It's like one big illusion made possible by the majority of out-and-back coasters being built on flat land. The triple down drop in the tunnel on the left is a big drop but you don't appreciate that when you're riding it.

Alas there were no passengers to photograph because the park were still trying to figure out what was going on.

Also new for this year was another shooting dark ride. In this one you weren't shooting anything though, you were "calling" turkeys out from hiding with your laser guided turkey callers. During Thanksgiving families eat turkey so I initially thought this was a bit morbid for a kids ride. This was actually a really fun ride and had a twist ending that calmed any fears of it being too gross. The guns worked and the scenery was great with lots of moving bits. Compared to Hershey park's variation this was premier league and completely blew that one away. Well done Holiday World! Actually I did get a ridiculously high score on this but only because we had a temporary breakdown and the targets kept reappearing!

It was upon leaving the turkey game that I saw Justin waving us onto The Voyage. Apparently he had helped the park identify the cause of the problems they'd been having (a loose chain causing the train to slip back at the top of the hill) and the park were looking for club members to act as test dummies to see if the fix had worked. What this meant was I got 3 consecutive goes in the front seat, something that would probably take the best part of a day to achieve normally. Bonus! and how fortunate was I for being in the right place at the right time. We let out the biggest cheer when we went straight over the lift hill first time, and every time they sent us back out we would cheer again. This did mean that there was quite a gathering of public a little bit miffed at watching us riding repeatedly, but at least they would get their go! Being fastened into the front seat meant I couldn't get any pics to document this happening but here's one of Jeppe too scared to hit the control panel buttons whilst we were waiting for the final OK to board the train.

With the ride up and running again the park breathed a big sigh of relief and let the public in. Justin and Yvonne have a brief chat with park owner Jeff Koch following the re-opening.

Holiday World was a great great park and had so much personality and character throughout it. The Indiana people were also the most friendliest of the trip inquiring about the club and where we were from etc.. Most were curious about seeing so many people in the same T-Shirts, something that we like to do on the big trips at what we will think will be the best park. We definitely got it right on this occasion. The only bad thing I could find about this park is that it's so far away from home, how great would it be to have something similar in the UK. Maybe Oakwood is the nearest to it.

South-east to Beech Bend.

Beech Bend

2006-07-01T11:21:00.000-07:00

If Beech Bend hadn't have built Kentucky Rumbler then I'm not sure it would have been on the itinerary, as without the park it would be nothing but a collection of fairground rides in a field.

From the outside the park looks much like any other.

Inside there is a mix of spin rides, children rides and a crazy golf course. There are a few coasters but it's the new wooden ride that steals the skyline and the attention of most of the public. Since its opening attendance at the park has been up by well over 100% so its obviously had the effect that the park owners intended.

First coaster of the day was the mouse coaster which was pretty good although or car didn't spin as much as we'd have liked. In fact it barely spun at all. I guess we got the weight balancing wrong on this occasion. We did have to queue for a little while before riding, not because of the crowds, there weren't many but because there was a guy smashing some part of the track with a hammer. Once he had finished whatever it was he was doing, we were allowed to ride.

This is Scat 2, an absolutely insane G-Force machine. Each cage spins like a centrifuge and the fact they're then spinning around each other makes the forces even more intense. Of our little sub-group only myself and Jeff were brave, or stupid, enough to ride it. In the heat, the forces felt stronger and I was very close to blacking out, I could barely move a limb. I'm glad I rode it so I can say I did it, but I'm not sure I'd ride it again.

I'd never seen so many Gravitron rides on one trip before, and we even had one here in Kentucky. Having just been spun more than I'd have liked on Scat2 I gave this ride a miss.

The park's history goes back to the 1880s but it didn't really become a proper park until the 1960s. As well as the park it has a oval race track, which was in use whilst we were there, and a drag strip. (For racing cars, not where men dressed as women disrobe).

Looping Star had no legroom and reminded me of the looping coaster that used to be at Drayton Manor. You have to ride cross legged just to get your legs in, which makes it really painful on some of the turns. Needless to say I only rode this the once.

In 2002 Viper had a close encounter of the rabbit kind when one bit him. In the park's petting zoo there were rabbits and other animals. Fearing a repeat we felt obliged to tag along on the off-chance that he might be bitten again. But it wasn't to be. I guess animals in Kentucky are more laid back than those in California.

Once again, the heat and humidity was getting the best of the group. Some of the members hijacked the rocking chairs outside the Rumbler shop to relax. I chose to play a round of golf instead, as there was some shade there.

Kentucky Rumbler is a really fun ride, that offers a great experience regardless of where on the train you're sitting. It has the record for most crossovers, but to be honest you take no attention of that.

A lovely little compact coaster that deserves to be cloned around the world.

Here's the manga hair I mentioned in my Great Adventure report. Nicely modelled by Jeff and Andy the hair comes in various day-glo colours and two styles; rockabilly quiff and little bunches.

At the end of the day we had an ERS on the Rumbler and we all had a great time. The ride is so re-rideable that most of us stayed on it.

Beech Bend is a park that is growing and the Rumbler coaster is now the catalyst for that. I hope the park does well after all they've taken a big gamble investing so much on this coaster that they deserve it. If you're visiting Holiday World then you may as well make the trip to visit here too. It would be good if the two parks could get along as there's an opportunity for cross promoting the rides. They both definitely have the best wooden coasters in the area.

South-east to Tennessee and Dollywood

Dollywood

2006-07-01T11:20:00.000-07:00

After a lengthy drive from the previous park we arrived at our hotel in Pigeon Forge at 2 in the morning. We had a morning ERS at Dollywood 6 hours later, so there wasn't much chance to get any sleep. We had been warned about this day well in advance but it still hit us quite hard.

We had no coach to take us to the park because the drivers had already driven so long the previous night. Instead we were going to take a local trolley that would deliver us to the park, however we had been given wrong instructions on where the trolley could be found and after walking the best part of a half an hour down Pigeon Forge's main street we had to turn back as we'd overshot the pickup point, by quite some distance.

Eventually we made it to the park bleary eyed but ready for a morning wake up call in the form of Thunderhead, their wooden coaster that was at one time number 1, although its not going to be this year.

Dollywood, for those that don't know, is Dolly Parton's theme park in the heart of Tennessee. It's an usual park in that the demographic isn't just families and teenage kids. Older peeps also flock here, mostly on the off-chance that they'll see their idol in the park. Apparently doing that is a bit of a lottery as she only visits the park half a dozen times a year.

The park has a weird layout like a big banana where you enter at the center. Thunderhead is situated at one end, and their steel coaster at the other. This meant that if you were there to do the coasters, as we were in the morning then you'd have to walk the full length of the park to do so. You can't cut the corner as there's a mountain in the way!

Jeff doing his impression of the Fonz doing an impression of a rabbit caught in the headlights of a motor-car. Ayyyyyyyyyyy!

Thunderhead is a great coaster, not easy to photograph but very easy to ride.

It's in a gorgeous location surrounded by hills on 3 sides, with plenty of wood in the theming mixing in with the ride making this easily the wooden end of the park.

The beaver themed Topple Tower (no sniggering at the back Atkins, I don't mean that kind of beaver) is new for this year, and as with a lot of rides that have just opened are suspect to teething problems. This ride was down due to a defective part, which is a shame because it looks like it would have been a fun ride with its beavers spurting liquid at the riders (alright, get out Atkins!).

Our ERS went on for so long that we kept the public waiting, and waiting, and waiting. I felt sorry for them as there wasn't any shade but they were a very patient bunch. In order to show solidarity for them I left the ERS and after visiting the water fountains for the umpteenth time waited for the club to finish up.

Some of the theming was a bit unique. The showers did actually work. It was ridiculously hot in this park and I was close to jumping in this in an attempt to cool off.

But instead I found a nice shady place to rest in instead.

As we made our way over to the other end of the park it was clear that they had really gone to town on the theming. Most parks invest in big wheels, not here. Instead we had water wheels, lots of them in fact.

Dollywood also had the biggest frying pan I'd ever seen, which they were using to prepare enough cheese steaks to feed the entire park it looked like.

The park has lots of channels to move water from the mountain streams around the park. Some of it serves no purpose whatsoever but it all adds to the theming.

I liked this bit of theming, we must be getting close to the Tennessee Tornado.

Up at the other end of the banana shaped park is the ride, a surprisingly smooth Arrow coaster. Rather ironically this was one of the last coasters that they built and when they finally figure out how to build them smooth, they go bust! Ah well, the world works in mysterious ways.

As with the Thunderhead ride, getting pictures of the Tornado proved to be nigh on impossible.

The ride was well received even by Paul who looks absolutely wrecked in this pic. In his defence the hotel failed to set up his wake up call and we all left without him. I guess in the panic he forgot to wake up!

The third ride in the park is actually the best one in my opinion. Blazing Fury is themed around a fire truck sent around a town to put out fires. After a lengthy climb upwards you have a couple of surprise drops and effects to keep you entertained. A really good use of a coaster to make a dark ride fun!

The lunch at Dollywood was one of the best of the trip. Whilst some ate (and drunk lots of iced tea) others took the chance to catch up on some of the sleep they'd been denied the night before.

By far the craziest ride in the park was this huge racing water slide thing. After ensuring each raft is overladen, you're then sent down a crazy course with some of the most extreme banking I'd ever experienced. You are warned that you'll get wet and I was soaked by turn number two.

More weird use of those river streams this time pumping it into tree and making out it is natural.

Its said that everything is bigger in America, and it's true of coasters and theme parks. Its also true of these vegetable replicas that are apparently to scale.

The final coaster in the park is over in the kiddyplay area and looks like a moving packet of opal fruits, sorry I meant starburst. Certainly very bright, and I have no idea why the park insisted on the trains they did.

The rapids are very good and guaranteed to get you wet. I had deliberately chosen not to ride some of these rides at other parks but today was so hot and I was so tired that I needed something to wake me up, which this did!

Even Dollywood has been affected by some over-commerciality but admittedly not as much as at other parks. There's no escape from Spongebob!

I really liked Dollywood, its one of the best "themed" parks I've ever been to and easily the best one on the trip so far. I hope the park appreciated how tired we all were as we weren't really as excited at the ERSs as we had been elsewhere, just due to lack of sleep and not because of anything they had done.

South-west to another surprise park

Lake Winnepesaukah

2006-07-01T11:19:00.000-07:00

The final surprise park of the trip was one I had known about and after leaving Dollywood we stopped off here for a couple of hours in the evening. The park is a small family run park that just oozes charm, and it ended up being one of my favourite parks on the trip.

We were welcomed by one of the owners. I was going to say she was dwarfed by Bart, but we all were. The park gave us one of the friendliest welcomes of the trip by not charging us for anything, including the evening meal they laid on for us.

The park is by no means large by any stretch of the imagination and positively tiny compared to some of the monster parks we had encountered on the trip. They had the standard selection of fairground rides with a bias towards the family rather than the thrillseeker.

Hardly surprising given its name, Lake Winne is on the side of a lake making it instantly photogenic and relaxing.

I had planned to meet a friend here, that I would go onto spend time with in Atlanta. However she didn't turn up but couldn't contact me to let me know. So I spent a lot of time here looking for someone that wasn't to appear.

The park has two coasters the first being a monstrous mouse coaster that didn't spin and instead subjected you to some pretty violent laterals as it negotiated the hairpins.

We had an evening ERS on this and the other coaster in the park but most members preferred the other ride to this one.

The other ride is their wooden coaster, a glorious old ride that was running extremely well. You could instantly see how much care had been given to its upkeep and in chatting to the ride engineers how proud they were of their ride.

There are parks that make you want to run the biggest rides and there are other parks that keep you busy with large crowds, loud noises and over the top neon. Then there are parks that just welcome you in for a relaxing time, such as here. Given the hectic pace we'd undergone this was a great time to unwind as the sun went down.

The parks flume/splash ride is custom built and has a very deceptively long tunnel that slowly turns you around whilst giving you the impression that its travelling in a straight line. During prom night this is a very popular attraction for the privacy it gives the riders. Its funny that there are hidden cameras which you only realise as you exit the tunnel.

I rode the cable ride a couple of times just for the views it offered!

The evening ERS on Cannonball was one of the better ones, you could tell because people stayed on it for the duration of the time it had been given to us. This ride, as well as being very smooth, has one of the best endings on a ride as you hit the final hill into the station just as the brakes stop the car giving you a strong out-of-the seat feeling.

The park also had a drop tower, which had a great surprise drop once it reached the top. There was no time to take in the view on this beast. You went up and then shot down with no waiting around. It was also cool to see the staff from the other side of the park run over for an end-of-day ride once they'd closed their rides.

I loved Lake Winne. As I mentioned earlier it was a great way to unwind after all the travelling we had done in the days prior. Its a shame there weren't many parks that could offer this slower relaxed pace on the trip (Knoebel's being perhaps the only other one that springs to mind). As an enthusiast we're often expected to like the big parks with the best rides over the smaller parks with the average rides. However you tend to find that its the smaller parks, free of the corporate policies and in your face tack that reign supreme. We could easily have a park like this in the U.K. but for whatever reason we don't.

South to Six Flags Over Georgia

Six Flags Over Georgia

2006-07-01T11:18:00.001-07:00

The final park of the club leg of the trip brought us to Georgia and to the Six Flags Over Georgia park.

Interesting Sign #22
"Keep Out - Trespassers will be prosecuted"
The new ride at SFOG travels outside the park, across what used to be one of the main roads into the park (now fenced off). The sign is there to stop people getting close to the part of the ride that sticks out. Fair enough you might think, but you also need to get beyond this fence to get to the main gate into the park, which you can see in the background.

This park was the second in the chain to open up, after Texas of course!

Our morning ERS was going to be on the new coaster Goliath however we could see that the other rides in the park were going through their test cycles too. This is Acrophobia, the parks drop tower ride.

and this is Goliath, their new Hypercoaster. There seems to be a weird mix of theming to the ride. It looks futuristic, but has a 50's radio channel playing in the ride station. It's like the executives couldn't agree on a final theme so they plumped for both. To be honest, I loved the radio station. I didn't like having to say "Yeah Baby" before the train would depart though. It might sound good in an American accent but during the ERS we sounded like we were in an Austin Power's appreciation club and not a coaster one.

The ride has plenty of airtime and I'm not going to complain about that, but for me the ride was too clinical, too calculated. It's like the park wanted a coaster that would keep people out of their seats but to do so gently so that they don't get sued. It's hard to explain why I'm thinking like this; whilst I don't like rough rides I think there needs to be a little something to scare you or make you think you overcame the challenge in riding it, but this ride lacks that.

Even so I'm sure it's going to do very well on the polls this year.

The helix was pretty intense though. This is the bit of the park that runs outside the park boundaries. After our fill of "Yeah Baby"s it was time to explore the rest of the park whilst the public ran over to ride the ride we'd just left behind.

The park's old style freefall ride was actually the best one of these I'd ever ridden with loads of speed on the way up that did give you airtime before it made its way to the drop section. I'd never experienced that before.

Georgia Scorcher is the park's stand up coaster and being shorter in length and height than others I'd been on meant that it was a bearable experience.

After a quick bout of stand up riding it was time for more reclined riding and given that the Gotham part of the park was empty it made sense to head over that way.

What superheroes get up to with their time off.

Mindbender is a great ride made even better by an excellent ride operator who had the station playing "Six Flags Trivia" and "Eye Spy" whilst waiting for the train to come back into the station. Why can't other parks do that? Give the kid a bonus, he deserved it.

Nemesis in the UK has its red waterfalls. Mindbender has gone for a bright green to fit with the Riddler colour scheme on the ride.

The Gotham bit of the park, where you'll find Batman and Mindbender also has a Gotham Circus area as its centre piece. I'm not sure if they still put on a show here or not, certainly not whilst I was in this bit of the park they didn't. Admittedly it was within an hour of them opening and the probably had shows on later in the day.

It was hard to choose what was the better ride so far; Goliath or Mindbender?

The Batman ride is exactly the same as every other Batman ride although it has more to it's theming. In addition to the scrap yard theming around most of the loop, its also able to accurately reflect 2 different Batman movies.

Here it is themed as "Batman Begins"

and this is it themed as "Batman Returns".

They'd done a good job on the wave swinger too. The character on the left is Harley Quinn, which movie director Kevin Smith used to name his daughter.

The rapids looked really good with plenty of wide waterways. I have no idea how wet it got you as I chose not to ride it.

Deja Vu at Magic Mountain caused me a lot of problems on the last US trip as it kept breaking down as I got to the front of the queue. Fortunately this ride did not live up to its name as after a short wait I got to ride one of the front seats. The ride worried me for a couple of reasons: it was a little shaky for a ride of this type and they had ridiculously long lap straps that were left hanging free whilst the ride was running. I wouldn't be surprised if they catch onto something at some point. A few club members complained about the operations on this ride but I think got lucky as I had no problem whatsoever!

Ninja looks like an impressive ride but it is atrociously bad. I will salute David Ellis for saying that its name is short for "Neck INJury, Aaaaargh!" I think everyone who rode this once (and I doubt anyone rode it more than that) came off holding their neck. My injured neck had sorted itself by the time we'd got to this park so it wasn't that!

In the afternoon we were subjected to a mighty thunderstorm which passed straight over the park. I know this because I saw lightning strike this very point under the sky coaster.

Skull Island is the park's water park play area. The bucket at the top of this wasn't tipping properly only spilling out a little bit of water every 10 seconds or so rather than the full on splash every 10 minutes.

Great American Scream Machine is the park's classic wooden coaster and having ridden it in the front thought it was a really fun ride. However the girl in the row immediately behind us burst into tears after the first drop and continued to cry all the way around. As she departed the train she was crying "she told me it would be OK, I didn't expect it to be like that". What had I missed? Well at least the ride lived up to its name, at least for her.

After lunch we headed over to Superman, similar to the one in New Jersey but with a slightly different layout.

It still had that awful pretzel loop, which would prove to be just as saw as the other one I rode.

Its still a good ride but this had the longest wait of the trip. After waiting just under an hour to get to the front of the queue, a storm came over the park closing all the rides for about 3 hours altogether. At one point lightning struck the station we were standing under and gave it a power cut. To say that everyone in the station crapped themselves would be close to understating the fact. Actually the geese under the skycoaster did just that when the lightning hit (so I've been told)

Patience is a virtue and Six Flags really tested that. Admittedly following the powercut they had to check every ride in turn so bringing the park up to normal service would take them some time. We only found this out by eavesdropping on conversations and phone calls in the station. Very little was communicated to us.

There is a roadrunner themed kiddy coaster buried in the middle of the park. We eventually found it but then got lost trying to get to the mine train behind it.

An interesting recruitment poster in the Acrophobia queue line. Does anyone really think that being in the forces is going to be as exciting as visiting a theme park?

Acrophobia is a pretty decent drop ride made fun in part by the people I was riding with who insisted I screamed as loud as I could.

The Georgia Cyclone is pretty rough and perhaps the worst ride in the park, but it was operated really well, with two trains even when half a train would do.

More dressed up characters in fortunately cooler temperatures following the storm. The girls on the right didn't expect Taz to be in front of them when they turned around, hence the look of shock on their faces.

Riding the train around the park it was great to see all the staff waving at us, even the dressed up characters; a nice touch. I did however spot this weird bit of trackwork hidden in the back of the park. Clearly they don't use the top track anymore, unless they like riding through fences.

After an end-of-day ride on the Mindbender, which I missed because I was filling my face with chicken, it was time to head to the final hotel.

Goliath was stull running very well at the end of the day, it's a shame there couldn't be more traffic on the road as I thought that looked pretty cool as you dived towards it. Ah well, park rules are park rules even if they're stupid ones.

Six Flags Over Georgia was a nice park to finish the trip with. Whilst it was spoiled by the weather and lengthy re-opening following, I still got to ride on everything I wanted to. The evening was spent in a bar next to the hotel getting very drunk and making sure a few of the group had a decent hangover to take back to the U.K. I on the other hand had planned nothing but rest for the next day of my holiday, an opportunity to recharge the batteries.

Time to relax in Atlanta

Stone Mountain

2006-07-01T11:18:00.000-07:00

The final day of my stay in Georgia saw me taking the opportunity to visit Stone Mountain, one of Georgia's largest parks and also home to the largest natural rock outcrop in the U.S. I had been told that a taxi would cost me around $30 each way. Maybe I misheard the concierge when he said that as the actual amount was $80.

The park consists is really just a vast expanse of land around the rock but to keep the public entertained they've built a small theme park on the Northern side of it. You're not going to find any coasters or dark rides here, it's based more around the traditions of the area. There is a 4D cinema, that's perhaps as good as it gets here!

I recall seeing this water based clock thing at Dollywood. This looked nicer but didn't have the ridiculous number of water wheels that the other park did.

At Islands of Adventure in Florida the talking fountain is one of the more fun attractions for the little kids. Stone Mountain has a similar attraction here, and it was just as well received.

The centre piece however is the massive rock which does look very immense and totally out of place. The guy that was responsible for carving Mt. Rushmore also started a piece here but for reasons unknown he left the project before it was completed.

It was finally completed in the 70s.

The three dudes depicted in the carving are all important to the history of the American Confederacy. Rather worringly the rock also has a significance to the KKK who famously performed a burning on the top. Fortunately the park does not celebrate that.

You can ascend the top of the rock by two means; a cable car or a lengthy walk. Guess which I chose? Actually I did both. On the top of the rock it does look like being on the moon, only without the space suits.

I found it quite funny that on the path down (or up) the rock they'd erected hand rails on the steep bits. I guess the threat of a lawsuit meant that they had to add these.

Although if that was the case you'd think they'd ensure the help phone boxes were up and running. If you had a problem at this point, you'd either have to make your way back down the rock to the previous phone or struggle up to the top.

A locomotive takes you around the base of the mountain and does the lap in just under an hour.
During the trip you're given some background to the area and how important the trainline was to the people there when it was first built.

15 minutes of the train journey is spent at this rather sad music show where they sing train inspired songs such as "locomotion". I felt sorry for the performers having to do this every hour to a train load of people who'd rather just move along.

The park also had a couple of shows to keep people happy. The better of the two was the dog show that had dogs racing around assault courses and catching frisbees. One of the dogs was so fast at doing that that he had to wear socks because he'd burnt the soles off his paws.

The other show was an acrobat thing that had to take place out in the baking sun because of the heights the people got to. This was the reason why I prefered the other show to this one, at least that had shade.

Can't fault the park for its surroundings!

New for this year was the ducks ride which is a guided tour that goes into the lake on the southern side of the rock. I had just missed one of them and didn't fancy hanging around for the next one. I was starting to run out of things to do.

This big barn is home to one of those play areas where kids can shoot foam balls at each other.

This rather normal looking drinking fountain was a cruel joke put out at my expense I think. The buttons to fire the water are on the side of the sinks but the left button operates the right fountain and vice versa. What it really means is that you can't press the button and get your head to the water. Very cruel, especially in the hot temperatures. Had someone else fallen for it I would have been laughing. I guess it serves me right.

The plan had been to stay at the park into the evening when the park uses the rock as a screen for a laser, lights and firework show that comes very highly praised. However I got around everything so quick that I wasn't prepared to wait around for it. As I left the park they were putting out signs for cheaper entry, so had I left this park to the afternoon I could have had cheaper entry, got around the park and seen the light show. Well I know for next time!

Time to hit the beach, Myrtle Beach that is.

Atlanta

2006-07-01T11:17:00.000-07:00

After a very long and worthwhile sleep it was time to explore the city of Atlanta, home of the world's favourite gassy drink Coca Cola (except in Scotland where Irn Bru prevails).

The city is also famous for being the home of the Atlanta Braves baseball team. When the Baseball league first started up the team was actually called the Boston Red Stockings, perhaps not the most manly of names. The franchise changed names a few times, Boston Beaneater for example, before finally ending up in their current guise in 1966.

Atlanta Underground is a small entertainment area not far from downtown. The current city is actually built on the Atlanta of old and only these four blocks remain. There are a number of bars and guided tours of the area explaining the history of Atlanta.

However the area is full of tacky souvenir stands offering the sort of rubbish you get in any tourist area. There is a great smoothie bar there though.

Across the street from Underground Atlanta is the Coca Cola Museum. You don't actually get to see how the drink is made because all they ever make in the factory is the syrup. It gets turned to drinks elsewhere. Instead, for $9 you get to walk around the biggest "buy me, buy coke" advertisement you could ever imagine, showing the history of the brand and how you've been brainwashed into liking it.

The funniest bit is the tasting studio where you can try brands that failed (the original coke zero was something else) or you can do what all the kids were doing when I was there and make cocktails, taste them and them spit them out. The more they drank the more hyper they got - who in their right mind would allow their kid to go on a school trip to the home of Coca Cola?

Atlanta is also the home to CNN, that TV channel that you turn to when all the others aren't in English. They offer studio tours and stuff like that but I wasn't interested in any of it. Who wants to pay to see two smartly dressed people talk behind a desk?

10 years ago the city was home to the Olympics and you can tell how proud they were of that achievement. The city still has plenty of reminders to the event such as this park, and they're all immaculate. You just know that 10 years after 2012 the Olympic Village in London is going to be in ruin. Each brick on the ground has the name of a person who donated cash to the event; a nice touch.

In the centre of the park is the Olympic Fountain, shaped like the Olympic rings. In the heat that we had they were being put to good use. It seemed like another strange location for a school trip, but the kids weren't complaining.

The Philips arena is the main entertainment venue in the city. Usually the home to major bands and sporting events on the day that I was there there was nothing there at all.

This is the Atlanta Dome which is home to the city's football team, the Atlanta Falcons. They play all their games at this stadium. Its probably also used for very big concerts but on the day I was there there was nothing on at all.

The marta is the city's public transport system, and is a really easy way to get around. The metro consists of 2 lines with one intersection, so getting about couldn't be easier. A one way ticket of any distance is $1.75 and you can buy the equivalent of travel cards to save more money. Take advantage of the hotel shuttle buses to take you to the airport then board the line there!

A shot of the Philip's centre and one of the many Olympic statues taken from one of the many entrances to the Dome. I may as well take advantage of the quietness, I imagine on game day this area would be mobbed!

Close to the Dome is the exhibition centre, which was housing a convention for Athletic Trainers. I couldn't have picked a more inappropriate event to gatecrash, but you didn't have to pay to enter. Actually it was pretty dull, full of vain people talking about the latest exercise techniques. Not for me at all.

America, home of the monster truck, and whilst this wasn't particularly massive it had the kind of front that you wouldn't want hitting your vehicle.

New to the city is its Aquarium that opened in 2005. Its now the largest aquarium in the world with over 100,000 different animals inside. This place is extremely popular at the moment and reserving tickets in advance is highly recommended. Fortunately I had done that from the hotel the night before and managed to get some. I was however a little early but at least I knew where to head when it was time.

Back in the Olympic Gardens and another monument. This one lists all the event winners, which is a great idea for an Olympic monument, I just wonder if they attempt to remove names if people are caught taking drugs and have their medals confiscated.

and this one just lists one of the corporate sponsors, which is weak.

Interesting Sign #23
"No Guns, No Knives, No Lighters or Matches, No Outside Food or Drinks and No Fishing Poles Please..."
Oh, come on. You mean people have actually thought about catching their dinner at an Aquarium?

The Aquarium to be honest is absolutely brilliant! Its split into several zones, each containing a different water environment such as tropical, coastal, deep water etc. Each is gorgeously themed with an abundance of animals to look at.

Good ol' creepy spider crabs lurking within the deep water bits.

A lot of thought had gone into the exhibits, some of which contained crawl spaces for the kids to get closer to the animals. Who's the exhibit here?

One of the main tanks contains the Beluga Whales. When I was there, the tank was being cleaned and was a little murky with algae. The belugas spent a lot of their time at the back of the tank as a result but did make the occasional trip forward to keep the public happy.

The underwater tunnel allowed a close up view of some of the sharks. It was odd that just about everyone insisted on standing on the travelator when you could stand off it and spend longer looking at the fish.

In the days leading up to me getting to Atlanta the Aquarium had managed to acquire a couple of Whale Sharks, the largest mammals in the world. They would obviously need a big tank to house those babies.....and boy did they have a big tank.

After some teasing glimpses into it you turn a corner and are faced with one of the largest windows in the world. Some classical music adds to the overwhelming effect that the view offers.

Compared to the Whale Sharks everything else in the tank looked diminuitive but to those of us looking in most of the fish were massive.

As well as the aquariums, the place also has a really cool 4D cinema with some unique effects. How better to simulate swimming through jellyfish but by dragging a curtain of rubber straps across the venue from one side to the other. It totally catches you off guard.

More cleaning going on, this time in the barrier reef section. A wave machine sends waves crashing across the top of the tank just like an Australian coastline. (Why did I put Australian coastline? Don't all coastlines have waves?)

After having my fish fix it was time for some food. A couple of blocks away is the Hard Rock.

But I chose to go to Hooters! I can't think why.

Following lunch I decided to head over to the resting place of Martin Luther King. In hindsight I should have caught a taxi as I found myself walking through a ghetto to get to it. I kept my head down and walked quick as I was genuinely scared at the idea of being jumped on and mugged. The contrast between affluent downtown and this area is stark, even more so when you realise that one freeway and a couple of blocks is all that seperates them.

It was just as I was about to give up and head back that I spotted the reflection pool and I realised I had found what I had come here to see. The place is extremely tranquil. MLK's tomb rests in the middle of the pool. "Reflecting Pool" was definitely a clever pun. I'm just not sure if it was intentional or not.

I hadn't appreciated that his wife had died only a few months before the trip. She has been laid to rest close by.

The area around the tomb has been designated MLKs area and as well as the church where he made some of his most famous speeches, there is also an exhibition detailing his life and showing the civil struggle he fought to overcome.

A walk celebrating those who had fought for civil rights can also be found here. A statue of Gandhi stands at one end of it and the walk includes luminaries from the worlds of politics and entertainment such as Stevie Wonder and Jessie Jackson. Rather surprisingly Bill Clinton had a mention. Not surprisingly George Bush did not.

Having made it back to the downtown area in one piece I spent the remainder of the day taking in the city and just relaxing, as much as I could in the heat.

This was one thing I had wanted to see on this trip; overuse of the Segway. Lazy people!!! I think I had walked absolutely miles today, clearly more than this postal person, and felt better for it. I'm sure my legs would tell me otherwise in the morning.

Atlanta is a nice city, and you can tell that the Olympics had been a catalyst for the wonderful place it is now. I wonder if the Olympics would have the same effect to London. Somehow I doubt it, we're not as friendly as the people here for one thing. Having the right attitude is important, and I don't think London has that.

East to Stone Mountain

Myrtle Beach

2006-07-01T11:16:00.000-07:00

Having met up with Keith, it was time to start the final leg of the trip heading out of Atlanta and back up to New York with some other parks along the way. It was a pleasant surprise to see that he had planned the itinerary to a great level of detail. I knew where I wanted to go but thought we'd be playing it by ear. A very nice surprise to the start of this leg.

First destination was over to the East Coast and Myrtle Beach.

After the drive to the area we had the evening to relax before we hit the parks the next day. We ended up seeing a Cirque de Soleil type show full of the usual chinese acrobats, which were all really impressive. What wasn't so nice was the animal act that had also been included in the line up. Seeing cats and dogs in costumes walking on their front legs wasn't that enthralling to me to be honest.

The beach is popular with teens for showing off their bodies and their ridiculous motor vehicles. The equivalent of the chav burning their "pimp my Ford Cortina" on Brighton promenade. Some of the vehicles were pretty cool though such as this Hayabusa!

and this car with clearly over sized wheels. The people who do this cruising do go back and forth up the road so if you missed the car the first time around you'd see it coming back the other way a few minutes later.

The Hummer H2. If I could afford the petrol I'd love one of these!

The Myrtle Beach pavilion is the most famous park in the area and was celebrating its final year in season, the victim of developers who wish to build shops and property rather than providing fun to people in the area. A shame but not a unique situation by any means. Actually its closure was the reason for me wanting to visit it. Had it remained open I may not have chose to come here. The Pavilion wasn't quite open when we got there so we headed down to the other park down the road, "Family Park".

Interesting Sign #24
Not the big white sign, the little pink one in the top right corner.
"Closed Private Party"
Oh, great. Looks like we'll have to come back here later!

Having made our way back up the main street to the Pavilion, the park still wasn't open so I had a quick look around the beach. It was full of people worshipping the sun (hardly a surprise really) and the odd one or two people who we so tanned that they needn't worship anymore. A sand castle building competition had taken place and this appeared to be the winner, at least given the security it had. It was also funny to see that this particular sandcastle had been sponsored by several companies such as "Hawaiian Tropic" sun cream. I wonder how that was pitched to the company executives?

With the park finally opening, it was time to make our way inside. This year's budget had clearly been spent on advertising the fact it was the Farewell Season. At least they didn't have to ponder on deciding what attractions to buy this year.

The large wooden coaster in the park is the Hurricane which is only 5 years old but runs like its been around for 50. It's a little rough to be honest but I still rode it a fair number of times. Two women with big hair had commented that it was the roughest ride they'd ever been on. They clearly hadn't been to Clementon or Coney Island then. We could tell they weren't enjoying it as we saw their big hair bouncing with the jarring ride.

I thought putting a spin ride inside the helix of the coaster was a nice touch though. Perhaps they had no choice with the park taking up a small footprint they had to cram rides in where they could, not necessarily a bad thing.

In fact the park did a really good job of getting the rides close to each other. Take note Dollywood, we shouldn't have to walk half a mile to get from one ride to the next.

The park has a really cool ghost train themed around a journey through a haunted hotel.

As a fun of good puns it was nice to see them trying on the theming to this ride. "Scare Conditioning", "Doom Service". All very funny; well that's what I thought!

Little Eagle is the park's kiddy coaster and it is actually not too bad at all.

The park also has a great log flume with a nice surprise near the start and a good number of drops to get you a little wet. Unlike the monster rapids at the back of the park that got you totally soaked.

The mouse coaster was actually my favourite in this park. Unique in that it had banked bends and trick track as shown here. It certainly made it significantly better than the majority of mouse rides.

Before we left we had a couple more goes on the Hurricane, just to say "goodbye". It's not a great coaster by any means but it is great for the area.

With Family Park closed we headed to the third park with coasters in the area at Myrtle Beach Grand Prix. As the name suggests its primarily a go-cart track (actually its several) but they'd added some other rides to attract more people and keep them spending once they'd turned up.

Unlike the Pavilion's the mouse coaster here was one of the generic spinning models. Alright but not remarkable. We only had the one go on this. I also had one go on the other coaster, a small caterpillar thing that I'm not going to post on here because you've seen them all a thousand times already (but then again you've probably seen mouse coasters just as often)

The one go on the coaster was one more than we had on the race tracks. I figured it unfair on Keith to have him driving when we get to a park, especially considering all the driving he was doing to get around in the first place.

The newest attraction was the small version of the swing shot ride that I'd done to death at the other parks. The ride operator was trying very hard to get us to part with our $10 bills for a very short program. Having seen the ride running, we knew to avoid the ride this time around.

Having finished with the Grand Prix park it was time to head back to the Family Park where the private party had ended. This park wasn't too bad at all and a decent alternative to the Pavilion. They're clearly going to be cashing in on the other park's demise in years to come.

I loved the theming that they'd done on this kiddy whip ride. Nascar is all about turning left so why not have a Nascar Whip. The kids were lapping this ride up; not with their tongues, just generally.

The park has a wooden coaster called the Swamp Fox which is actually really good and a lot better than the Hurricane IMO.

Myrtle Beach is a nice area but I felt a bit old and pale compared to the majority of people I saw. There is a lot of development going on in the area, a sign of its success perhaps. Its just a pity that that development has meant the loss of a really nice park. However the other park just down the road is still a good reason to go back here when the Pavilion has gone.

Back west to Carowinds.

Paramounts Carowinds

2006-07-01T11:15:00.000-07:00

Following the day in Myrtle Beach we headed back inland towards the Carolinas border. This Paramount park is unusual in that is situated across the state line and depending on the side of the line you're on the products in the shops are priced differently.

Here's the view that welcomed us to the park. A lovely looking inverted coaster. We had cheated a little in parking in the priority pass holder car park around the back of the park. Telling the car park attendant that we'd buy the pass later on was enough to let us in. On this occasion we were true to our word and bought the pass (I had mine already but Keith didn't). If you fancy avoiding the majority of the queues, try this!

Walking over the Top Gun coaster (you enter over its tunnel) we decided that the first ride of the day should be on Borg Assimilator, the park's flying coaster. I'd originally ridden this in 2002 when it was in Paramount's California park where it was called Stealth. The theming here was a little better with a great looking sphere beneath one of the helixes and a really cool voice telling you you were about to assimilated.

The ride itself was pretty decent and just as good as X-Flight, not surprising considering they're very similar. Keith, who hates the restraints on these rides came off liking it! I was expecting the lowering mechanism to be really rough as it was in 2002, but they'd sorted it out and it was OK this time around.

Vortex is the park's stand up coaster and like the others it was pretty uncomfortable but of a nice short length to not hurt you too badly.

Like King's Island the park has a Runaway Reptar kiddy inverted coaster and it was pretty much identical to the other both in ride experience and theming.

The obligatory "Paramount Parks have tranquil bits too!" photo.

and just like Kings Island, Scooby Doo was the shooting dark ride. This one featured guns that worked though, which is always a bonus on these kind of rides.

This post indicates the state line, if you weren't attentive you'd probably completely ignore it.

Paramount Carowinds lacks the baby Eiffel Tower and Fountains entrance that both King's Island and King's Dominion have. I'm guessing this is because unlike the other two Carowinds was never a King's park.

Is it me or do the stall prizes get bigger and bigger each year? Which came first; the big prize or the big car to drive it home in? After a quick respite getting Keith to rock out at the School of Rock we had lunch then went off to enjoy the rest of the park.

Hurler was a fairly decent wooden coaster, which took a considerable amount of time to open up. We thought it was out of action as there were no signs of life around the ride for most of the morning. It opened just after lunch.

Interesting sign #n
"Enter this way y'all"
One way to know for sure that you're in the southern states. Nice to see the Carolina hospitality extending to the signage around the park. Just a shame there was a strong smell of vomit in this area. I think someone found the mouse ride a little too heavy going.

We spent a long time at the Flying Super Saturator coaster, which as the name indicates is another of those coasters that encourages water fights. I didn't even know that this coaster existed thinking that Hersheypark were the only park to have one. After riding it and getting off fairly lightly in the wet stakes we spent a great deal of time with another group of people playing with the one of the water cannons. Definitely a lot of fun, and one of the few occasions where I think you can get away with attacking people you don't know.

The Goldrusher coaster is the park's mine train ride and it was never bad nor great. It just did its ride thing well.

Whilst they lack the Eiffel Tower they do have an observation tower and it provided a good way to see the park (and take pictures of course). So how I managed to take absolutely rubbish pictures from up top I have no idea.

Thunder Road was a racing coaster that actually raced up until the backwards side broke down. When service was restored the station staff didn't bother resyncing the trains. A shame as it could have been a fun ride.

With Top Gun we intentionally saved the best for last. This ride is blistering and its unique layout made it better than a lot of the other ones I'd been on. In 2002 it was Top Gun at the Californian Paramount park that became my favourite coaster of all time. This, although not as perfect as that day, is up there.

Fair to say the public were loving this ride just as much too!

I've come to the conclusion that of all the chains of parks out there, Paramount is my favourite with a great mix of rides, friendly staff, decent hospitality and good operations (most of the time). It will be interesting to see how this changes under the ownership of Cedar Fair. I'm intrigued whether they'll have these playing second fiddle to their original parks like Cedar Fair, Googoo and Dorney.

North-east to Busch Gardens

Busch Gardens Williamsburg / Europe

2006-07-01T11:14:00.000-07:00

I'd included Busch Garden's Europe (formerly Williamsburg) on the trip because I'd been told it was one of the best "themed" parks in the U.S. There really hadn't been that many on the trip so far with Dollywood being the best by quite some way. I had been to Islands of Adventure in Florida, which had the best theming I'd seen in the U.S. so it would be interesting to see how this compared.

Busch who make bad beer own two parks. This one in Virginia, which now has the European theme and the other in Tampa, Florida that now has the African theme and name. After figuring out how to buy the ticket without having a zip code (I'd conveniently failed to see the "foreign visitor" button) we made our way into the park.

Well this looked very quaint, we must be in the British area of the park, which they've labelled Banbury. I'm sure the American's think this is how quaint British villages look with the Tudor buildings and big wide red paved road. I just wondered why they'd chose "Banbury" as the name and not "Banberry", which is how the majority of visitors would pronounce it.

In the Ireland part of the park there are no rides but there are some nice stage shows and this excellent 4D cinema themed around the audience being mistaken for a box of "little people" and sent around the Irish Countryside. I don't know if its my eyesight or not but I don't always get the 3D effect in these rides. This one without shadow of a doubt worked perfectly for me to the point of making the horse ride sequence particularly rough on the stomach.

The park has some animals within it, although nowhere near as many as the sister park, which is admittedly part Safari park anyway. In keeping with the European theming they had a number of Bald Eagles, indigenous to Portugal and the northern reaches of Spain. They also had wolves, which admittedly can be found in Scotland foraging through the bins of Glasgow council estates in the early hours of the morning.

We hadn't come all this way to look at birds with their wings clipped, we were here for the rides. The first was the latest attraction to the park, The Legend of DarKastle. Themed around a Transylvanian castle, this "Spiderman @ IOA" type attraction saw you boarding a sled and journeying through the castle into a mystical realm where animals led by the castle owner try to kill you. I had absolutely loved Spiderman and whilst this had a better story, it lacked the scenic elements that the IOA ride had, such as real fireballs etc.. This was still a great attraction though and everyone was coming off raving about how great the ride was.

In a few years this queue line will become a fully grown hedgemaze, which will make queue jumping a hell of a lot more difficult than it was when I was there.

Keith had told me about a really nice looking fountain somewhere in the park and as we made our way through the German area of the park he was adamant it was just around the next corner and repeatedly telling me about how great it was. When we turned the corner this was what I saw, not that exciting at all really!

It turned out he'd got it wrong and the correct fountain was around the next corner, and yes it was pretty decent, as fountains go.

Big Bad Wolf was the first coaster at this park we rode and was one of the swinging variety similar to Iron Dragon at Cedar Point and Top Gun at King's Island. This however was in a totally different league with you swinging through an inaccessible Bavarian village in the first half of the ride...

...before hitting a huge drop for a ride of this type and flying over the lake awaiting at the bottom. Keith had done a good job ensuring I'd ridden the coaster before walking over the nearby bridge where this shot was taken, so I didn't know the drop was coming.

The Italian part of the park is quite vast and contains quite a collection of rides, most of them tailored to the family. Not surprisingly if you have an interest in statues you'd spend most of your time in this bit of the park.

I quite liked this Leonardo da Vinci themed ride using his gliders as inspiration for the cars. For the scared kiddies there were conventional cars for them to sit in. For those a little more brave there were lie down glider ones closer to Da Vinci's original designs.

Apollo's Chariot is a big hyper coaster that is rather unfortunately placed at the edge of the park where it is nigh on impossible to take pictures of it. This ride is famous for its press day where a stray bird flew into male model Fabio's face breaking his nose (the bloke's not the bird's). Fortunately we had no bird encounters to brag about.

Here's one shot I got, not very good admittedly. I think the better shots can be taken from outside the park but not where we had parked. This was taken near the the Rapids ride.

Which is deceptively wet. Those bits of the ride you can see all look fairly tame with some poorly aligned water cannons that give passers by the opportunity of shooting the riders. However on the return leg back to the station you get completely soaked by some devilishly positioned waves.

Being one of the biggest areas in the park, the Italian section also has a performance stage where entertainers croon out big band songs to keep the elderly visitors happy.

Interesting sign #26
"Virgina law prohibits the taking of alcohol beverages beyond this point"
The park had these signs dotted around the park but only at either side of bridges. I know America is full of silly state laws, I can only assume drinking alcohol on a bridge in Virginia is another thing you can't do. Very strange!

Coaster numero three was the Scottish themed Loch Ness Monster. I was expecting this to be themed more around the lake but it was located on the side of the hill instead. The idea of having tunnels under the water and camel backs as the humps may be how it would be built now. I guess the technology just wasn't there when the ride was conceived.

The ride used to have a large dragon in the latter half of the ride where the helix is but it's not there now, or if it is its hiding in the dark; you certainly don't get to see it if it is. This leaves the best bit of the ride to be the linked loops found half way around the circuit, although this has nothing to do with the Loch Ness monster, unless there was an occasion where he tied himself into a knot.

Looks like Mr. Griswald did alright after his trip to Wally World. He now has enough money to run his own bank!

The water splash ride was superb although it was prone to breakdowns. We got stuck in the station waiting to go. Fortunately we weren't stuck in the top as its full of explosions, fireballs and collapsing scenery themed around the eruption of Vesuvius over the city of Pompeii.

Alpengeist is the most talked about coaster in the park and justifiably so, its also one that I had wanted to ride for a really long time. It's an absolutely huge inverted ride, themed rather cleverly around a ski lift that goes out of control. There was a nice touch in that the trains had skis in holders on the side, not real skis of course, they'd have fallen out. This was a great ride and was definitely as good as I'd imagined it would be.

Having done the rides the last hour of the evening was spent with the entertainment. The swing show in the Italian bit of the park was alright, although Keith being the critiquing dance teacher thought the performances were weak. The final show however over in the main auditorium was excellent with some crazy trampolining.

Busch Gardens is a very nice park but not the best themed one, IOA still has the U.S. crown. It lacks a large number of rides but the few it has are world class. Definitely a case of quality over quantity. However you can't have good rides and happy people unless the operations is top-notch, which at this park they were. They were definitely moving people through the rides at a decent rate.

North-west to Kings Dominion.......Now!

Paramount Kings Dominion

2006-07-01T11:13:00.000-07:00

This was the only park on this trip that I had been to before, back in 1998 when the new ride to the park was Volcano, The Blast Coaster. I had really liked this park back then but it had changed quite considerably since then and there were plenty of new rides so it would be interesting to see what I thought of it this time around.

Before telling you about the park I needed to capture this picture for prosperity. Large roads in the US often have a median between the lanes. It can sometimes take the form of a bank or in this case a ditch. When turning off the road it is usually a good idea to avoid said ditch, which we almost drove into. It provided much entertainment that night! Keith couldn't stop laughing, and when he'd finally composed himself enough to walk into the hotel, when asked how he could help us I replied to the receptionist that Keith had just tried to drive us into a ditch, which cracked him up again.

First coaster of the day after being held back by security in the centre of the park was Hypersonic XLC (why let us in if we can't ride anything or go anywhere?) . I had ridden the big brother ride in Japan and completely fell in love with Dodonpa and riding this one was on the list of things to do on this trip. After a short queue we boarded our train and took our seat in the little pods that make the car look a bit stupid.

The launch was absolutely manic and rather stupidly I thought I'd ride it with my hands up. When the ride transitions from the horizontal to the vertical the forces were so strong it felt like my arms were being ripped out of their sockets.

A couple of rides after our's someone lost their glasses on the ride, which came crashing down on the ground next to where we were standing.

A really exciting ride once you get over the power of the launch!

Joining us in the park today was Hanson, and I think they liked the ride too! I wonder how much drag these silly seats put the ride under. I don't recall Dodonpa having seats like these.

Another new ride since my last visit to this park was the mouse coaster. It had a slightly unusual layout in that it was built on a triangular footprint rather than a rectangular one. It was a pretty good ride.

The drop tower was really good too, and the best of the non-coaster rides in the park.

The last time I was here, the Anaconda was a green coaster but since my last trip it had undergone a face lift. I didn't bother riding it on this occasion.

PKI had an Italian job ride and so did PKD. In fact this was the newest of the bunch having opened a month before I got to it. The ride was identical in layout but hardly any of the effects were working. We didn't even get wet in the shootout sequence. The park was still assessing the ride asking riders to complete surveys as they departed the ride. I think the staff were keen to get as much input as they could because they couldn't go on their break until a set number had been done, and it was extremely hot around the ride. Rather unfortunately the sheltered part of the queue line had been closed because the queues weren't long enough to justify using it. A shame as the shade would have been advantageous.

Having finished with the rides at the back of the park, for now, we headed over to the jungle themed part of the park. It was instantly obvious that plants had been allowed to flourish since last time, adding to the jungle theme.

Avalanche, the bobsled coaster spent all its time on the lift hill on the day we were there. Fortunately I had ridden it before.

Volcano was just as good as I remember although light had been allowed to creep inside the belly of the volcano ruining the surprises somewhat; last time it was pitch black. The ride has a launch shortly after the station followed by a second launch out the top of the volcano before you make your descent around the volcano and back down the station. In the year this ride opened the queues were just under four hours long, this time I queued for 40 minutes. Much better!

Although it was obvious from the graffiti in the queue line that they still have their slow days.

The new ride in this park was a back-to-back top spin themed around the Tomb Raider movies. It featured the normal water fountains that these rides usually have but also fireball effects, which made the ride better than most. In fact the theming on this ride was top notch. This ride was prone to breaking down and I had to wait a good while before I could ride it.

The park's kiddy wooden coaster was pretty decent. In fact all the Paramount parks had good coasters of this type, and they'd looked after them well.

The Scooby Doo shooting game had got better as we'd visited each Paramount Park and the pattern continued here. The whole attraction was better themed than at either of the other two. Some of the effects were switched off such as the snakes in the queue line though, but at least they had them, the others did not.

As with the water fountain on the water coaster at Carowinds, we spent a great deal of time playing with the cannons on the log flume. Actually we didn't do the firing, that was left to a family of quarter-rich people. We, and another chap did the distracting.

Interesting Sign #27
"No Show Today"
At PKI, myself and Tim enjoyed the School of Rock show. At Carowinds I introduced Keith to it and he liked it just as much as Tim did. So we were really looking forward to seeing how the same show at PKD would compare. Alas, we were at the park on a Tuesday, the one day in the week where there aren't any shows. Never mind. You might be able to keep the man out of the rock but you can't keep the rock out of the man. (See I learnt something at Rock School!!)

Grizzly is about 25 years old and I really liked it this last time around. It was pretty good this time too, although the trees weren't as close to the ride as I remember. Whether they've been cut back or my memory isn't what it used to be (I'll leave that for you to decide) I don't know.

The other coaster was Hurler, a little taller and longer than the Grizzly. This one wasn't as good as The Grizzly but I had absolutely no recollection of this ride the last time I was here.

This path to nowhere was in the queue line to the Hurler. I wonder where it was supposed to lead?

Interesting Sign #28
"During the fall season, this attraction contains bees and wasps at elevated areas. Those allergic to these insects should not ride".
Talk about pulling out the stops, they even supply insects for the Summer months deliberately? You'd think if they knew there was a problem they'd do something about it like install one of those ultraviolet electrocution boxes or give us swats to ride with.

Rebel Yell is the park's racing coaster and I had only got to ride the forward facing side last time I was here. This time I got to ride both but as with some other racing rides the racing element had been taken out of the ride at the turn around where one car would just suddenly slow to a crawl allowing the other to race ahead.

Shockwave is the park's stand up coaster. Having remembered how bad this was the last time I rode it I had no intention of riding it on this occasion.

The end of the day was spent taking advantage of the views from the park's baby Eiffel tower. Here is volcano with Avalanche and Tomb Raider. Flight of Fear in the background was closed this year pending its sale but is apparently re-opening following a turnaround.

Hypersonic and Hurler at the back of the park. The path through the trees beyond the rides contains the cables that power the park from the powerstation beyond.

Anaconda and Rebel Yell
The obligatory "Tower and Fountains" shot.

Six Flags has some of their staff dressing up. Paramount has them dress up and dance. The starfish was a pretty good mover but I have no idea how someone with legs as skinny as Spongebob was able to carry the costume at all.

Kings Dominion has improved significantly since my last trip there and it has some pretty unique rides in amongst the generic types. Even the mouse coaster has a layout I've not seen before. Hypersonic is very popular with the crowds but its the Volcano ride that is still my favourite.

Last new park, its north to Six Flags America

Six Flags America

2006-07-01T11:12:00.000-07:00

The final new park of the trip was Six Flags America in the crab-cake state of Maryland. Originally a water park it was bought by the Six Flags chain just before the turn of the century, which when written like that makes it sound older than it really is.

On the majority of parks visited so far we'd been allowed in before the public did. The upside is that we got to ride the best rides, the flipside however was that we got to miss the wonderful opening ceremonies. Here Sylvester, Daffy and the often overlooked Grandma from the Tweety Pie cartoons prepare to flip the switch that signifies the park opening.

First coaster of the day was Superman - Ride of Steel, a very large blue and red monstrosity that towered over everything else in the park. It is similar in design to the one in New England but the layout is nowhere near as good, relying on large helixes instead of the more exciting twists and turns that the other has.

Because we'd rushed over here queue time was next to nothing and we took the opportunity to have a few goes before the queue got bigger.

Its fair to say that this is the best coaster in this park, by quite a long way!

After our morning Superman wake up riding session was over we headed to the back of the park where they had buried their flying coaster Batwing. Unlike the flying Superman rides seen earlier on, this used the same trains as X-Flight and Borg Assimilator.

When we got to the station they were only running a single train, the other sitting idle on the far side of the station with passengers still stuck in it. You have to laugh! At least they were lying on their backs, had they been stuck on Superman their rib cages would have been pretty sore by now!

With one go being enough on Batwing we headed back into the park. Penguin's Blizzard River is one of those water rides where you all sit in a circular raft and slide down the bottom. This started out quite impressive with some clever use of braking strips to spin the raft, which I hadn't seen before. It soon became obvious that they were also there to slow the raft down, effectively removing any enjoyment out of it whatsoever. You barely banked on the bends and the final splash was really lousy. Why build a water ride if you don't want the riders to get wet?

Joker's Jinx was the last of those must-do rides that I'd seen years ago. Such a complicated knot of a track it's one you just look at and spend ages trying to figure out. This is actually the same layout as the Outer Limit rides at the Kings' parks, just out in the open. However the ride was down on the day we were there as a precaution following an accident on Chiller in the Great America park a week earlier (although there was no signs saying this just one saying it was being worked on, which it wasn't). I was disappointed that I didn't get to ride it but given the number of coasters I had ridden by this point I wasn't overly bothered.

This is Seacoaster, a flume ride that according to Keith is closed whenever the park finds out he's on his way to visit. It didn't look like it was going to be running today either.

Wild One is one of the park's wooden coasters and its not too bad. At least it was running!

It rather nicely cuts the Gotham City part of the park away from the rest of the park. You walk beneath this ride to cross between the two halves.

Roar is the other, and by far the better of the two. I'd ridden another Roar in 2002 at Marine World i California and hated it as it was just a little bit too twisty for my liking (thinking about it I think it was my first twister wooden coaster). Perhaps I've gotten used to rides of this type since then as I really liked this one.

Mind Eraser is the SLC ride and again this was had a little more headbanging than I would have liked but it was still enjoyable. I'm guessing this changes its colours a lot as on the six flags website its shown with red and blue track yet here it was yellow. The ride was sponsored by Slim Jims, a manufactured sausage snack, who's colours are red and yellow. I'm guessing that the colour scheme is to tie in with that.

The park did have some nice little touches to its theming such as this bull look to its breakdance ride in the Western section of the park. Fortunately the ride lasted longer than the 8 seconds the real bull riders have to last for.

In an attempt to escape from the heat we armed ourselves with brain-freeze inducing smoothies and headed over to the shaded stunt show enclosure. The Batman stunt show started out looking like the any other, up until one point where for reasons unknown at the time the show just stopped and we were asked to leave. I'd never been evacuated from a show before! Later on we could see mechanics working on the batmobile so I could only assume that it was a fault with that that was to blame.

Interesting Sign #29
"Please Pardon our Progress"
What progress? There's nobody working here.

Two Face is one of Batman's enemies, so why this ride was positioned outside the Gotham City part of the park I can only put down to inept decisions made by the park. This ride had the longest queue of the day, too long for Keith who escaped for some liquids but alright for me, as the queue line did at least offer some shelter. The ride was alright but I think they could move people through it quicker if they added a second train, one just isn't enough.

Some more nice theming as a myriad of loony tune statues appear to hold up the roof of the main theatre building, and if photographed from the right angle almost looks like they're flipping you the bird at the same time!

Could it be that the Skull Coaster was running after all? Looks like the curse of Keith had been lifted, or had it? On our first attempt we had endured a young girl vomiting up her mountain dew in the queue line and were just about to board when the ride broke down.

We did stick around until they fixed the ride and brought stuck people back into the station but then they needed to hold an investigation and make checks before they could re-open the ride.

It wasn't until later in the day that it reopened and we finally got our go, that was up to the point where you reach a turntable that prepares you for the final drop. Two boats elsewhere on the circuit had got too close to each other and tripped the emergency stop again. We had a brief scare when the train behind us continued coming up the final lift straight for us. Our cries of "you might want to stop that" to the non-plussed operator up there with us eventually led to that car stopping on the hill where it was stuck for at least half an hour in the sun. Poor people on that boat, at least we had shade. I doubt it helped that the ride operator telling them to keep calm was openly drinking water in front of them and not offering any. After the delay we were dropped without warning into the final splash where we returned into the station. One blessing is that the people who would have blasted us with cannons at the bottom of the final drop had all given up waiting for us to appear and left.

A second visit to the stunt show saw the show complete this time.

The last ride of the day had to be on Superman and after having our goes we enjoyed watching a guy, clearly terrified of the ride, being literally dragged onto the ride by his friends. As the ride came back into the station I think we caught a brief glimpse of him holding on for dear life and screaming rather loudly. A rather amusing finish to the day.

Six Flags America was perhaps the worst run corporate park on the trip, with signs of standard Six Flags operation policy (not running rides for no obvious reason etc.). The staff were friendly though even when refusing me permission to ride the kiddy coaster (c'est la vie). The park does have a good selection of rides and although rumours said it was earmarked to be sold, we could see track and cars from another park ready to be erected which would contradict that.

At least Keith managed to shake of his curse and finally got his go on the Seacoaster, its just a shame it doesn't work as it should.

The final park of the trip and a return to Great Adventure.

Back to Great Adventure

2006-07-01T11:11:00.000-07:00

At the start of the trip we only got to look at El Toro when we visited Great Adventure as it was undergoing testing and whilst making our way around the U.S. the ride was finally opened to the public to rave reviews, some of which said that it was better than The Voyage. As I'd been heading back to New York, had some slack in the itinerary and Keith didn't mind the additional driving we were able to head back there and get to experience the ride for ourselves.

I'm not normally a fan of opening weeks for new rides for two reasons: the ridiculously long queues as everyone rushes to be one of the first to ride and the second the risk of the ride breaking down. Well we had the queues, thats for certain but fortunately the ride was running.

...and running very well by the look of things. People were going mental on it with loads of cheering and screaming.

Rather disappointingly the ride had been positioned in the park in such a way that it was the second drop that you queued past, the first drop was inaccessible in the same way that the Kingda Ka tower was. This meant that the majority of photos being taken by the public were here and not at its best bit.

A lot of work had gone into the design to make the experience as smooth as possible and it wouldn't be long til I got to find out if that was true. Well, that was up until the point it broke down. Great!!!

So whilst the ride wasn't running we had to stand out in the sun going nowhere, fortunately we had bottles of water to keep us cool. However definitely not so cool was this annoying DJ guy that was there to entertain the people. He seemed to enjoy playing music at the wrong speed, singing over the top of the music he was playing and telling us about how he loved his job. He was definitely losing his audience at one point telling us that even though it was hot and you weren't going anywhere to enjoy ourselves. Grrrrr!!!!

Eventually the ride did get up and running again and after two and half hours of waiting it was time to make our way into the station.

For some reason the queue was stopped short of the building and you were allowed in in small groups. Maybe they were afraid someone might defy gravity and fall up the stairs leading into the station.

Another sign of Six Flags incompetence. They'd put a bin across the queue line that most people took to be a barrier, so you had a large number of people queueing for the front of the train and less at the back. As it turned out we were able to get advantage of this to get the back seat on the train. Keith also noticed that they were playing the safety message from Kingda Ka that told you to keep your head back. The only problem with this was that the El Toro headrests didn't exist.

It was also rather odd that they were only running a single train even though the second was clearly visible. When we asked the ops why they had done this we were told it was because it hadn't been tested yet. So if they're running a single train all day when are they going to get to test this one?

At least from the station you can get a half decent picture of the first drop. So how does it ride? It is amazingly smooth, fast, steep, full of airtime and exciting - everything it strived to be. There are no kinks on the track, no rough spots, it does everything extremely well but it lacks one thing, a challenge. Its so easy to ride that I came off thinking "good but not great".

It wasn't like I had overcome anything in riding it, much like Goliath at Six Flags Over Georgia. Having said that its still way up my "list-I-don't keep" of wooden coasters. Is it as good as The Voyage? Not in my opinion, that ride really fired up my adrenaline levels, this didn't.

Whilst I was here I also took the opportunity to ride those rides that were closed the last time I was here. Rolling Thunder was only running one side, so they still weren't doing things right, which was a shame as it was quite a fun ride partly due to this woman screaming her nut off in front of me.

The mine train was also OK but did get close to the trees and branches in a few places, partly exciting but also dangerous.

I also managed to ride the kiddy coaster that I had missed the last time I was here. I also saw a rather amusing example of park rule enforcement as the five year old kid in front of me was denied entry to the ride because he wasn't wearing a t-shirt, a rule I thought was there for adults, not kids.

I am definitely glad I came back to this park as El Toro is a superb coaster, the first of its kind in the U.S. We have Balder in Sweden, a smaller version of the same ride technology, but this ride takes that to a different level!

With all the parks out of the way it was time for some sightseeing in New York.

New York

2006-07-01T11:10:00.000-07:00

As far back as I can remember I always wanted to be a gangster. Not strictly true but I have always wanted to visit New York but the expense of doing it solo always put me off. I made sure that on this trip I would finally get to see how this city, deemed to be one of the most cosmopolitan in the world, compared to London.

New York City is the birthplace of Graffiti, and I mean the good stuff, not the scrawling your name on a wall with a marker that blights most major cities today. I'm on about the multi-coloured throw ups that are works of art, even if painted in a public environment.
Over the last decade or so though the city has been fighting the war on graffiti and its not as prevalent as it used to be. Some examples do appear such as this on the side of a van.

As with most major cities space is at a premium so it was amusing to see this confined car park that lends itself to a massive game of tetris than the conventional car parks we have back home. Where your car is parked is based on when you want it back so your social life in the city is partly driven by this.

I can't remember if this is a municipal building, a gallery or a museum. This is what riding too many head banging coasters does to you I guess.

I can assure you that the officer in the background is carrying a box of paper files and not a party size Krispy Kreme platter. I'm not sure how I managed that fish-eye effect at the bottom of the picture though!

This is quite sad but having deliberately not read any travel guides on New York I started to recollect seeing a lot of buildings in the city before but couldn't think where. It turns out that as well as being in movies and TV programs a lot are in a Spiderman game I have on the PS2.

The morning was spent making our way to one of the touristy areas for a bit of city sightseeing from the river. Avoiding the "I ♥ NY" t-shirt shops we made our way to the docks.

With a large selection of boat trips to choose from some lasting up to 4 hours, we eventually plumped for one that would take us up the Hudson river and around the Statue of Liberty (not "Luberty" as I'd originally typed, although that would be an interesting, if slippery statue). We're already on the boat in this pic so please don't think I did it on that old looking boat in the shot, which is just there for tourist effect I think.

This is downtown with the familiar skyscraper filled skyline but unfamiliar grey sky that most photos usually contain. The weather had taken a turn for the worst but given the inordinate amount of hot days I'd had this came as a pleasant change and we remained on the top deck of the boat whilst others retreated to a more sheltered viewing deck.

The Empire State Building isn't actually in amongst all those skyscrapers, which I hadn't realised. It resides in the midtown part of New York further north. I also hadn't realised that since the destruction of The World Trade Centre, this was again the tallest skyscraper in the city.

The Brooklyn Bridge is another iconic landmark within the city, joining Manhattan and Brooklyn (so why isn't it also called the Manhattan Bridge?). Opened in the late 1880s it has survived inumerable attacks from terrorists and still stands today. This is also the bridge where The Fantastic Four came to public notice when they managed to avert a tanker explosion that almost happened on it.

Ellis Island was built by a Welshman and is famous for once being the immigration processing centre for Europeans travelling to America for a better life. It has also been the site of a long running territorial dispute between the states of New York and New Jersey, which has led to neither side paying for its upkeep and as a result it has fallen into disrepair. However its still popular with the tourists, particularly those who families once passed through its walls generations ago.

The Goldman Sachs tower is the tallest structure on the New Jersey side of the river. That would be because its the tallest building in the state. Its also the tallest building not in a major municipal area in the U.S. The big clock to the left is the Colgate Clock, cited to be the largest clock in the world. The toothpaste company left the site many years ago and clock is all that remains, I guess it was just too big to load on the truck.

Perhaps the most iconic of all the New York landmarks is the Statue of Liberty, a large copper statue given to the Americans by their best friends, the French. A lot of tourists stop on the island and walk around to take pictures but wouldn't they just end up with nostril shots? This was the main reason for choosing a boat that goes around the island; better pictures!

This funny shaped building marks the entrance to one of the many tunnels that run under the Hudson river.

New York harbour is still one of the most popular cruise destinations. This one was preparing for a jaunt to the Caribbean.

Having finished the hour long boat trip (highly recommended by the way) we noticed a Bodies exhibition close by and as Keith had never been to one but was curious about what was on show, I took him in. The display is similar to others that are now being shown worldwide, and I think they're very important exhibitions as we don't really know a lot about how we work and take ourselves for granted. I think going to a place like this would make a more worthwhile school trip than one to a theme park.

Interesting Sign #30
"No Standing Anytime"
Not wanting to face the wrath of New York's finest I took the picture then quickly moved on.

This is New York City Hall, a fenced off building that houses the Mayor's Offices and the New York City Council. A lot of political speeches are often made on the steps to this building, such as clamping down on rappers with guns.

This is City Hall Park which adjoins City Hall. It offers a perfect place for city workers to stop for lunch.

This is New York Supreme Court where rappers found not guilty of committing gun crimes stand on the steps outside and thank the American Justice system.

A quick trip on the Metro and we were in Times Square.

Rather surprisingly it's not a square at all, but more a meeting of major roads in the city with 42nd and Broadway as its centre. In London we have all our neon in Leicester Square, which really isn't a square either. In New York they have all their neon here. Its all very impressive but not in the league of Tokyo.

There are so many adverts here it is hard to take them all in and you wonder if the money being spent putting them here is well spent. I guess its more about having a presence than actually getting people to take it in.

We stopped off for lunch in a Chinese Restaurant called Ollie's. The food was really nice especially their pork buns, which I am assured are quite commonplace but which I had never seen before. I shouldn't however have insisted on ice in my drink as I had to run into Virgin Megastore soon after and find a toilet.

Radio City Music Hall is a show venue that has been running since the 1930s. They have a very famous Christmas show that plays there but there didn't appear to be much on when we were visiting however.

The Toys R Us store is so large that it has a big wheel inside it with cars themed around popular toys such as Snoopy and Loony Tunes. I didn't go on it choosing instead to try to find a case for my DS Lite, a console that had only been out a few days and which I'd bought at a massive electronics store close to City Hall.

I've been doing quite a bit of travelling of late and have noticed that just about every major city has an Inca/Aztec pipe player. So I wasn't pleasantly surprised to come across one in New York City too! I would have been impressed with this one however had it not been for his poor attempt at the A-Team van behind him.

This is Rockefeller Centre, another popular location at Christmas where an ice rink is put in place for people to fall over and break their hips on. During Summer however its used for a big square hat convention, which doesn't make for an interesting picture.

This is the Rockefeller Centre, actually its one of the buildings that make up the complex. There are 19 in all. We had come here for "Top of the Rock" a viewing gallery on the top of the tallest building in the complex, for a chance to see the city from on high. However it took a little while as we couldn't find the way in.

But the views from the top were amazing, even with the grey weather. This is the Empire State Building to the south.

and here's Keith enjoying the view to the North of Central Park. I am pleased I was able to drag Keith along as he'd never actually done this even though he works just next door. I guess like me with the London Eye if something is on your doorstep you take it for granted as you could "go at any time" but end up not going at all!

We must have spent at least 90 minutes up here just chilling out and taking in everything. You are so far from the noise of the city below that you'll easily find yourself unwinding up here.

That is until you find this little room where you're tracked as you walk around inside and as you stand in various locations you trigger different light shows. We must have spent another 30 minutes in here trying to figure out if there was a system to how it worked.

Having spent plenty of time up top it was time to come down low, where night had started to fall and the neon of Times Square would come into its own.

After taking in Times Square we headed off to a bar to see a band play. They were really good and consisted of around 12 people crammed on a small stage playing Blues Brother's covers (Keith will kill me for that). We left a little earlier than planned when we started to sense some unease in the room, like a fight was going to kick off. I do know the friend got into a shouting match with someone over the drummer's playing abilities. I thought they were all really good though.

This was one thing I didn't expect to see in New York; a shiny train. I thought they'd all be painted up but as mentioned earlier the state is winning the war on graffiti. Trains are cleaned so frequently that the artists don't bother painting on them as they know their work will only last a day or two. In a way I was disappointed but at the same time it was good that pride was being taken in the transport system.

The following morning I had a quick opportunity to look around Brooklyn. I had wanted to go to Harlem just so I can say I had been there but the rain storms over night meant that it wasn't going to be practical for me to do so. Brooklyn is really neighbourly though and I had preconceptions of it being rough, but it isn't. Maybe it is in the places Keith didn't take me!

One house that stood out was this weird one where the owner had covered the fences with birdhouses and dollhouses for reasons no-one really knows.

A short drive past the tenement buildings, where I wouldn't want to go alone, and I was at the airport. After saying my farewell to Keith and his nephew for being great hosts it was time to leave and after 30 days in the states it was time to head home.

So, in conclusion?

In conclusion

2006-07-01T11:09:00.000-07:00

175 coasters later at an average rate of a park a day every day for a month and do I have any regrets about undertaking such a long trip? Not at all. Whilst it was tiring and I did have to take time out to catch up on sleep (including at Cedar Point) I am glad I did it. Was it the trip of a life time? no, Japan still has that crown. America may have the better rides but Japan offered so much more to me.

Had the weather not been as hot as it was I would have been fine, but that coupled with the pace of the trip really got to me. Fortunately the second leg was taken at a more gentle pace but by then the damage had been done and I was finding it very difficult to spend all day and night in the later parks. By the time we'd got back to Great Adventure I was only interested in doing the rides I'd missed. If things had been different I would have had stayed and enjoyed the likes of Nitro some more.

I passed 500 coasters on this trip which was a target I had set myself when my interest in theme parks started to take off. I don't have the same drive to reach 600 or more and so I've decided to take a break from the scene for a bit, the drive to ride coaster after coaster just isn't there anymore. I guess I'm just coastered out after this trip, after all I did ride nearly 200 of them in a month.

I will be hopefully be heading out to Scandinavia with the club next year but I want to use some of my holidays for non-coaster breaks. The breaks in Atlanta and New York offered me more opportunities to learn, which you don't get at parks. I am realising that the world really isn't a big place and there's plenty to see outside the themeparks; ironcially its the club I'm taking a break from that has shown me that.

Having said that I would like to thank the organisers of the trip for doing a sterling job once again, and for the people on the trip who made it fun. Also a big thanks to Keith for being a perfect guide through the second leg and for putting up with me, I mean putting me up in New York.

Music of the trip (not by choice, the radio stations played little else).

"Hips Don't Lie" by Shakira
"Ridin'" by Chamillionaire
"Where'd You Go" by Fort Minor
"Snap Yo' Fingers" by Lil Jon
"I Write Sins not Tragedies" by Panic! at the Disco
"Unfaithful" by Rhianna

Food and the drink of the trip

Smoothies
Pulled Pork Sandwiches
The amazing array of energy drinks

Rides of the Trip

Top Thrill Dragster @ Cedar Point
The Voyage @ Holiday World
El Toro @ SFGA
Talon @ Dorney
Lightning Racer @ Hershey

Park of the Trip

Lake Winne!

Surprise of the Trip

Jack Rabbit's double drop

Disappointments of the Trip

Coney Island Cyclone
Beast @ PKI
Having a sore neck for the best part of a week
Not going out in the evenings as much as I'd have liked.
American Red Bull
Overuse of the word "awesome"