I used to do one major amusement park trip per summer (usually around a week long, trying to hit a bunch of parks in an area) along with sometimes doing one minor/long weekend trip also. I didn´t do so in 2020 or 2021 due to pandemic caution. This year was going to be my return to it, and I was figuring to do a road trip that hit some or all of the following (asterisks are places I´ve been to before, others are as yet unvisited by me): the historic carousel in Albion, PA; Waldameer; Midway State Park; Seabreeze; Sylvan Beach Amusement Park; Canada´s Wonderland.. I have been to Waldameer, Seabreeze, and CW before. The rest would be first-time visits.
Unfortunately, plans have been put on hold again because my husband might be starting a new job soon. So, probably no "major" parks trip for me again this year. I may have to be content with my usual day trips to Michigan´s Adventure and Cedar Point (I´ve visited each once so far this season). So let´s hear about your plans instead. Planning to visit any new-to-you parks this year or revisit old favorites you haven´t seen in a while?
--
Heather, the Carousel Rabbit
So far this year we've done 6 major trips involving 48 parks and fairs and 73 new credits:
heard of it. And we finally got the Big Dipper at Blackpool Pleasure Beach, which had eluded us on our last visit there.
I used to do one major amusement park trip per summer (usually around a week long, trying to hit a bunch of parks in an area) along with sometimes doing one minor/long weekend trip also. I didn´t do so in 2020 or 2021 due to pandemic caution. This year was going to be my return to it, and I was figuring to do a road trip that hit some or all of the following (asterisks are places I´ve been to before, others are as yet unvisited by me): the historic carousel in Albion, PA; Waldameer; Midway State Park; Seabreeze; Sylvan Beach Amusement Park; Canada´s Wonderland.. I have been toNow I´m laughing at myself because I decided not to bother with asterisks
Waldameer, Seabreeze, and CW before. The rest would be first-time visits.
Unfortunately, plans have been put on hold again because my husband might be starting a new job soon. So, probably no "major" parks trip for me again this year. I may have to be content with my usual day trips to Michigan´s Adventure and Cedar Point (I´ve visited each once so far this season). So let´s hear about your plans instead. Planning to visit any new-to-you parks this year or revisit old favorites you haven´t seen in a while?
I'm planning to stop at Santa's Village in Illinois and Lost Island in IA to document the dark rides later this year. I'll probably ride a coaster or two at Lost Island, but my neck is in lousy shape and I really shouldn't be going wild with the coaster riding.
Maybe one day I'll love it again. Maybe I never will.
On Jun 14, 2022, GodsOnSafari wrote
I'm planning to stop at Santa's Village in Illinois and Lost Island in IA toI can sympathize. I herniated a disc in my neck badly about ten years ago and
document the dark rides later this year. I'll probably ride a coaster or two
at Lost Island, but my neck is in lousy shape and I really shouldn't be going
wild with the coaster riding.
it was incredibly painful, though oddly coasters were not implicated in it at
all. Rather, it was probably the result of a lifetime of bad posture and computer use.
What´s really started cramping my coaster hobby is that my back has gotten bad. I have lower back arthritis that started getting bad over the last couple of years, and when it´s bad, I feel like I can´t take the kinds of rattly wooden coasters that have always been my favorites. It´s sad, but I´m trying to enjoy what I still can, while I still can. My days of sessioning Shivering Timbers are definitely over, though. It helps that I see
myself not as a roller coaster enthusiast per se but as an amusement park enthusiast, so I reassure myself that I will still have things left to enjoy when I can´t ride coasters as much anymore.
I started getting neurological symptoms (most significantly lhermitte's sign) which were tied into the herniation and thankfully not multiple sclerosis. Hopefully I never lost much or any real muscle strength. I can't do anything about it now, anyhow.
I have loved parks and amusements as a whole; I wouldn't be an editor at Darkride Database or wrote/podcasted for Parkscope if I never did.
We both live in the same metro area and Cedar Point is our common nearest "big park". As a big park, hours have been slashed, hotel and entry has increased, it's down two coasters and a car ride for 2022 but up one chicken restaurant, and they're still as understaffed as any other year in the last decade or worse.Yeah, I hear you, and replacing a lovely vintage car ride with another
On Jun 16, 2022, GodsOnSafari wrote
(in article<5ac9bd8a-e674-43ea...@googlegroups.com>):
Wow, I had to look up what that is and yeah, that sucks. I´m sorry to hear it. I just ("just") got severe arm pain and hand numbness. Unfortunately
it does flare up without apparent cause sometimes and I´ll go through a relapse for a month or so. Luckily riding coasters doesn´t have any effect on it. No, my back´s taken over in that department.
Of course I know that and didn´t mean to imply otherwise, though I realize now that it looks like I did. We´ve never met, but we´ve both sort of
been "around" (and oddly, yeah, live in the same metro area) so I´ve
read a lot of your thoughts over the years. We have some similar opinions on stuff, I gather, though I have a greater (acquired?) tolerance for Michigan´s Adventure. :)
Yeah, I hear you, and replacing a lovely vintage car ride with another chicken restaurant is probably my least favorite thing they´ve done since, oh, let´s say replacing a lovely vintage Enterprise ride with a barbecue restaurant. But there are also aspects of Cedar Point I´ve been impressed by recently. I loved their anniversary parade and show, and I´m glad they decided to keep having parades. That´s the kind of celebratory park stuff that I appreciate. I´ve been enjoying button trading (I don´t even really trade but I´m fond of collecting them). They´ve improved their overall aesthetics. The most significant improvement in many years (in my book, everyone else´s mileage is going to vary) has been putting the band organ on the Midway Carousel back into service, having let it fall into disuse in (I think) the 1990s. It makes night and day difference over listening to the same single recorded band organ CD that they´d been using for years and years. (God, if I had to hear "How Ya Gonna Keep `Em Down on the Farm?"
one more time...) They did the same at Kings Island along with a full restoration of the carousel figures. That stuff really matters to me.
Still, ride operations at Cedar Point are indeed the worst I´ve seen (and Michigan´s Adventure´s are bad as always). The throughput on rides is terrible, and it´s hard for me to take because I grew up with Cedar Point and remember when lines always moved briskly even when they were long. And if
there´s one single thing I could wave a magic wand and change about the amusement park industry generally, it would be to make it so no one had ever thought of monetizing queuing. But that´s going back a long way now. So I´m certainly not sunshine and roses about Cedar Point or the other big parks. I´m just overly forgiving.
It took me 11 years to go from 400 to 500 credits (finally hitting 500 last year), hoping I can reach 600 in much less time. Though I don´t makeplans
based on credits, more just for what I like and what is more relaxing as a trip as well, so however long it takes, it takes.
It's fine. I'm sure sometime I'll go back to get ramen at Avenue Cafe and run into you playing pinball too. I don't know when I'll have free time to do that, but that's my own fault.
work and had to hustle back to EL. The thing is....what else is there to draw me there? It's not the food. The other coasters are all bad. The car ride - my favorite non-coaster there - is now a revamped kiddie land featuring most of the same rides as before.
they've still made some nice additions. Even in the arcade, where they gutted the classic games, that came with a modernization of their payment system.
The heart of the park are "big iron rides" and anyone
who goes to Cedar Point is overwhelmingly likely to be drawn in by coasters and big flat rides. There's this fascination people have everywhere with trying to do "Disney things" with hyper immersive experiences and games, and at somewhere like Cedar Point, it's not gonna work that well.
Lots of people are. I remember before the pandemic when Pointbuzz had a thread in which members chastized each other for not volunteering hours at Cedar Point to help them with their staffing issues in the fall.
I don´t know if I mentioned this before but I run the pinball league now so if you are there on a Tuesday night and see someone giving directions to a crowd at the pinball machines that´ll be me (or my assistant director, but that´s my husband and we´re easy to tell apart).
I´m sorry they removed their car ride, but the improved kiddie area does make sense for them. And I could never get that excited about the car ride because it just drives itself. If the gas pedal doesn´t do anything, I don´t feel like it´s a proper car ride. I miss Cedar Point having three
of the good kind.
What draws me to Michigan´s Adventure is that it´s far closer than Cedar Point, it doesn´t require an exhausting all-day trip (I´m getting kind of old to really enjoy getting home from CP at 2 or 3 am dog tired), and I´m really not picky about roller coasters. I´ve said before, it´s a
blessing, like being a cheap drunk. Having any non-kiddie coaster and being less than two hours away is going to be more than enough to draw me to a place. The only thing that makes a coaster bad to me is if it´s so painful I can´t take it, and the only coaster there that is on the cusp of that is Wolverine Wildcat, even though I actually used to enjoy it quite a bit in the
2000s. (It´s really weird now, by the way, with the steel track only on the first hill; it goes from so excessively smooth it doesn´t feel right, back to being almost unbearably rough the rest of the ride.) I enjoy junior woodens a lot generally, so I like Zach´s Zoomer and just wish it had full sized trains so I could sit side by side with my riding partner. Shivering Timbers is Shivering Timbers, of course, and the rest of the coasters I find enjoyable enough to be worth riding. Actually, I´m pretty keen on Mad Mouse too, but it´s just the horrible operations that hold it back since they put the seatbelts on it and changed the loading process. It always used to be good for one or two rides for me in the old days, but lately it´s either down all day or has a ridiculous line. If not for that, I enjoy it. I like wild mice.
I think there´s a good bit of room between being narrowly focused on coasters and being Disney. My earliest memories of Cedar Point are of riding Earthquake, the Mill Race, and the Western Cruise with my parents when I was very young. They weren´t roller coaster people then (or now), but they still enjoyed being at an amusement park. As you said, people don´t necessarily want live actors and a "plot" on Snake River Expedition. (I could do without that myself.) They want to enjoy a boat ride around the lagoon, though. I feel like that´s the gap between Disney and a pure thrill park and I´m happy to see them take up a little more room there.
I think it´s a combination of kissing up, and the fear that acknowledging bad behavior by
park ownership might disrupt their hobby in some way.
No, when I say I´m forgiving, what I mean is just that I´m usually pretty good at focusing on things I did enjoy or things that did go well, so I am able to get to the end of a day with a lot of objectively disappointing or frustrating stuff happening and still think, "I had a good time," and go back again. In other words, it doesn´t take much for me to feel like I had a worthwhile time at a park. I just wanted to make sure you didn´t mistake my attitude for one of apologism toward the parks on a moral plane.
I don´t know if I mentioned this before but I run the pinball league now so if you are there on a Tuesday night and see someone giving directions to a crowd at the pinball machines that´ll be me (or my assistant director, but that´s my husband and we´re easy to tell apart).
You had not, and I'll keep that in mind. In the "everyone shares about real life" stuff, here's also a paper I contributed to (I helped design the survey) which it seems like you might care about on some level given your interests.
It was weird. Basically a dark ride but outdoors. And weird beats "good" sometimes because novelty means something after thousands upon thousands of rides.
The log flume at the park isn't bad either. Not a lot of places have three wood coasters and it does, but there's some major flaws with one of them, and the third is basically intended for someone who isn't me (e.g. children). Their carousel is wack.
The clubs in the US have transitioned away from any sort of overarching societal good through their influence (the preservation mission) in parks to one in which opinions and values are mediated by the parks themselves.
I have a Usenet history going back to 1993 under my real name(s) that´s now immortalized by Google, so obviously I´m not too worried about spilling my real life details anymore. I checked out your article. It looks like important work. The stuff I do is obviously not as empirical.
I have to give you that, and it´s made me rethink my negative assessment of Be-Bop Blvd. I do tend to like uncommon, weird, and oddball rides. I´m not sure why this one didn´t do it for me. I think it´s because it sort of felt like they couldn´t quite be bothered to put in an actual car ride and half-assed it. It was meant as the replacement for a traditional car ride that was wrecked by the derecho, but seemed like a poor substitute, kind of like Luna Park putting in a Motocoaster and calling it Steeplechase.
"Close, but no cigar."
(I can´t believe I´ve just mounted a spirited defense of a fiberglass carousel. I have really gone soft.)
That´s too bad, if true. I really care about historic preservation. I care about it more than I do about the latest and greatest, by far.
The clubs in the US have transitioned away from any sort of overarching societal good
through their influence (the preservation mission) in parks to one in which opinions and
values are mediated by the parks themselves. We are to act like good little children and
assume that they are, in fact, always right.
On Tuesday, 21 June 2022 at 14:28:38 UTC+1, GodsOnSafari wrote:once.
ACE has always been a bit like that. I remember being surprised that members are expected to always speak positively about coasters. That's one of the things I like about the ECC; if a ride sucks, we will say so in First Drop. I have done so more than
On Tuesday, June 28, 2022 at 5:40:31 PM UTC-4, Richard Bannister wrote:than once.
On Tuesday, 21 June 2022 at 14:28:38 UTC+1, GodsOnSafari wrote:
ACE has always been a bit like that. I remember being surprised that members are expected to always speak positively about coasters. That's one of the things I like about the ECC; if a ride sucks, we will say so in First Drop. I have done so more
Well, as I'm sure you've noted at some point, I'm a member of ECC (and too have contributed to First Drop), and not one of ACE, so I agree about that categorical difference in the mentalities of both pretty strongly! That said, I don't know if ACE hasalways really been like that. I get the sense from old timers that it wasn't always the case, but you know, people say things and in time you find out they're completely wrong. There's still people who claim that Beast ran untrimmed even though there's
Maybe it was there but sometimes not used? I’ve been on coasters before where that was the case.
With respect to the Beast, there's an enormous difference – almost twenty seconds – in the run time of old POVs versus newer ones.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4vOiyblA3Xk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZBd3ug7BlI8
That tells me that something has changed with respect to braking and/or wheel compounds.
-
www.superiorsolitaire.com
The thing with ACE and criticizing coasters or parks is not "don't to it", but do it constructively.
The thing with ACE and criticizing coasters or parks is not "don't to it", but do it constructively. Write a letter, or email, be smart about it, don't air it all in public and yes that also means on the internet and social media. Tell them why you don't like something or a specific ride, coaster, or change. Tell them why it might make the public happier to not do what they did, or attempt to come up with some valid reaason that mike actually make sense to a business like an amusement park. It's fine
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