With the spot of time we had after examining the whole park history we figured the thing to do was try riding the new roller coasters, starting with Snoopy's Soap Box Racers. This is brand-new; it was less than a month old when we got there. It had a maybe 20-minute line and I guessed that was the best offer we were going to get. As it turned out, I'm not sure it was any worse than we could have gotten the next day, but we couldn't count on that.
It's a boomerang coaster, pulling back and sending the cars through a couple twists and turns and then right back up a hill, to repeat it all in reverse. The train is, as the name suggests, soap-box-race themed, with the cars matching various characters, as we can all think what Schroeder's personality is like in a soap box car. Yes, Charlie Brown's car is in the back. Snoopy's is in front. The ride is narrated by Franklin, whom I'm sure you would agree is the Peanuts character most likely to narrate a soap box derby. It's a nice ride, with a particularly attractive station and attractive train. Should do well at helping kids get comfortable with bigger and more intimidating roller coasters.
And then the really big, intimidating roller coaster, and the one that I knew was at Kings Island before we got into the park: Orion. Its building coincided with though didn't strictly require the demolition of Vortex, although it did consume the space used by Firehawk, one of the rides rescued from Geauga Lake. That closed at the end of 2018, before we could do anything about it like get a last ride in.
Orion is a 287-foot-tall coaster (with a 300-foot drop, thanks to landscape), much like Leviathan at Canada's Wonderland or Millenium Force at Cedar Point. And not radically unlike Diamondback, also at Kings Island. It is a fun one, not as good as Leviathan, which is a dismissal along the lines of ``not as good a band as The Beatles''. Orion's got a pretty nice theme, though, something about seeking out asteroids or something and with an outer space styling to it all. And, rather like The Beast, it goes off into the woods. We got a twilight ride on this, so didn't get the full effect of being in the dark alone with nothing but roller coaster, but we got an idea of it. Roller coasters that seem to go off into their own world are wonderful.
So those were the new coasters. With night setting in we had one thing we absolutely had to get to, and that was The Beast, for a night ride. Here the ride got delayed a good bit, so that the fireworks-and-drone-lights show could go on. These are launched from somewhere near The Beast so the ride shuts down from the final countdown through to the securing of the last fireworks. We were in the queue, underneath the partial cover, so we had a most obstructed view of the park. ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
bunnyhugger demanded to know how I could tell the drones were spelling out, say, 'Kings Island' in the Cedar Fair Parks typeface. I may have just had a slightly better angle on things than she did.
It took a long while even after the fireworks and drones were finished to get the ride opened. I think there may have been a mechanical problem, most likely restraints stuck closed, that needed fixing before the line could resume. We wouldn't get up to the launch station until about 40 minutes after the park closed, and while we missed the last ride of the night we weren't far off. Worth it, though; The Beast is a fun ride but the ride at night, in the dark --- Orion turns out to cut into its sight lines much less than we had feared, almost all near the station where you can't help seeing the rest of the world in evidence anyway.
The Beast is one of the most distant things in the park. Between that, and that there were only one or two cars of people after us, and that we rode something like 45 minutes after the park closed, and that we stopped for the bathroom, we were pretty near the only people in the park by the time we were ready to leave. We couldn't help it; we posed for a couple cheesey pictures of us holding out our arms as though the whole park was ours alone.
For a short visit to the park it was a quite satisfying one.
And now pictures from a quite satisfying trip to another park, last October, part of Halloweekends on Sunday:
This sign has aged hilariously, thanks to Cedar Fair's decision to be a cashless park chain so that only credit (and debit) cards are accepted, in every establishment. You can't even use coins for the penny-press machine and they took out the thing where you buy a quarter's worth of food to feed the fish.
Some more vintage signs, including you can see one for the Candle Shoppe, or as it's properly known, ye Candelle Shoppeepepepe
Here are more baffling older signs; I imagine the Great Lakes and the Winnebago signs used to decorate train cars or something. The buttered pop corn sign I imagine might be historic, like, a century or so old, or it might be something that's just been a park decoration forever.
Getting out to the park to try riding stuff. It was a little wet. Here's Steel Vengeance with the sign for one of the haunted house attractions, Blood Rath, to the right somewhere.
Lusty Lil's lost the ``Lusty'' adjective for a few years, but it's back now, probably as a result of the park loosening up what with how they sell beer everywhere now so what's a little informed lust on top of that?
Oh hey, a marker telling us when Halloweekends started and also do you want a gravestone for a thing that's still going on and is your park's money factory?
Trivia: Though Charles Pierre de Frédy, Baron de Coubertin was named the honorary perpetual president of the International Olympics Committee at the conclusion of the 1924 Paris Games, and he would live until 1937, these were the last Olympics he would attend in person. Source: Encyclopedia of the Modern Olympic Movement, Editors John E Findling, Kimberly D Pelle.
Currently Reading: John Adams, David McCullough.
