Dvo

Over the weekend a group of friends and I went camping in Wisconsin Dells. I've never been up there but have always wanted to. We left Chicagoland around 5:00 on Friday and arrived at our campsite at about 8:00. We set up our tents and drank some beers by a fire. Nice relaxing first night. Saturday I woke up around 7:30. For some reason I can never sleep in on the day I'm going to an amusement park. Not a bad thing I suppose. Anyway, the park opened at 9 am. I arrived at the Mt. Olympus gate around 9:30, since I figured there wouldn't be many people. I was right. Right when you walk in, Zeus's entrance is right in front of you. So I walked right to the station and sat down in the back seat. Then we had to wait a few minutes for enough people to get on the ride to dispatch it (it was that dead). After a minute or two, we were on our way. Now I had heard that Mt. Olympus's rides were "rickety" and "bumpy as hell," but I went in looking forward to it. After all most woodies are bumpy, but in a good way. Zeus is not bumpy in a good way. After the first drop, we hit a camelback, and on the other side of that was one of the worst valleys I've ever hit on a coaster. My back immediately ached. Devastating. The rest of the ride wasn't too bad.. a decent turnaround at the end of the track, and then some okay hills back to the station. After Zeus, I walked to Hades, the only ride with a wait. That being said, it was a one-train wait. I again got into the back seat. Hades is a very good coaster. Immediately out of the station you get ejector air in the back seat. Dead serious. There is a solid drop right off The Bat. And then more ejector air before you even get to the lift. After the lift it's the renowned tunnel under the parking lot that's full of quick turns in the darkness, so you have no idea what's coming next. My favorite part is going through the tunnel for the 2nd time and coming out to a wonderful airtime hill. You can certainly see the similarities to Voyage, but you can also see that Voyage is basically the incredibly superior sequel to this thing. Hades is very good. Voyage is incredible. Now on to the ride that I was most looking forward to on this trip... CYCLOPS. This behemoth only stands at 75 feet high, but I went in with countless reports about the back seat on Cyclops. You have to be 18 to ride it because the 2nd hill supposedly had insane ejector air. I got in line, got to the empty station, and walked to the back seat only to find it CLOSED! They chained off the back seat. So I sat in the 2nd last seat to try to salvage what insanity I could. I was incredibly disappointed. The first drop was okay into a turn, and then you go climbing up to the top of a hill before the second drop.. only to hit a trim brake. We crept over the 2nd hill and I only caught a little air. Far less than on either Zeus or Hades. And after that, Cyclops is basically over. It's maybe a 30 second ride. Cyclops Fail. After that it was scorching hot, so I walked back to our campsite to meet up with my friends (who decided to take it easy in the morning), and we got on our swim suits and headed to the waterpark. There's not too much to talk about over there... they have some decent slides, basically everything you expect at your standard waterpark. Nothing spectacular in terms of the actual slides. BUT... they do have the best attraction I experienced all day. Poseidon's Rage wavepool. We arrived at the pool and put our towels down, and I was so hot I literally ran to the pool to find the last of a few small waves floating to the edge. I was expecting your average wavepool... a bell rings, some waves start coming, and you do the "up, down, up, down" routine. WRONG. After about 5-10 minutes, we were standing in the calm water talking, and we hear a giant WHOOOOSHHHHHH. Everyone screams. I don't know if that was out of fear or delight. But I turned my head toward what I thought would be some normal waves.. to find a GIGANTIC wave roaring at us. I had to double-take, because I couldn't believe what I was seeing. I just remember thinking "wait a minute... that looks a lot bigger than..." and then it just hit me like a freight train, knocking me literally about 75 feet back toward the shore. It's simply amazing. The wave is literally about 10-15 feet in height and it just plows everyone backward. We stayed in that pool for over an hour enjoying one wave every 10 minutes or so. Fantastic. Mt. Olympus certainly isn't my favorite park, but if you go in not expecting too much and just spend time with good people, it can be great. I had a wonderful day at the park and will most likely return at some point in the future. If nothing else, just to be raged on by Poseidon.

Personally I think SoB could/should be up there. I'd say that thing was really extreme when it ran. Also, based on other people's reports, Cyclops at Wisconsin Dells should be up there. I'll have more info on that after this weekend

The outside of the park is pretty nice. It's really right in the middle of a neighborhood, so you can find plenty of things to eat/do in the area. Be sure not to miss Montezooma's Revenge and Silver Bullet too

Yeah that article is hilarious. Don't miss Flying Turns. I nearly fell out of my chair when I saw that one. This must have been written by someone who googled "fun amusement parks" and spent 5 minutes copying what he saw. Although he did find Knoebel's... maybe he looked for "Golden Ticket Winners..."

Glad to be part of such an "Elite" group! ...

Doesn't anyone remember KI's last attempt at an Enterprise? Skylab was down for maintenance all the time until its removal for... games. I think the climbing wall came first, then the Virtual Reality simulator. Forget the Enterprise and get a Skyhawk

Millennium Force for the win. I don't think any coaster will ever knock it out of my #1 spot. Not saying it won't happen, but I'll never forget my first ride on it. That lift hill and drop are just breathtaking. Magnum is an extremely close 2nd at CP for me.

I recommend hitting Maverick first thing. That almost always has a line over an hour long, whereas MF is normally a little less than that.

Really? You mean like that concrete paradise they put in, known as Action Zone? I think the Paramount acquisition was the beginning of the end for theming and it never really came back. Don't get me wrong, KI is still a very beautiful park relative to many others. But after going to parks like Knott's, Busch Gardens Williamsburg, and Disney, you get a big reality check. I think KI has a good blend of thrills and theming, but they could certainly improve on it.

I recommend Knott's Berry Farm.. It's a little "off-beat" of the Midwest parks IMO. The California setting is beautiful, and the overall feel of the park is just "different" for some reason. Not to mention they have Xcelerator and Silver Bullet. Of course Cedar Point is and always will be my favorite park, but if you're looking for something different and aren't worried too much about travelling budget, I'd say give Knott's a try. And SFMM is only about 45 minutes away

Nice TR, but I have to disagree about CP's mine ride being better than AE. AE is easily the best mine ride I've been on to date. And also, I love the Panda Express

that'd be the one

If you move it somewhere else, they'd just complain at the new location...

They filmed this last season. I'm not exactly sure how it actually worked, but I know they had exclusive ride time to get shots of people riding the rides. I know a few people who were chosen to be part of it.

What if Action Theater wasn't there? They'd have a nice spot to put a giant flat, i.e. Skyhawk.

Also see Hades at Mt. Olympus had there been no anti-rollbacks on the 2nd hill, it would have valleyed. This, however, is stuck.

yeah it was cool on sunday morning, and there was a LOT of moisture in the air from the storms that went through Sandusky early that morning.

It's when the coaster train doesn't have enough momentum to complete its course, so it gets stuck somewhere in the middle of the ride. That's weird.. I was at CP Friday-Sunday and I didn't notice it valleyed. But then again I didn't really get a look at it on Sunday, so it could have happened I guess.

This was without a doubt the greatest weekend I’ve ever spent at Cedar Point. Better yet, at any park. I’ll start from the beginning. Friday morning at work, I looked at the weather forecast for the weekend… 70% chance of rain Friday, Isolated thunderstorms all day Saturday, and rainshowers all day Sunday. Crap. At that point I was seriously considering not even going, as I live in Chicago and it’s a 4.5-5 hour drive. But seeing as I would be paying a fine if I canceled my hotel reservation, I decided to just brave it out. One of the best decisions I’ve made to date. I arrived at the park right at 6:00, and went straight to Coral Courtyard for the evening social hour. I met up with my friends in a MASSIVE line for the food. As it turns out there were close to 1,500 enthusiasts at CP this year. Yikes. Nonetheless the food was very enjoyable again (can’t go wrong with unlimited boneless wings!). Then came the keynote with Walter Bolliger and the film fest. Mr. Bolliger was nice, though his accent was very thick. Then came the film festival, which was very enjoyable for me since I was spending my weekend with Adam (TTD 120mph), whose video ended up winning. If you haven’t seen the video, it should be up on YouTube at some point. Very funny video. The first night went without a hitch.. The rain held off the entire evening, and during the ERT we got 3 quick rides on Magnum (first one was trimless and delicious), and one each on Mantis and Raptor. Alan (Kyurthich) and I tried to get on Dragster, and we made it to the point at which we were next to get on… but then it went down mechanical. After about 10 minutes we decided to move on and come back later. So we got back to Dragster at about 12:15 to try to dead-weight it, but alas we didn’t get any rides. Saturday morning, we arrived at Millennium Force at about 6:25 to find it already operating. I decided to just power-ride MF through the majority of that ERT. I ended up getting 9 rides on MF, 3 on Skyhawk, and 2 on Maverick during the morning ERT. Fantastic! We went to Dragster after that and just waited for it to open. A one-train wait for the front seat was very nice And to my surprise, it was sunny! Still no rain… After dragster we hit a few rides before deciding to go up to the front of the park.. This is where the day got really interesting. Rock Band Live premiered yesterday, and we decided to check it out. We walked up to the table to find an employee that Adam knew telling us to sign up quickly for the auditions, so we said “sure, why not.” Our band name was The Chucks. That’s another tale. Basically the contest was set up in a tournament format, with “American Idol”-style judging after each performance. Since we were the last band to sign up, we saw all the other acts perform before us in the first round. We ended up getting lucky right away, as our first-round opponent didn’t even show up. So on to the 2nd round we went. Our opponents in the 2nd round were doing okay.. It was very apparent that the judges were wanting a lot of personality while you were playing the game. The difficult part was that during the first 2 rounds, the song you played was random. In our case, I didn’t know either of the first 2 songs, so I was just doing my best to rock like a true guitarist. We were fortunate again in the 2nd round, however, because one of the band members on our opposing team failed out of the song. Nonetheless we received rave reviews for our performance, and we moved onto the finals. Now things were getting hairy.. the other team in the finals was VERY good.. the guitarist was really doing some great showmanship, and after their performance they laid their guitar to the ground and acted like they set it on fire. Great idea. The good part about the finals, though, was that we got to pick our own song. In our case, we selected “Any Way You Want It” by Journey. When I went out there, I put everything on the floor. I was just trying to constantly move around and even sing the song while trying to just not fail the song. At the end of the performance, I knew we had done well. But it was up to the judges. The other band came out, and after some deliberation, the judges were ready. Tony gave a long talk, and right at the end, he announced that the first winner of Rock Band Live was…. The Chucks! As our reward, we won the following: Single-day passes to the park (we ended up giving these to the runners-up as we all had platinum passes); A $25 gift card to Hard Rock Café; A copy of Rock Band (in my case, the XBOX 360 Beatles edition); and most importantly, a 4-hour VIP tour of Cedar Point to be used any time this summer. This includes front-of-line access to all rides for each band member and one guest. When I found out we had one all of this, I was simply ecstatic. Not to mention, we would get to play on stage as part of the show! So at 1:45 we showed up for the show, and were told we would sit near the front and be brought on stage by one of the cast members. The show started, and sure enough, they came down and brought us onto the stage as the “new band” for the manager in the show. He instantly started to dress us as one of the Rock Band characters.. in my case it was the really tall “goth” character, so I had to wear this absurd long black trechcoat. I was trying to stay in character, but it was so funny I couldn’t help but laugh. After that, they put us on a mobile “platform” and we got to play 3 songs as the new band. Then at the end of the “battle of the bands” we played one last song as a joint band, and we just got to really ham it up for the audience. Overall, Rock Band Live was simply a fantastic experience from my standpoint. I didn’t really get to see too much of the show as we were being given instructions through a lot of it. But the stuff I did see was really enjoyable. The “leader” of the other band was hilarious and the dancers/singers did a great job as well. The rest of the day was a pretty quiet day at the park, with a lot of people leaving because of the rain forecast.. but it didn’t really rain at all until the literal last ride of the night for us. A few spotty patches of drizzling were enough to shut the rides down a few times, but nothing major. I went into the weekend wanting to get 12 rides on Millennium Force; I ended up getting 18. So in the end, I can’t say enough about this trip. To think.. I almost didn’t go….

I was 7, and we were at Busch Gardens Williamsburg.. We saw the train for Big Bad Wolf come around the turn onto the river, and seeing as we'd never seen a coaster like that, it looked really fun and not scary at all. Only because we couldn't see the giant hill that dropped down onto that turn. I'll never forget how terrified I was when we crested the second lift and I saw that drop. But once I got through that ride I was in love and I never looked back.

I actually liked Scream!. I also rode the front seat, three times in a row because the park was dead that day. It wasn't jerky at all, from what I remember, and I liked the layout a lot. I did NOT like its location, and the fact that they still have the parking lot (complete with parking space lines) under the ride even after the several years it's been in that location. Landscaping ftw.

Or 7-1. Love it. My biggest turn-off is excessive trim brakes. I'm looking at you, Raging Bull!

So... they've gotten worse in the last 20 years?? Boom. Here's my list.. Millennium Force: back seat, lake side. Magnum XL 200: once in the 2nd last seat for the smooth ride, once in 1:3 for the ejector seat. it hurts soo sooooo good Raptor: Front seat TTD: Anywhere, this ride is just pretty cool. Maverick: Anywhere, same thing Chaos Power Tower both sides Sky Ride maXair Skyhawk CP&L.E. Railroad from the back of the park to the main midway. Boneville is a hidden gem. Blue Streak: 2nd last row. It's a fantastic woodie with great air.

I thought it was pretty bad when I got a card from them wanting me back, even though I already have a platinum pass from Knott's.. Once again the "genius" that is Cedar Fair's season pass system shows its face.

My first ride on King Cobra. I remember being a young Dvo and desperately waiting until I was finally tall enough to ride (although I'm a rather tall person, so it really wasn't that long ). Alas, one year I finally made the cut and got on. That was my first looping coaster, and still one of my favorites to this day.