LongLiveTheSmurfRide

^ I'm going to put on some "In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida" for when I watch it.

This one time, I went to the water park and got wet. Meeeeeeemorieeeeeees...

35 is not that old!!!! *Runs away crying and snotting all over*

Oh yeah, did those last like 1 season?

Agreed. Garfield's Nightmare is appropriately named.

Goodbye Smurfs.

I can't like this post enough. I always wondered where they all ended up.

Looks like they finally broke ground on Avatar Land....with giant shovels. That should speed things up. http://land.allears.net/blogs/dnews/2014/01/groundbreaking_for_avatarinspi.html

I was trying to find pictures of them online, but the closest I've found is this: Which looks like it could be one. Found it here: http://www.whatacharacter.com/a-f/f--page3.htm

Coming from someone who loved the Smurf ride and someone who loves the Haunted Mansion even more, I always had disdain for Phantom Theater. To me, it was not as fun as Smurfs and seemed like a cheap Haunted Mansion rip off. For a seasonal park, it wasn't bad, but you can't tell that to a jaded 12 year old, like I was, when PT came in and exorcised my Smurfs. Of course, it wasn't as bad as the Haunted Castle Ride at Magic World in Pigeon Forge, TN; but neither is a stick in the eye. I think what I miss most are the boats and the little hill at the end of the ride to finish it off. I could have ridden that ride over and over. I wonder how my 34 year old self would now relate to that ride if it was still here. But yeah, back on topic, PT > BBOBH all the way.

I miss the old HB juice sippy cups that they used to sell around the park that were shaped like HB characters.

Isn't the Banks to Newport like an 8 minute walk? Either way, I've read that a route to Newport and Covington are proposals for future expansion. Baby steps.

As an "out of towner" I'm a fan and am excited to be able to park farther away from the stadiums (for free) and ride over.

I plan to go to KI a lot next year since this year I kind of took a break from the park with only 2 visits. Hopefully I get to ride the carousel with live organ music playing.

Great looking pictures.

Oh my gosh, here's the scene. I can't even stand to watch it. I started to watch it and had to stop. I need to find an internet cat or something to take my mind off this now. Edit: Nevermind, I unlinked it because there's an F-bomb dropped in there (of course there is, it's the scariest thing ever), but if you want to see it, search You Tube for "The Descent Cave Collapse".

I would be unable to do a haunt that involved too much crawling in small spaces. That's my #1 phobia. I can handle small spaces where I can at least turn around and make use of my limbs, but when it comes to being forced down a small 1 way tunnel, count me out. At that point, I'm figuring out a way to make my heart stop so I can just end it. If anyone's seen the movie the Descent; that scene early on where the girl gets stuck for a bit in the smallest possible place, THAT'S my worst fear. I'd welcome monsters at that point.

I would eat the parking fee if I was the park if your using your one free day when you process your pass for customer service sake.I took my parking receipt to the ticket window and they refunded my parking fee when I purchased my gold pass this past Saturday. If you still have your parking receipt I would go to guest services and they would refund the parking in their beagle bucks so you can spend that money in the park.Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk Just wanted to confirm, we did this last Friday. Took our parking receipt to the ticket booth when buying the passes (we purchased them at the park) and they took $15 off of the cost of the passes. Glad they did that. Can't believe parking is that expensive and the lot is in the state that it's in.

I think we were in the 4th or 5th row.

Good report! I can't believe that I was at the same Alonzo show that you were all at and I missed you. If anyone saw me, I was wearing a white shirt with blood splatter on it that said, "This is my zombie killing shirt". I was keeping an eye out for any KIC'ers but didn't see anyone. Was a pretty smokey night.

I may have seen you when you were getting your shots of Banshee through the fence. I thought I recognized you from your avatar, but since I wasn't sure, I just let you do your thing.

I am not going to wear clothes to the park on Saturday. Because I'm going Friday.

Yeah, I did kind of get that old Kings Island feel to a lot of the park. The theming is great and it's not like Kings Island feels that far removed from what they do with the atmosphere at BGW. They could start by just having the music change for the different areas of the park. Seems like such a simple thing, but it adds so much.

The wife (Laura) and I went on a week long vacation to the Outer Banks and on the way home we stopped at BGW on Sunday the 15th. Since it was still going to be an 8 and a half hour drive home, we knew we'd only have a short time at the park. I didn't even know that it was time for their Halloween event or I may have looked into booking a hotel so that we could stay all day. This is my first time at the park and *spoiler alert* I loved it. I have to give a BIG SHOUT OUT to TTD-120-420 for hooking us up with a ticket and a ticket discount, which reduced our entry from $140 to about $50 for both of us. Very cool! The first thing I noticed about the park was how pretty it is. It's like they went out of their way not to cut down any trees to put in rides or buildings because everything is so entrenched in the woods. I loved that. The park had such great decorations for Halloween as well. I haven't been to Universal or Knotts, but if they do a better job than Busch; I'd be really impressed. When we entered the park we were greeted with limbs above our heads. I never caught Jack. I could have used that reward money. I loved this area of the park with pumpkins all over the paths. Germany becomes Vampire Point. Not sure how they survived out in the sun like that. They weren't sparking or nothin'. Here's Laura trying not to become a spider meal. Onto the rides. We were new to the park, so we had no idea where we were going. The park map was a bit confusing and a lot of areas of the park were not open at the start of the day, so we eventually made our way to Griffon first. It was a walk on, so we walked onto the front row center which was so cool. This is my first drop coaster and my main reaction to it was, "Meh." Don't get me wrong, it was fun. The drop was good, and it was very smooth, but it just wasn't much to write home about. Not many forces and was pretty short. It was a good ice breaker. Next we hit Alpengeist. Again, a walk on. We hopped into the first row. I really liked this one. Uses the terrain very well and had great theming. First invert that I'd ever ridden with tunnels. This ended up being my favorite ride of the day, though we did ride it a second time later and it wasn't quite as great. Then we went over to Verbolten. Walk on (liking this trend). Front seat was a few cycles long, so we went to the middle. Very fun ride. Love the surprise drop during the ride, which was very....um...surprising. This ended up being Laura's favorite ride because of the unexpectedness of it. Laura getting a picture with Verbolten. Next was Apollo's Chariot. Another "meh" ride for me. It seemed slow for a B&M hyper. I didn't get much air time out of it. Definitely prefer Diamondback to this one. After lunch at the Festhaus (we had the sausage sampler "yum"), we did the Curse of DarKastle. That was a cool dark ride. Loch Ness Monster was next. I was really surprised how smooth this old Arrow is. Of course, it's either designed (or trimmed) not to go too fast through a lot of elements, so the transitions are not as jerky as others. It was a fun ride, and of course, the coaster is so photogenic. The majority of the rest of our stay in the park consisted of going into every shop and checking out the animals. We rode one of the 3 sky rides and also took a ride on the train. Then we hit Alpengeist one more time, this time in the middle (as the front had a little line). It was quite shaky in those seats and gave us both a headache, so not a good final ride. Overall, I loved the park. I described it to Laura as a mix between Epcot, Kings Island and a Zoo. The Halloween stuff looked so good that it seemed more like it was permanent instead of just a seasonal set up. They even had cool Halloween merchandise and food! I'll finish the report with a few random pics. Such a pretty park. I met a girl, and Laura wasn't even threatened. One more of Loch Ness. Thanks for reading!

I spoke to Don earlier this season after running the Pink 5K on opening day. I shook his hand and told him that I was a member of KIC and that I enjoyed the run. He was pretty cool. Only question I had for him on the spot was how hard was it going to be to clean up all of the color thrown all over the park that morning. He replied that it would come out pretty quick with a spray of the ol' water hose. This was before I knew that there was construction going on over in Action Zone, so I couldn't try to get a genuine generic PR answer out of him about that.