Magenta Lizard

What about Ohioans? $15 a day is just about the price point where I start considering a trip down there just to rubberneck at the train wreck.

I'm kind of tapped out on writing about the weekend after spending the whole time Tweeting about it. I definitely want to give helpful feedback, but I need some more processing time before I can.

Please feel free to introduce yourself next time you see me!! I only /look/ forbidding, I actually love to meet new people. I often have an intensity of purpose as I trek through the park, but unless I'm on my way to Cirque I'm rarely on anything other than a self-imposed time crunch. I just like to get quickly where I've decided to go if I don't have anything else going on, but I always have at least some time to chat to new or old friends

I'm already looking forward to next year's Coasterstock!

^A little correction, I believe you are talking about Greg Scheid, Kings Island's VP/GM, not Don Helbig, Kings Island's PR, if you mean the questions he asked before Dennis Spiegel's presentation. Unless you're referring to comments made by Don at some other time. They both shave their heads, so it can be sometimes confusing at first which is which.

My curiosity is piqued by this car, which was in one of the areas we walked through on the way back to the train tour. I was near Don Helbig at the time, so I asked him about it, but all he could/would tell me was that "it's always been here." Intriguing.

My husband got me a Fitbit last season, and I've enjoyed tracking my steps too. Yesterday, since I was there from 6:30 till 10:30, I hit my record so far: just short of 40,000 steps. When I got home and saw I was about 700 away, it was tempting to circle the living room to break 40k, but I was just too tired and sore That came out to be something like 16 1/2 miles. I've noticed that I generally walk about a mile for every hour I'm at the park. Eventually we should start some sort of step counting thread for those of us who are into it.

Sorry, double posted. But so it's not wasted, I will mention I won the "Social Media Rockstar" prize for my Twitter activities. Got some really cool old pictures (I will post later), a Banshee paperweight, and two tickets to the park (which is excellent because my husband doesn't have a pass).

To answer last page's question, the best part of both meals was dessert, for me anyway. Some excellent cake Saturday and blue ice cream Sunday. I probably should have just skipped the actual food and went straight to dessert. I don't know when I've ever had so much fun or been as tired as I am after this weekend. And I even went home at 7 Saturday.

I'm betting on refurb/lighting package like SR&R received last year. And if I'm right, I cannot WAIT to see it!

I wouldn't say I feel /guilty/ exactly but... My husband has told me "if I beat you up as much as The Beast, you'd leave me!" I do often get bruises, etc, but I just can't stop loving that ride!

Yes, it has been even better than I expected. Heck, just the souvenir cup and meals covered the price of the event, and were far from being the best part. I love Coasterstock!

If Monster gets as cool of a lighting package as SR&R did, I'd be willing to see it down for the rest of the season. I hope it doesn't come to that, but it would be worth it. I love the new night life coming to Coney Mall.

Through some strange quirk of fate, one of my tweets is very close in the running for the most favorited/retweeted prize. As far as I can tell, it is second only to a tweet that got a lot of attention when@KingsIslandPR retweeted it. I was actually trying for the most comprehensive coverage prize, but I'll take what I can get Of all my tweets today, the one in the running is probably my least favorite :-/ If you want to help me win, please go retweet: https://twitter.com/maglizrd/status/599592251799515136

I was excited enough about the train tour before my husband mentioned the house in the fort, so it's not crushing my dreams. Fort Coney or not, it's one of the things I'm looking most forward to. I like your description of the previous tour, too, because that sounds likely to be less affected by rain than many of the other things happening this weekend.

Me too! Other than the swag (I was happy enough about a t-shirt, now it sounds like we're getting pins and stuff too) it's the thing I've been most excited about. Even though I try to spy the house through knotholes in the fort every time I ride the train, the idea I might see inside on the tour didn't even occur to me until my husband mentioned it earlier today. Now I'm even more excited about it!

There's no way I can stay till midnight Saturday, and still make it to the train tour Sunday morning, even as little as I sleep most nights, considering an hour total drive time and a shower, etc. As much as I'd like to do both, I can ride the rides at night other times, can't do the train tour another time. I hope they let us see inside Fort Coney. That would be awesome!

I'm betting buffet in the Picnic Grove. Less than two days to find out for sure!

It is new, but will probably lose its brightness and blend in more as time goes by. If it keeps a train from hitting a deer, I'm all for it. Thanks for posting the vids

When I rode yesterday, the operator told me earlier in the day a couple little girls were in a glider, not moving the wing at all, and they just kept snapping over and over. Wonder if it was because of how windy it was?

When I was walking past the Biergarten today I heard Ace of Base's "The Sign", then I entered Adventure Express's queue and Van Halen's "Jump" was on FUNTV. I wondered briefly what year this is. It wasn't quite as surreal as another visit when a countrified version of Footloose came on FUNTV in the Drop Tower queue and a multitude of young people started singing along.

Because it may turn out to be very pertinent this weekend, unfortunately, I inquired about rain ponchos in the front gate store before I left today. They do have ones with Kings Island printed on the front, approximately the same material as a plastic grocery sack, for $5 each.

Yep, I got my Toto. A half hour before the tour was to start, I popped into The Beast Arcade, and started playing the Wizard of Oz coin pusher game. For those who don't know, there are character cards you can win from the game, and if you collect the whole set, it's worth 5000 tickets. Toto is much more rare than the other character cards. I played for awhile, ultimately shoving a stack of several cards (the top card being Toto) off the edge. But when I went to collect all my chips and cards so I could go wait for the tour, Toto was missing. It wasn't on the playing field, it wasn't in the bin, and it wasn't visible anywhere between the two although it had to be stuck somewhere. The only employee in the area was a young man running the water-squirt race game out front. He said he couldn't do anything about it, and his supervisor (who could) went on break and he had no way of contacting him. I said I was just going to go ahead on The Beast tour, and asked him to tell his supervisor what was going on when he showed up. It was a gorgeous day, and a wonderful tour Amazingly, the games supervisor hadn't checked in the entire time of the tour (plus a ride on Beast afterward), but the young employee happened to see him walking off toward DB soon after I approached him again, and I ran after him and he called maintenance (took like five seconds for him to deal with me, after I finally was able to get to him). After hearing my story and opening the machine to find the stuck Toto card, the maintenance man actually told me until he saw the card, he thought I might have been putting him on. What are the chances that only the rare card gets stuck in the machine? I told him "yeah, *wink* *wink* it ate my Toto."

I'm almost always a single rider, and I've met a lot of other friendly people who often are too. Nobody has seemed to think I'm creepy for being at the park alone. A lot of the time I prefer being at the park by myself.

So they're having a Twitter/Instagram contest going for Coasterstock. Prizes will be given for the people who post pics that get the most retweets/favorites (and a separate contest for who documents the whole weekend best). Since they said we can start early, I started while I was at the park today. My Twitter handle is @maglizrd. Please, if anyone else on the boards is participating, let us know yours too so we can follow you and like your posts.