Labor Day - Dollar Days - 9/1/2014

[Voicetek]

Since we both had the day off work, my wife and I decided that we'd ride out to KI Monday evening for a few hours to grab some $1 pizza for dinner and to enjoy a few rides.

We arrived at the park around 4:30 and proceeded to find ourselves a parking space. After driving up and down a few rows, we found a really great spot in Invertigo row 45. We parked the car and were getting everything ready to head into the park. When I arrived at KI, I usually take my main car key off my key ring, hook it to my lanyard, and wrap that around my belt loop. This makes it easier for me so I don't have to carry all my keys around the park with me.

So while I'm doing this, I hear a "thump" and my wife starts making some comments in frustration. My attention immediately goes to her and I ask, "What's wrong?" It seems as if, since it was windy the day, the wind caught the door and blew it open rather quickly causing her door to slam into the car we were parked next to. Great. So I get out of the car, shut my door, and walk around to her door to check out the damage. She gets out and shuts her door as well. We inspect the damage and decide that it was bad enough that we needed to leave our contact info. So we go to get back into the car and realize the doors had been locked. Both of them. That's ok, I had my key right here hooked to my lanyard. Oh wait. This isn't the right key. Yep. I had taken my car key off my key ring and just now realized we're not in my car, we're in my wife's car. In all the commotion I had grabbed the wrong key. Great. So now we just dented someone's door AND we're locked out of our car. Two crappy things happened within 5 minutes of arriving at the park. And what's worse, we left our cell phones in the car too.

I wasn't sure if KI had anything set up to help you with keys locked in your car, so I figured we'd walk over to guest relations and see what kind of assistance we could get. When we arrived there, I explained what happened and the girl was super nice and informed us that security could help us get into our car. She asked us what row we were in and what kind of car we had and then radioed security to meet us. Once back at our car, we waited just a few minutes until security came. The security guy was very nice and extremely helpful and within about 10 minutes had our car door opened. So, we grabbed the correct key and wrote a note explaining what happened with the door situation and left our name and number. We left the note under the windshield wiper of the car in hopes that the people would see it. Just a note - If you're reading this and it was your car we hit, we're super sorry!!!

Ok, so now it's a little after 5 and we're finally heading into the park. We're determined to salvage our evening! We were both hungry and decided to go straight for the pizza. We thought we would head over to the LaRosa's by The Beast since they had tables and places to sit. While walking through the park we noticed how long the lines were to get food and we also noticed people who had stacks and stacks of plates piled high on multiple trays. How much pizza can one person eat? Hmmm. So we get to LaRosa's and that line wasn't too long. We waited about 10 minutes which wasn't too bad.

After eating, we decided to take a ride on The Beast. The line wasn't too bad at all for the crowd that was there. It only took about 15-20 minutes to get on and was an awesome ride as usual. Next, we walked over to Coney Mall and walked around for a bit. The crowds were extremely light over in this area. Not sure why. We got down by Adventure Express and decided to take a ride. It was pretty much a walk on, which is always nice. This is where something interesting happened. So we loaded the train, got buckled and we're waiting to get everything checked. In front of us was a woman with, what looked to be, a very young child. Too young to be on this ride it seemed. So as the workers are coming back checking harnesses and such, they noticed the young boy and asked him to step out of the train to be measured. The woman starts semi-arguing with the workers explaining that he rides this ride "everyday." They proceed to measure the young boy and he stands about 3-4 inches below the bar. They explain to the woman that he was way too short to be on this ride. The woman continues to argue with them explaining that he rides this ride everyday and they said he could ride as long as he was with an adult, etc, etc. You could tell that she was not happy. The workers kept explaining that he was too short and could not let him ride. In frustration, the woman gets up out of the train and proceeds to the exit with the boy, still convinced that he should've been able to ride and still claiming that he rides the ride everyday. So that was over and now we were able to enjoy our ride. Great ride as usual - that's about all I have to say about that!

After Adventure Express we headed over to Action Zone for a $1 Banshee Twist cone and some Cotton Candy. The line for the ice cream was rather long, but we gladly waited. This year it seemed that they were making the $1 cones slightly bigger than other years. Maybe it was just the people working this day. Regardless, we were happy. Unfortunately though, this location was sold out of cotton candy, so we decided to take a walk over to Planet Snoopy and get our cotton candy over there. As we were standing in line waiting for the cotton candy, it started to rain. Now, this is the third Dollar Days we've come to and the third year in a row that it started raining while we were waiting in line for cotton candy. Not sure what that means exactly, but it's becoming a rather annoying tradition!

After buying the cotton candy, we walked into the Peanuts store (not sure what the actual name is) and looked around for a bit. It was now about 7:45 so we decided we should probably head on out since the park closed at 8. While walking out to our car the rain picked up again and got us pretty good. I guess it's not Dollar Days without a little bit of rain. Oh well.

Even though the evening got off to a rough start, things turned out pretty good. We got some pizza, ice cream, and grabbed some cotton candy for the trip home. All in all a pretty good day. We didn't ride a whole lot, but it's always nice to get out to the park for a bit, even if it's just to take in the atmosphere.