coneyislandchris

Not that people care nearly as much about it as they do Volcano, but has Avalanche reopened yet either?

#Team2017Forever #NeverGiveUpHope #ItsStillRealToMeDammit

FWIW: Daniel Tiger is a spinoff from Mr. Roger's Neighborhood. It's a new animated series that premiered about 5 years ago, takes place in the Neighborhood of Make-Believe, and features the children of many of the characters from those segments, as well as some of the classics like King Friday and Henrietta Pussycat. I personally don't think it has the same charm as the original but as far as modern kids' shows go it's one of the better ones.

This photo that Robb retweeted from Jason McClure is literally everything to me right now. Following along the TPR Twitter like a junkie right now for my next fix. Keep up the good work!

For what it's worth, Lightning Road appears to be back up today if the app wait times are to be believed. Currently posting a 75 minute wait as of around 2:00 PM. Keeping my fingers crossed it will be up and running when I get there in mid-August. I'll be there on a Monday as well. We shall see.

I dunno but that's not the only thing that's phallic with Coney Island Cincinnati... from their website, this is the logo on their loading splash screen. I don't know why the letter C is ejaculating, and frankly, I don't want to know. Thanks for the report. I'm gonna try to figure out how to work this place into our next road trip, because honestly, I forgot it even exists but it looks like a cool little place to kill a few hours. (And $6.95 kids' admission? Dang. That's Lakemont pricing right there.)

There are definitely a few ridiculously crappy parks in NJ. Bowcraft and Keansburg both come to mind. Sounds like Clementon's another real winner. Also, 42" for the drop tower of death, but 54" for the wooden coaster. Okay. I give up trying to understand height requirements at all. Hope the park lasts until the kiddo sprouts up another 5 inches.

YOU DON'T SAY?!

Sesame Street isn't a half-bad park... if it's not too busy. Otherwise, it's a friggin' nightmare to navigate and to ride anything. I remember going back when I was a kid and loving it. When I visited with the family late last year during their Halloween season, I couldn't get out of there fast enough. But the kids enjoyed it, and that's what was important. Looking forward to the Clementon report, one of the few area parks I still haven't checked out either.

I don't know why it took me so long to subscribe to this thread. Bill, you have some of the best trip reports on this board, and a writing style that never fails to make me laugh. If you don't write professionally for a living, you need to contemplate a career change. (Unless you like actually making money. In which case, stick with whatever you're doing.)

To be honest, I'm kind of thinking the same thing. As far as someone from the East Coast goes, I had heard about the incident in passing, but I couldn't remember the name. I doubt it has any bearing at all on this outside of a small, select group of people that might possibly remember it. (And/or if a news station decides to use some more gotcha scare tactics.)

What do you know... I actually did manage to visit Dorney on Sunday, and dragged along both kids, the wife, and my father as well. A few brief thoughts and images for all y'all: The weather was absolutely beautiful all day long. Even though the parking lot was nearly filled to capacity by noon, that didn't really translate into heavy crowds on the dry side. No great surprise there. We didn't end up waiting more than a single cycle for any ride all day long. I know that's par for the course no matter when you visit, but even on a Sunday? Amazing. I'm not complaining. But I can also understand why this means this park won't be seeing any new major coaster investments any time soon. Early entry was kind of a joke. I have a Platinum Pass saved on my phone, and they literally had no idea what to do with it. They were going to issue me a gold pass at the gate, and I had to tell them, no, this is the actual platinum pass from Cedar Point... then they told me they couldn't honor it and they needed a physical card from everyone in order to scan them through. *sigh* Good thing I still carry them in my wallet too. They had no problem processing the bring-a-friend codes though. Anyway, once we get into the park, there were supposed to be four rides open for early entry; the Antique Carousel, Dodgem, Kaleidoscope, and Talon. My wife and daughter split off to do the carousel, my father and son headed over to Dodgem, and I bounced over to Talon. At 9:40, the chain was up and there was someone at the gate saying "ride is closed." All day? "I dunno. Maybe. Yeah." Met up with F+S at Dodgem only to find that there was literally no one at the ride. We walk back towards the carousel past Kaleidoscope only to see that that's closed as well, and there's a couple of ride ops inside the booth just BSing with each other. Try to wave them down and get their attention to ask if they're open... "Nah man, wait until 10." OH WELL. At least we got several rides in on the carousel... It's clear my daughter is going to be just as much of a ride junkie as my son and I. Part of the reason we stopped over here is because of their extremely liberal height policy; even though she's only 37" tall, she got a massive amount of rides in throughout the day. In the Planet Snoopy area, she rode the Camp Bus, Charlie Brown's Wind-Up swings, Peanuts Road Rally, Snoopy's Cloud Climbers helicopters, Woodstock's Wagon Wheel, and like a thousand times on the Kite-Eating Tree (mini-drop towers definitely seem to be her favorite). And for the second week in a row, we managed to get the whole core family (including my coaster-hating wife) onto a kiddie coaster with Woodstock Express. Meanwhile, out in the rest of the park, she also managed to get rides in on Sea Dragon, Monster, Road Rally, Apollo, Zephyr, the Whip, a solid back-to-back pair on Thunder Creek Mountain (which is neck-and-neck with Zoom Phloom for my favorite log flume of all time), and an extremely spinny ride with the four of us on Tilt-A-Whirl. Spun us around so hard she literally lost a shoe. Kudos to my wife who reacted fast and caught it mid-spin. She would have also been eligible for Musik Express but at that point, she was crashed out so hard in her stroller that we didn't dare wake her. Gotta catch 'em all! Had a really weird experience getting season pass dining at the Chickie's & Pete's near Sea Dragon. Apparently they upgraded to self-serve kiosks at some point. Even though I scanned in my card and it registered one credit for a meal, whenever I clicked "next" on that screen, it kept showing me "No options available". I walked up to the cashier window and asked if I could just place my order there. According to that employee... nope. All season pass plans need to go through the kiosks. Explained the situation to her, she took my card and went over to the kiosks to check, and ended up repeating the same loop I was stuck in about ten times before sighing, giving up, and asked me what I wanted. "Cheesesteak combo." Scribbles it down on a piece of receipt paper with an order number, gives it to me, "here you go". Didn't have any such problems with the self-serve kiosks at Kings Dominion, so no clue what's going on over here. No complaints though. Food came out quick and was yummy. The kiddo and the cast of Cirque Imagine! We took a break during the middle of the day to check out Cirque Imagine, the new show playing at the Good Time Theater thrice daily. We had seen the Cirque show at KD the week before, and our kids absolutely loved it just as much as we did, to the point where my daughter was attempting to imitate the performers in her seat. No such luck with this one, unfortunately. Although it managed to keep her attention for the first couple of segments, once the BMX stunt performer came out, she just turned off any interest whatsoever. The big kiddo loved it, especially the rope swing performer who did some absolutely amazing stunts (and easily blew away the rest of the cast). Overall, not as good as the Kings Dominion one, but still a worthwhile way to spend a half-hour. This was the best photo I could get of him in front of Revolution. His reaction afterwards was MUCH better. The big kiddo had an absolute blast as expected. He rode all of the above as well, and also eventually got in rides on Dodgem and Kaleidoscope. We also got in a number of rides on both Dominator towers; always nice to see a park that has S&S towers with 48" height requirements. Almost every park that we've visited recently aside from Casino Pier has had them at 52", so as soon as he saw that it was a 48" requirement, he made a beeline for the entrance. His verdict; green is better than red. I honestly don't know if I agree or disagree, they're both fantastic. This was also his first time hitting up some of the larger flat rides; Meteor, Revolution, and Demon Drop were all new to him. Meteor and Rev were both great, but Demon Drop ended up being his favorite ride in the park today! I'm so glad that they still have a classic Intamin drop ride like this up and running (even though it has no riders). After our first ride, we asked the guy on the exit side if we could stay on since there was no one else in line. He asked the guy on the other side. Guy on the other side ran up to the ride op and chatted for a sec. He then came back to us and said "OK, if you can beat me in a game of rock paper scissors, you can stay on." I lost. He cheated. We got some exercise and ran around for a second ride anyway. The most useless things on the face of the Earth? Coaster-wise, it was slim pickings for us. The wild mouse line is always slow moving and we had done it before anyway, so we skipped it this time around. We all got on Woodstock Express as I mentioned earlier. When we walked past Thunderhawk the first time, it was down for maintenance and we hadn't seen any trains running at all, so we just walked past to Steel Force. The kiddo and I ran up the steps, through the obnoxiously long and abandoned queue, into the station and into a literal walk-on for row 7. Not great, but decent enough. When we got back to the station, again, there was no one waiting. We asked again if we could stay on and re-ride, and the checker's response was a surprising "yeah, do whatever you like". Okay! Two in a row for us this time. When we went to check our photos down at the booth, we found out that on both rides, our heads were cut off on the top of the frame. Nothing the guy could do to fix it either. A disappointment for the kiddo, because he collects photo keychains and wanted to get this one, but we made up for it at the end of the day by finding a Steel Force character keychain for him instead. We ended up walking past Thunderhawk a second time on our way back up to the top of the park and noticed that they were now running some empty trains, so we booked it back over to the entrance to find it still closed. We were going to wait, but then they stopped running test trains again for some reason, and the fellow manning the gate advised us that we should probably find something else unless we wanted to wait even longer. So no classic woodie this time around. The family that coasts together! Now if I could only get my wife on a wooden coaster... We played a couple of prize games too. The kiddo kicked our butt at Raging Waters and won a Pikachu for his sister, and then I thoroughly schooled everyone at Whac-A-Mole (but gave him his choice of prize anyway, which ended up being a red Yoshi). I'm also loving the fact that retro game prizes seem to be in right now. In addition to the Pokemon and Super Mario prizes, they also had a large number of Sonic and Pac-Man prizes available. Kudos to the fellow running the Zephyr. He always does a great job of throwing down interesting historical tidbits about the park, and it always ends up being a pleasure to ride this classic mini-train. I can't even be mad at this one, I'm more amazed than anything, but someone managed to pinch out a turd in one of the urinals. A fitting final memory of our day at Dorney Park. While there were some mild disappointments, the lack of lines throughout the park ensured that we definitely got our money's worth and were never at a loss for things to do all day long. We ended up hitting the road around 6 PM and made a stopover in Hellertown at the aforementioned Crossroads Hotel for some pizza, pierogies, and birch beer. Always recommended!

I did not have any such problem when I used that same plan earlier this season at both Kings Dominion and Carowinds within a day of each other. Something seems off here.

Oh, like that's changed since they installed it and suddenly has come as a great surprise to everyone.

Where exactly in that story do they claim that the whole town is gone?

As above; the kiddo and I were there on Father's Day and we got three rides in on the green train. Wasn't painful in the slightest, and it was gloriously out of control in all the best ways. I do agree that there's no way I'd rank it above the Bull but I still think it's a fantastic ride and definitely one of my top woodies. And as you can see below, the kiddo put it in his top five (but I have a feeling nothing's gonna take Wicked Cyclone's spot until maybe New Mean Streak opens up). Also, I have to say, I'm jealous and stupidly kicking myself for not taking advantage of the sky ride while we were there. We were on the second day of our 8-park Father's Day Weekend roadtrip and pushing to make it to two more parks after that. I literally thought to myself, "eh, we'll get it the next time, it's not like it's going anywhere." Goddammit. The free drink stations were a nice touch. I'm on a seltzer kick at the moment so it was nice to see that they had just the plain soda water option as well, and we took full advantage of that.

Great photos and report Jcoaster. Is that the Waffle House just off of 78 at the Hellertown exit? Never stopped in there; any time I'm in the area I end up going to Crossroads Hotel just a little further down Main Street. Pizza of my childhood. Hoping I can stop by at some point this weekend, possibly on Sunday. Going to be visiting family in the area. I know it's gonna be a tough sell on my wife though since she's still a little parked-out from last week's trip to VA.

Ha! That was me. I was there with some friends from out of town. We also had a great lunch at the Water Street Grill in Yorktown, too. I had a suspicion! Too bad we didn't cross paths at some point. We actually ended up eating dinner at the place right next door (Riverwalk Cafe I think it was called?). Also, ElvisLuv, great pics! My wife was in charge of taking most of the photos, and ended up dropping her DSLR the very first morning, so she's been shooting mostly blind. Still have yet to go through all the raw images. Overall we had a great couple days down Virginia way, I hope I have the free time to write up a trip report soon. Definitely reconfirmed my suspicions that BGW is one of the best parks on the East Coast.

Big thumbs up for the multi-part TR, Boldikus. Glad you enjoyed the park. For all the naysaying it gets I think it's my favorite in the SF chain currently, though I still have yet to visit SFOG or the Texas parks. Can't wait to get back (and hopefully without the kid, so I can get some quality time in on Superman).

^ Close by -- Invadr. Not too bad, hated the restraints though.

Okay, which one of you bums is at the American Revolution Museum right now? I ask because I noticed a Club TPR sticker on one of the cars in the lot.

I completely missed the fact that my family and I will be there on a Food & Wine Festival date. Awesome! Will definitely have to look into getting one of the deluxe passes. How were the crowds last Friday?

It always amazes me how far out of the way the rapids are from the rest of the park. Wait, there were rapids?!

Oh DANG. That is a thing of beauty! I hope they have some stock left when I get there in August. My wife's only souvenir request from any amusement parks I visit without her is usually to bring back a Christmas ornament. Haven't found many that look as nice as that, though.

Counting the hours until I get back to Kings Dominion on Thursday, and Busch Gardens Williamsburg on Friday. \o/