TR: Geauga Lake July 23, 2005

[Marko]

Since it was a Saturday and we were both pretty coastered-out we decided to make Geauga Lake a quickie one hour stop before continuing on to our motel. The park has really improved from our visit last year, in fact I'm really impressed with the park. They oddly enough don't give out tickets when you present a non-GL Cedar Fair season pass at the guest relations booth. Instead they take down your name and instruct you to tell the gate attendant that "Carl" said it was ok to let us in. Certainly an interesting approach and while there was some confusion our pass-phrase did indeed get us into the park.

 

First stop was Big Dipper which unfortunately I did not get to ride last trip. There was a very short wait and we were both really impressed with our first front row ride. We got back in line and tried the last row, holy crap what a difference! BD has to get an award for providing the most striking difference between front and back rows. Elle found the back to be too violent but I absolutely loved it, big thumbs up for Big Dipper.

 

Next we took a spin on Dominator in the front row and we both really enjoyed the ride, much more than Hydra. The first loop just seems so huge and the rest of the ride was really smooth with great interaction with the ground and surrounding water/marsh. In fact of the four floorless coasters I've tried Dominator is by far the best.

 

The last mission was to get a ride on Raging Wolf Bobs which I also missed last time and unfortunately it was closed again this visit. But that's all right, I can see visiting GL again in the future, it really is a beautiful park with very efficient ride operators. The only exception is still X-Flight which they have yet to find a way to run both sides of the loading station. The queue snaked around twice and I remembered from last year that was around a 30 minute wait. We were more than happy to call it a day and in little under an hour we were out of the park.

 

One of the things we both noticed was there was lot of partying going on, lots of people drinking beer and coolers. Not a bad thing at all, everyone seemed to be happy and were having a good time, in fact it was a refreshing change from the day before at Knoebels. Every park has something to offer and GL just seems like a rockin' and rollin' kinda place, truly look forward to returning again soon.

 

Final stop, a gas station and mini-golf course in the Dells.

 

Mark