Trip Report: Idlewild Park

Ligonier, Pennsylvania - 07/02/2000

"It's all Mark McKenzie's fault"

On Sunday morning, I awoke in an entirely unremarkable motel room. I pursued the usual assortment of morning preparations, then dropped the top on the car so that we could enjoy the gorgeous weather. By "we," I mean myself and Columbus area ACEer John Peck.

We headed on out US-30 through the deepening forest. The further we got from Pittsburgh, the more the road reminded me of US-23 between Chillicothe and Portsmouth on the road to Camden Park. Shortly after 10:00am, we arrived at the park.

Idlewild is an unusual park from the moment you enter the driveway. First of all it is absolutely huge...so big in fact that there are three areas we never even looked at. Second, while parking is allegedly free, there are still toll booths where you stop and pay your admission. I guess Idlewild...which is a strictly P-O-P operation...uses wristbands to avoid people pulling drive-in movie stunts [Footnote 1].

I drove well back into the park and found a suitable parking space behind the Rollo Coaster, right across the split-rail fence from the spot where Tim Melago and Dave Sandborg were busily setting up the r.r-c picnic. I stashed the car keys in a bag in the trunk of the car so that I wouldn't lose them. With my own car, I have two sets of keys, one set on my key ring and one set hanging on a hook in the trunk. Since I only had the one set for this car, I wanted to be especially careful. I hopped the fence and said hello to Tim and Dave, who graciously declined my offer to help them set up. John and I opted to wander into the park, which was just beginning to wake up. While we wandered the gravel midways waiting for the rides to start, I took note of the park's adult rides, but never managed to get a list of the kiddies:

As 11:00 approached, we joined the growing queue for the Rollo Coaster. The ride opened with one train, and when our turn came, I hopped into the back seat of the lead car. I couldn't resist reaching behind me and lifting the hinged hood of the car behind me. Much to my surprise, the hood hides a pivot shaft for the front axle of the car. So the cars on Rollo Coaster have about the same mechanical configuration as a modern PTC articulated car, only with the axle positions reversed, that is, with a roll pivot on the front axle.

This is a good thing for Rollo Coaster, as I don't think there is a foot of straight and level track on the whole ride. The ride is built astride a nicely forested hill, so in order to get some up-and-down action, it snakes back and forth across the hillside in a mildly exciting fashion. Oh, sure, it's a junior out-and-back coaster, and it is gentle enough that there were young people riding who were barely old enough to walk. It's a genuine classic train in beautiful shape with fixed grab bars, deep upholstered seats, and complete lack of active restraints. Easy for the operators to check: just make sure everybody is sitting down! The ride is even run by hand with big brake levers, just the way John Miller intended. It's not real big, it's not real long, it's not real fast, and the
Kennywoodies are a much better coaster package than Rollo Coaster. But Rollo Coaster scores big in the most important category for any ride: it's a whole lot of FUN.

The line for Rollo Coaster was growing long, but the Trinado was about to load, so we climbed aboard. The Trinado is a Huss Tri-Star, which is a cross between a Condor, a Troika and an Enterprise. I had ridden this particular ride once, the year it operated at Kennywood. It's a good ride, but it takes a very long time for the center to come to a complete stop, meaning that in spite of the ride operator's repeated admonitions that riders remain seated, young, impatient kids keep jumping off of the nearly-stopped ride. One such kid leaped out of the car, but when the ride operator told everyone to remain seated she walked back to the tub she had just vacated and jumped back in. A little unclear on the concept here?

We proceeded to ride a few of the other classic flat rides before lunch. That meant the (currently coverless) Caterpillar, Paratrooper, and Scrambler. Noon came and went, and it was time to join the picnic.

The crowd at the picnic was a respectable turnout, about a dozen people. Chef Melago tended the grill, serving up hot dogs and cheeseburgers. I'm not sure whether the cheeseburgers were bootlegged or not. Accompanying the meal was a broad assortment of soft drinks including a few I'd never heard of before and several I'd never tasted, including the famous Cranberry Dry. The brownies were tremendous, and for the Netscape users in the group there were even "magic cookies." [Footnote 2]. For entertainment during lunch, Adam Revesz treated us to a spot-on drop-dead impersonation of Chris Trotter describing Son Of Beast. That impersonation is sure to end up on somebody's end of season videotape; there were enough cameras there to shoot it in Circle-Vision [Footnote 3].

By mutual agreement we all met at the Rollo Coaster for the group tour portion of Call of the Wild 2000. After a ride on Rollo Coaster (I still don't know how Robb and I managed to both fit into one of those seats), we headed for the unique Wild Mouse. The wait was a long one, and in addition to taking lots of pictures of the Mouse, I had a fairly technical conversation with Brian on the subject of coaster controls. All because I complained about what his colleague did to one of my longtime favorite rides... 8-)

I climbed into a car with Dave Sandborg, and he reminded me that when the ride was at Alton Towers, the lift was enclosed in a rotating barrel. Suddenly both the tilted lift and the strange curved struts beneath the lift hill made sense to me. Like most big Wild Mouse rides, Idlewild's Mouse is heavily braked, quite often with braking you are thankful for when you hit the unbanked curves. The problem with this is that the brakes tend to be violent themselves, so the ride action tends to be to whip around a curve, accelerate down a straightaway, slow with a jerk on the brake, then repeat the process with the next curve. Well, Idlewild has apparently had enough of this nonsense, and so they had all but one of the trim brakes turned off. Instead, they have equipped this Mouse with magnetic fin brakes which operate very smoothly, slowing the cars without that awful jerking motion. The setup is really very, very cool. I think we're going to see more and more of these magnetic brakes, and I think a Wild Mouse is a perfect application for them.

John spent much of the day ogling the ride operators and telling us how cute he thought they were. He's usually like that, but not usually to this degree. But while he has no problem telling us what he thinks of the girls, it was Robb Alvey who finally did something about it, obtaining for him the name of one of the Wild Mouse operators. Not that John did anything with that information, but it was more than John did himself. All of us straight single men ought to have friends like Robb around. 8-)

From the Mouse we wandered into Racoon Lagoon by way of the H2Ohhh Zone, and we all took rides on the adult hand cars. My parents, particularly my Dad, have liked amusement parks for as long as I can remember, and I guess it runs in the family...I learned about a year ago that my grandfather once worked in an amusement park (a food joint, I think, at Olentangy Park), and I don't doubt that there is probably some connection between me and the German circus Althoff family. But while I was growing up, the only park we ever visited was Cedar Point, and in the 1970's, kiddie rides at Cedar Point meant Hamptons. As a result, I never even saw a hand-car ride until I was too big to ride. So I had to take advantage of the adult hand cars at Idlewild. I was surprised at how easy it was to get the thing going, in fact I had to reverse direction to slow the car enough to keep from colliding with someone else in the loading area. It's a neat ride. More parks should have these. 8-)

From the hand cars we were off to the Mister Rogers Neighborhood Trolley. The route took us through part of Racoon Lagoon, where I failed to take note of all the kiddie rides, but I did notice that the park has cleverly located their Herschell wet-boat ride at the edge of a large pond.

I have not watched Mr. Rogers' show in many years, but Idlewild did an amazing job with the set pieces. I did think it odd that our trolley conductor told us at the outset that the trolley ALWAYS goes backwards before going forward, but then once through the tunnel, it never went backwards again. With the trolley nearly full of r.r-c folks, we invited all of the puppets to the castle. "Come along, come along, to the castle Hug-N-Song." For what it's worth, I don't remember ever hearing that song before.

We missed the train that was to take us back to Hootin' Holler, which is just as well since a few of us opted for Sno Cones. Not really Sno Cones, as they were served in plastic cups rather than paper cones, but it was the usual Gold Medal syrup. I don't know why so many of us felt compelled to buy Sno Cones, but I am sure Mark McKenzie had something to do with it. Those who weren't eating Sno Cones took a ride on the bumper cars. Once the ice was consumed, it was off to Confusion Hill.

Confusion Hill is a heck of an illusion created by the construction of a tilt-house. When we stopped in the kitchen it became clear what the effect has been of our "No Deposit, No Return" beverage culture because none of the first-timers in the room knew that glass Pepsi bottles are returnable. It's not clear to me why, but we changed tour-guides midway through the tour, but other than that, it was a most entertaining experience, and a perfect setup for Dizzy Lizzy's.

Years ago, amusement parks were full of illusion attractions. Early motion simulators gave riders the sensation of taking a train or carriage to a faraway place. Tilt houses were popular, and the haunted swing was a common attraction. It seems Idlewild is doing its part to uphold this grand tradition with the installation of Dizzy Lizzy's saloon, right on the junction point of the Quadrasphere. It's too complicated to explain here, but I know I somehow missed the Gary Story dart board because I was too busy trying to figure out where all the beer bottles came from in the preshow. The main room was hot and crowded, but the illusion is amazingly effective.

By this time our group was breaking up. We had a snack in the mine shaft kitchen (I had the Potato Patch fries), we took a round-trip ride on the train [Footnote 4], we rode the Whip, the Caterpillar, and the Rollo Coaster again, we rode the Trinado, and we noticed that the park was suddenly extremely crowded. Someone speculated that the waterpark had closed. It was time to go home, so we walked around the Rollo Coaster back to our picnic site, and back to our car.

It was more or less at this time that I suddenly could not remember where I had put the car keys. John and I searched every compartment, every bag, every box, and every pocket we could find. All but one, and of course, that's the bag where I put the keys. We were searching all over the park even though I knew the keys were in the car. Knowing we needed to get on the road, we called a locksmith. He came out and got the codes from Oldsmobile to cut us a new key, but there was one hitch: the car is equipped with an electronic anti-theft system and Oldsmobile didn't have the anti-theft code for this particular vehicle in their computer. We commenced an hour-long decoding process to try and figure out which key blank we needed. We were running out of codes, and it was getting really late. John decided he wanted to slip into the back seat and try to get some sleep. As he did so, he picked up The Bag. Hours and hours we had waited, searched, fiddled with keys and cursed General Motors. And here was the keyring, right at the bottom of a bag we both swore we checked a dozen times. Five minutes later we were finally on the road, with a five-hour drive ahead of us. I got home just before 6:00am. My advice to you is that if you have a General Motors car with VATS...that is, if you have an otherwise conventional ignition key with a little black resistor chip in it...go to a locksmith NOW and have the key read, find out what the VATS code number is, and write it down in the vehicle someplace. If I had known that one bit of information that Oldsmobile thoughtlessly failed to provide, we would have been on the road in about ten minutes instead of three hours.

The key incident was one of those things that can ruin your whole day. I refused to allow it to ruin mine, though. Idlewild was too much fun, particularly with a dozen friends from r.r-c. I can't think of a better way to spend a pre-holiday weekend.

Next: Paramount's Kings Island and Stricker's Grove.

--Dave Althoff, Jr.

Footnote 1: Such as putting one or more group members into the car trunk so that they are not counted at the ticket gate. [Return to text]

Footnote 2: I'm not kidding! That's what it said on the package: "MAGIC COOKIES" [Return to text]

Footnote 3: A special-venue film format developed by Disney which uses nine synchronized cameras to produce a full-circle panoramic view. See it in the Canada pavilion at EPCOT. Funny, I'd expect the Canada pavilion to feature something in IMAX, which is itself Canadian... [Return to text]

Footnote 4: Come along, come along, to the...oh. Sorry, wrong train. [Return to text]

--DCAjr

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