Trip Report: Adventureland

Altoona, Iowa - 08/05/2002

"A study in demographics?"

I'd spent the night at a motel right across the street from Adventureland, but that doesn't mean I got a good night's sleep. See, the night before, I arrived at around 11pm. Little did I know that I'd spend the next six hours not sleeping, but talking coasters with Wolf. Funny how things work out with coaster nuts...I am from Ohio, he is from Michigan, he works in Kansas, and where do we finally meet up? In the middle of Iowa. Go figure.

Anyway, Adventureland looks to be a little park with a huge ego. The entrance driveway, for instance, is something like eight lanes wide. The infrastructure seems to be built on the scale of Walt Disney World for a tiny little independent regional theme park. But d'ya know something? For them, it seems to work. They're not a Six Flags park or a Cedar Fair park, but they are also 200 miles from anybody else. They're about equidistant from both Valleyfair! and Worlds of Fun, but far enough away from both that they really don't share the market with anybody. Locally, they are the major theme park and so they might as well act the part.

Once inside the gate, everyone has to go to the left or to the right and through a tunnel under the railroad track. That's right, in accordance with the layout of Disneyland, the first thing you come to at Adventureland is an earthen berm with a railroad track on top. Of course the train is a gas-powered Chance CP Huntington and the layout is a long dogbone instead of a loop around the park, but the flavor is there. Past the berm is what looks like the courthouse square of many small towns across the country. In the center of the square sits a Chance carousel of fairly recent vintage. The band organ music is recorded, but it is also repeated on speakers surrounding this stage-managed set. The buildings around the square include basic administrative facilities like a rest room building, customer service center, rental center, candy shop, and a couple of gift shops. Opposite the train station, the "street" continues for a block or so into the center of the park...past a restaurant, an arcade, and a bingo parlor. This street takes you right into the center of the park, to the Space Shot tower and the adjacent bumper cars.

Another spur off the town square entrance takes you straight into the carnival ride collection, past a Chance Ferris wheel, Zamperla miXer, Chance Inverter, PTC Crazy Daisy, Hrubetz hydraulic Paratrooper, and the park's famous sky ride. Everyone I have talked to about this park tells me I must ride the Sky Ride, and looking at it, I can see why. It's a fixed-grip 2-seat model very similar to the one at Indiana Beach, probably built by O. D. Hopkins/Skyfair. The interesting thing about this ride is that it literally goes through the treetops as it runs across the park. I mean, tree tops are literally trimmed around this ride. The bad thing about it is that during my visit, it was closed. Some unspecified mechanical problem; it had been down for a few days.

Across from this sort of main midway of flat rides was a row of game joints. Then back up near the end of Main St. is a structure housing the Underground, probably the second most twisted ride Custom Coasters ever built. I had a fairly long wait for it. The wait led into a room where a detailed animatronic told the story of the mines in the area, but he was kind of hard to understand, partly because the speaker is at the opposite end of the room from the figure, and partly because the announcement PA and departing train on the other side of the queue door is a whole lot louder than he is. Finally, the train rumbles in and the doors open. It's a roller coaster train, looking a lot like the old PTC junior cars, but with T-shaped lap bars like the old Arrow mine trains. I sat in the front of the last car, but did not get a good look at the running gear. What I do know is that the ride is most certainly gravity powered, it runs a roller coaster train, and it has multiple roller coaster lifts. It's all a slow downhill run (apart from the lifts) and gives a dark ride as you would expect from any dark ride, with a number of well-done audio, visual, and animated stunts. The thing that impressed me, though, was how well the train handles the tight curves of the wood coaster track.

Okay, that's one coaster down, three to go. I worked my way around the right-hand side of the park and got to the Tornado entrance just as the ride queue was being shut down. Whoops! Don't tell me I'd miss another coaster...worse yet, my first Cobb coaster?! The park people present proclaimed that the ride required only routine realignment, and would reopen later in the day. Dejected, I continued on to the Dragon.

The Dragon sits on an island and is accessed through an enormous stucco building very reminiscent of the kinds of buildings you see in the photos of the old Coney Island parks. The boarding platform is unreasonably high in the air, and the maintenance catwalk beneath the station track is clearly visible from the queue, along with the maintenance man giving continuous attention to the train, apparently well aware that Hopkins doesn't support it anymore. Which is probably a good thing; if I were Hopkins I might disown these cars too. They seem to track sort of OK; they're basically a short version of the Arrow Runaway Train, but with bad seats and worse shoulder bars attached. The headbanging is bad enough going up the lift...then after the two vertical loops the track goes through a figure-8 helix. Ouch! It's a neat ride, but if this is typical of a Hopkins coaster then I don't think the world is significantly worse off for Hopkins dropping its line of steel coasters to concentrate on water stuff.

It appears that the original idea was to have this island house the Dragon coaster station with two identical gazebo-shaped pavilions flanking it, each containing a classic ride. Today, the gazebo to the right contains a Himalaya-type ride. But the one on the left now serves a different purpose. It contains some carnival games, but its real purpose is to serve as the entrance to Outlaw Gulch, which appears to be the park's newest development. Walking through the gazebo leads to a path back to a "western town" themed area. Here are the park's new family inflatable raft ride, and the Outlaw.

The Outlaw is a CCI compact twister. I got a ride on it, and whether it was the heat, my sleep deprivation, or simply the way the ride was running, I wasn't too impressed with it. This is probably because the ride consists mostly of helix turns, in a configuration that the PTC trains don't handle very well. It was an OK ride, but nothing spectacular, and it's a bit short. It was yet another CCI compact twister, and I don't think it was their best effort.

Beyond the Outlaw is a field containing a large tent for the Royal Hanneford Circus, which is set up behind the Dragon. Not having much interest in circuses, I doubled back around. Outlaw Gulch is a dead end area, accessible only via the Dragon's island. I stopped for lunch at a large eatery with a big rotating clock out front. The burger and fries were served up with assembly-line efficiency, including my special burger with no mustard. It was cheap, but it also wasn't very good. A decent value, but the food quality was cafeteria grade or worse. As I had my lunch, the flower bed at one end of the spacious outdoor plaza rose into the air to become the roof of a performance stage. That part of the installation is very nicely done, although there is an overhead cable that could just as easily have been run underground or along the roofline of the trellis surounding the patio. The show was far better than the burger, though again it was nothing spectacular. The show was credited to some production company, so I'm guessing it was one of these off-the-shelf amusement park shows where a park just adds some moderately talented sing-and-dance people to the canned music track for a mildly entertaining, blatantly inoffensive show. Popular music, flashy costumes, lots oif hand-waving, you know, the basic amusement park show.

Along the main midway I watched as an interesting machine pumped out funnel cakes. A multi-port dough head would spread batter onto a griddle in the fryer, the griddle would drop out from under the cake, after some time a pusher would push the cake under an overhead conveyor which would dip the top of the funnel cake into the hot oil while carrying it across to be served. I'd never seen such a system before. Quite clever, actually...

I wandered the park some more. I rode their Break Dance. I noticed the interesting demographics of the park; not only that it was the most colorless crowd I think I had seen at any amusement park this year, but also that the ride operators were an interesting mix. If you assume that each ride has two operators, I figured that the average age of the ride operators is about 36. The park employs a mixture of young and old operators, typically mixing youth and experience on the crews whenever possible. It's an interesting idea, and it seems to work. Although I wonder how many young operators are as a result placed in the interesting position of supervising their schoolteachers for the summer. I also stopped in at one of the park's arcades and ended up blowing all my remaining quarters on games of Q*Bert and Marble Madness. No pinball but the video selection was classic. No Tempest, though.

Finally, after much too long of a wait, the Tornado opened. Apparently there had been an adjustment problem with the skid brakes, although why it took so many hours to get the problem sorted out is more than I can comprehend. But they did get the problem worked out. The Tornado is really the best the park has to offer, which really does say great things about the Tornado because it really is a very nice park. The ride is a fairly basic out-and-back layout, with lots of wonderful airtime, decent pacing, and a good ride. The wood coasters on my tour were certainly improving, although Tornado suffers a little because Iowa has had an extremely hot, dry summer, and wood coasters seem to suffer a bit from that kind of weather. But no matter, the Tornado still delivers, and it's my kind of coaster.

I took a few rides, but it was later than I had planned. I scratched Arnold's Park from my list of things to do, but I still left Adventureland. It would be a long drive to Minneapolis. Even so, Adventureland is a gem of a park. Of all the parks I visited on this trip, it isn't a corporate theme park, but rather a small, independent park. But it is a small independent park doing what it does best. It's the largest park in the region, and it takes a lot of cues from the big corporate themers. But it's Des Moines' hometown park. Bugs Bunny doesn't work here, and neither do Mickey Mouse, Snoopy, or the Berenstain Bears. But the park is a no-nonsense Iowan theme park with a good ride collection and a nice selection of coasters. I liked the place. I'm glad I stopped.

--Dave Althoff, Jr.

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