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"Why can't we have another ride or two?"
Saturday, I went up to Wyandot Lake to buy my season pass. As park visits go it was a relatively quick one, but then Wyandot is a pretty small park.
I met up with my Dad at the gate, and made my first tour of the park with him. Once again, Wyandot Lake's capital improvement for this year is (drum roll please...) Cosmetic Improvements. You know, the number of years Premier/Six Flags has sunk Wyandot Lake's capital budget into "cosmetic improvements," it ought to be the best looking amusement park on the planet. But you know something? It still isn't. This year there are some new signs up, the references to "caramel apples" and "candy apples" have been removed from the candy shop building, the remote control boats are gone (though the sign is still there) and lots of new vinyl-coated steel picnic benches and umbrellas have been added. The new stuff looks good, but when is this park going to get some new iron in it? Six Flags has enough perfectly good ride pieces rotting away in various storage locations that they could build two or three parks with twice the ride count of Wyandot Lake...so why can't they set up a couple of those pieces at Wyandot?
Oh, Wyandot did get a new ride this year...an extra-pay 4-in-1 bungee trampoline whatchamacallit with a 200-pound weight limit. I don't understand the appeal of those things...and really I don't consider it to be a ride. We took a look at it and saw how they needlessly hacked up a tree to put it in rather than installing it 60' to the right of its present location. We took a ride on the roller coaster, wandered the midway a bit, then Dad opted to go home.
I stayed behind and investigated the midway further. The last time any new ride pieces were added to the park was for the 2000 season when the Tilt-A-Whirl, carousel, and four kiddie rides were installed. Thing is, that was also the year that we lost the Rock-O-Plane and five of the kiddie rides. So nothing has been done to boost the park's ride count. Couldn't we at least get the Flying Scooters that were removed from Geauga Lake?
On the other hand, maybe part of the problem is that Wyandot has enough trouble maintaining the stuff it already has. It appears that about half of the cars on the bumper cars are not working...or maybe it's just rider incompetence, as there seemed to be a lot of small riders who couldn't grasp the concept of "Push the pedal and turn the wheel." The bumper cars that work are halfway decent, although the floor could stand to have the rust layer buffed away. A more critical problem on that ride is the stockade queue that is so narrow that most adults have to walk through sideways. Moo!
I didn't ride the carousel, but its full scenery package is in place now. It only took them two and a half years to put the thing together and get it running. By comparison, the old carousel was removed at the end of the 1999 season, completely restored, and installed and operating at the Zoo by Memorial Day of 2000.
I spotted John Peck over at the Spider and so opted to take a ride. The Spider is back up and running now, after taking much of last season off, and it's running quite well. Some of the tub noses are a little beat up from operator errors (something about crashing the tub nose into the control rod tunnel) but it looks like somebody is preparing to do some extensive body-work on the tubs, so eventually they should be looking good again. The Tilt-A-Whirl got a fresh coat of paint this season and looks really good. I didn't ride the Scrambler but it appears to be running at the proper speed and in the proper direction for a change. From the Ferris wheel I got a glimpse of some kind of tower over at the Zoo that, from a distance looked like a kiddie bounce tower, but it turned out to be merely a construction crane. And I took a ride on the roller coaster.
The Other Paper did a story on Ohio's roller coasters, listing their top 36 rides. The listing was far from complete, failing to mention about half of the state's kiddie coasters, not to mention the coaster at Coney Island. But where they made no sense at all was in ranking Kings Island's Beastie at #29, and Wyandot Lake's Sea Dragon at #35. Sea Dragon and Beastie are practically identical rides apart from being mirror-images of each other. Okay, yeah, the Beastie has a tunnel on the first drop, but it also has a trim brake on its third hill, and it has had its final dip unprofiled. Sea Dragon, on the other hand, has no tunnel, but it also has no trim brake, and still has its final dip. In other words, if you want to know how the Beastie was meant to operate, take a ride on the Wyandot Lake Sea Dragon. It really is a very nice little ride, a mild coaster to be sure, but it runs very well, and really is better than the Beastie in almost all important respects (particularly length of queue!).
I finished up my day on the Sea Dragon, then got some dinner on the way home. Hmmm...Now where should I go...?
--Dave Althoff, Jr.
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