As trips to Cedar Point go, this was the longest one I have taken in a long time. As it's my fourth documented trip to the park this month, this trip report should be comparatively short.
Friday started early. Really early. I was out of the house before 5:00am. Was I insane? Maybe, but that's not why I was driving to Cedar Point in the dark. That is better explained by the National Amusement Park Historical Association's 2003 convention, "Pointing to 25 Years of Fun". Festivities were scheduled to begin with early morning ride time on Millennium Force at 7:00.
Millennium Force started up just a little behind schedule and I took my first rides of the season on the 310-foot-tall machine. It's about the same as always...a quick ride to the top, an incredibly smooth ride, three inversions that Cedar Point won't admit to. There were just under 200 people present for the event, so the park was only running two trains. But that doesn't tell the whole story. You see, the National Amusement Park Historical Association is a group of amusement park nuts, NOT a group of coaster nuts. Sure, there are coaster nuts in the group, but there are also people in the group who couldn't care less about coasters. The result is a very interesting dynamic for coaster ERT sessions. With the yellow and blue trains running, we would return to the station and the operators would practically beg us to go through the special access gate and get back on the train. This for more than two hours, well more than the hour of ride time we had been promised! Okay, sure, we also had an hour of ride time scheduled on the Blue Streak, and I like the Blue Streak, but I also know that almost any afternoon I can walk-on to that coaster. That is not the case for Millennium Force, so I stuck it out.
It was interesting to watch the coaster come to life during ERT. I could tell with my own rides that the ride was getting faster with each cycle. Partway through the ride session, maintenance finished blow-torching the wheels of the red train to preheat them, and the crew put the red train into service, leaving the water dummies in place on the train. The blue and yellow trains had been running for an hour, and they cycled the red train with only the weights on board. Riding the blue train, immediately behind the red train, we kept getting delayed on the lift hill because the lightweight, not warmed up yet red train was running very slowly, taking a very long time to get through the safety brake at the end of the ride. As the ride continued to run, the red train's performance improved, and when the park gates opened for resort guest/Joe Cool Club ride time, the water dummies were removed from the red train and it was running fast enough to keep from delaying the other trains. It's amazing how much faster those trains go after they've run for a while!
The Millennium Force crew continued to beg us to keep riding, but I took advantage of my early arrival and my Joe Cool-enhanced season pass to go wait in line for Top Thrill Dragster. This time I did a couple of things different from my last ride. I waited the extra time to ride from the back station, and I took the extra time to ride in the front seat. This gave me a neat vantage point to learn even more about this amazing ride. By departing from the right-hand station and sitting in the front seat, I got to watch the train ahead of me depart, then I got to watch the launch sled return. I finally got to see the top of the launch sled, just a flat steel block with an oval opening in the top. The other thing I noticed was that the two tow ropes are not visible in the launch track, as they run in enclosed channels on either side of the launch channel. That makes me feel better about the consequences of a broken rope.
From the front seat, a ride on Dragster is very different from a ride anywhere else in the train, just because you can see everything, and because of the incredible amount of wind in your face at 120 MPH. At the end of the ride I realized I was blind in one eye, but quickly determined that it was because of the large splotch of...something...that had slammed into my glasses at some ludicrous speed. I reiterate If you're going to ride Top Thrill Dragster, I strongly suggest some form of eye protection!
I spent the rest of the morning riding a series of rides, trading off between groups of fellow NAPHA folks all morning long, then I exited the park for lunch in the Coral Courtyard. It was a Cedar Point picnic of bratwurst, pasta, potato salad, beans, and a few additional garnishes. The plastic spoons were no match for the ice cream, but I managed anyway. Lunch was followed by the Heritage Fund auction which raised a considerable sum through the sale of various artworks and miscellaneous amusement park junk. Yes, junk. Come on, now. Art prints are collectible items, but some of the stuff that brings the most excitement at auction are bits of identifiable or even unidentifiable wood and steel, just because it was part of some amusement park before it was retired and somebody grabbed it before it reached the scrap heap, so some park enthusiast could spend too much money on it at auction.
(No, I didn't buy the Gerstlauer lap bar. I thought about it, and I could have got it cheap since nobody wanted to haul it home on an airplane (I live within driving distance), but I opted not to bid on it.)
I went back into the park and rode more rides, and generally enjoyed the park until the afternoon's activity. I forget the man's name, but we went into Cedar Point's maintenance facility behind the Corkscrew. He showed a group of about 50 of us the smallish facility. Every time I go into a park maintenance shop it turns out to be smaller than the last one I visited. Disney's shop was a huge manufacturing facility; Kings Island's shop was a half-dozen interconnected pole-barns crammed full of spare parts and enough space to dismantle half a park's worth of coaster cars; Cedar Point's shop is about the size of a 3-bay auto repair shop. One wall is covered with a rack full of fresh urethane and nylon coaster wheels, and there are a few additional parts about, along with charts on the wall giving parts specifications for various coasters. Adjoining rooms held the paint shop, the glass shop, and a machine shop, but it is clear that most of the ride maintenance doesn't happen in this shop, but out at the rides. This is in a park where the maintenance program allows for a combined 96% up-time for all rides for an entire season. We had an interesting talk for about an hour, then I returned to the park. By riding Mean Streak I finally managed to ride all of the coasters in the park that I actually ride (I can't ride Jr. Gemini or MantisTCFKAB), after only four visits. It never used to take that long. I even rode rides I almost never ride, like the Turnpike Cars. I got one of the newer, deeper cars where my arm is too short to reach the operator handle, but my legs are too long to comfortably reach the go pedal. The car's steering was a lot more responsive than the Cadillac Car I drove on my last visit. The livery on the Turnpike car suggested that it was a Corvette, but I submit that the only things that car has in common with a Corvette are the flags on the hood and the Fiberglas body.
As closing time approached, we still were not finished. We gathered in the Coral Dining Room of the Convention Center for light snacks as the park emptied out. The Coral Dining Room is in the oldest building at Cedar Point, the Grand Pavilion, built in 1888. The unfortunate thing is that over the years, the exterior has had most of its distinctive features removed, and on the inside the whole place has been institutionalized with acoustic ceiling tile, I suspect to hide air conditioning ducts. It's a shame; the once-grand building looks like it was renovated into oblivion in the 1950's and never recovered. Of course, most people don't care because the building is hardly visible from inside the park, and few park customers ever go in there. But looking at historical photos...more historical even than the slides Bruce Cassi was showing...it's hard to compare the Convention Center as it stands today with the Grand Pavilion hidden somewhere under all that siding and acoustic tile.
Of course the purpose of this gathering was simply to give us a place to gather before the night's festivities: an hour of ride time on Magnum XL-200, quite possibly the best coaster in its class. Tonight it would shine brighter than usual for us, operating in a moderate crosswind with its trim brakes completely off. Honestly, the weather has been so cold, windy, and nasty this spring that almost all of my many Magnum rides this season have been with the brakes off. The resulting high-speed run on the short hills at the end of the ride makes for more time riding the lap bar than riding the seat. Again it was two trains, no waiting, for ride after ride. I rode until they wouldn't let me ride anymore, then hiked down the midway to catch the last few minute of the overlapping ride session on Raptor. I've never been a huge Raptor fan, not the way that I am a Magnum maniac, but that doesn't mean I don't like the ride. So in the last minutes of ride time I managed perhaps a half-dozen brakeless Raptor rides to close out the evening. Finally it was time to go, to get some dinner, and to check into my motel, as Saturday would be another big day in the park.
Accordingly, I was up early again Saturday, for the 7am wake-up call was for ride time on Top Thrill Dragster. We met outside the ride, waiting for it to open. To almost nobody's suprise, it didn't. We waited as the park began to awaken. We passed the time with a group photo. Finally, just before our scheduled ride time ended, the ride opened and we filed into the queue. Half an hour of almost-continuous operation later, I was aboard the train. Meanwhile, out on the midway, hordes of people had arrived, and the line for Dragster extended past the station and down the midway as fas as the eye could see. This was just from the resort-guest opening!
The ride was amazing, as usual, but really not worth the wait those folks on the midway were facing. The park was fully open now, and I don't know how long the line was. So much for ride time! But wait! At the ride exit, Robin Innes was intercepting the NAPHA group. He and his colleagues had cooked up a scheme to make up for the missed ride time for today only, Dragster's "Freeway" entrance would be open to NAPHA members who had not had their promised morning ERT. For reference, Freeway is Cedar Point's handstamp-driven virtual queue system, which has so far never been put to use on Dragster because the ride isn't reliable enough. Of course we were not promised any particular riding time, so for us it was just a way to avoid much of the queue. I've never been one to use special front-of-line tickets and such, but as Tim pointed out, we did pay for ride time that we didn't get, so I made an exception this time and joined a few other NAPHA people for another ride.
This time it was a longer wait, with lots of dirty looks from people standing in the long line as we cruised past. Then I got a back seat ride on Dragster. From the back seat, you're really close to the big "engine" on the back of the train, and I jokingly asked if there shouldn't be a guard over the exposed timing belt. I've taken to riding Dragster much the same way I ride Millennium Force, generally with my hands resting loosely on my knees. On Millennium Force, there are several points on the ride where my hands generally come up a little while riding, and I made a concerted effort to see if this happened on Dragster. Every time I've ridden I've felt myself pushed hard into the lap bar over the top of the tower, but at the same time I have also noticed an involuntary tensing in my legs. I think there is weightlessness between the twists on Dragster, but it lacks any kind of a kick to actually throw you from the seat the way Magnum does. Maybe some day I will get my hands on an accelerometer kit so that I can find out for sure. It would be enough if I could lift my feet off the floor, but I'm pretty solidly wedged in there.
After Dragster it was approaching lunchtime and we (actually, the posse I was with at the time) decided "lunch" sounded like a good idea. Somebody wanted a burger. We saw the line spilling out the front door at Coasters. Somebody else suggested Johnny Rocket's, which we knew would be as bad or worse. Finally I suggested that if we were after burgers, we should go to Charlie Brown's Cook-Out in Camp Snoopy. So that's where we went.
Charlie Brown's is quite possibly the best-kept secret at Cedar Point, as it is almost never busy, probably due in part to its out-of-the-way location. That, and the fact that most people don't know that they serve the best hamburgers available in the park. It's a faux-rustic cookhoouse situated between the Samba Balloon and the Camp Bus, right across from the Lolly Swing. There, you can get an interesting variety of products...for the kiddies there are kiddie meal items including Uncrustables PB&J, cookies, and hot dogs. For the more mature palate they have hot dogs and 1/3-pound burgers, all of which are cooked on demand on an open fire, in full view of the midway. The one thing missing from Charlie's menu is fries of any description. You can get a tiny bag of potato chips, but no fries. Given that this is Cedar Point, that is not necessarily a bad thing, as the park has three kinds of fries available, two of which are invariably served undercooked, cold, soggy, and generally inedible. The third variety, the Berardi-style "Cedar Point" fries, are available from three locations, including the Happy Friar at the diagonally-opposite corner of Camp Snoopy, on the Gemini side of the midway. As expected, my cheeseburger was excellent. Nothing particularly special, it was just a good cheeseburger, much like I might grill myself.
There is one thing about Charlie Brown's that I find a little annoying, though. It's that $0.85 "topping cup," a little styrofoam dish containing a piece of lettuce, a slice of tomato, a couple of rings of onion, and a few dill pickle slices. My cheeseburger was $4.10, and quite frankly I don't really object to paying $4.95 for a good cheeseburger. Even as I type this, I am sitting in a restaurant awaiting the arrival of a $6 cheeseburger that is not significantly better or fancier than the one Cedar Point sells. Paying $4.95 for a burger inside an amusement park doesn't bother me. What bugs me is the 85 cents. I guess the idea is to give people an opportunity to be cheap by ordering plain $4.10 cheeseburgers. Thing is, to me it feels like the park is being cheap by breaking the price down this way and charging a ridiculous premium for what most of us think of as standard toppings. Heck, for $5 they ought to offer a limited topping bar as at Kennywood, or at least perform custom assembly. It's a minor thing, but it's the kind of thing the park ought to do that wouldn't cost them a dime, but could go a long way to making the customer not feel like he's being dinged for every little thing all day long.
Of course, had I been laying out Camp Snoopy I might have traded the locations of Charie Brown and Beagle Bay Outfitters. In the grand scheme of things in the park that wouldn't make as much sense, but it would put the best burgers in the park right next to the stand where you can get good fries. 8-)
Speaking of fries, after consuming burgers, that's where we went next. The posse began to break up, and before long, I was on my own again, naturally. The park was far more crowded than the date would suggest, with a particularly annoying sort of crowd. I've long suspected that there is an inverse relationship between the general level of basic human decency you can expect from a Cedar Point crowd and the number of motorcoaches parked in the front parking lot. And each dark yellow motorcoach, even though it has a smaller capacity than the big ones, counts double. It seems the park was holding some kind of special event for school bands and choirs, something that was attracting groups from three and four states away. The crowd looked more like July than May. Of course part of that was that it was a Saturday. You know how it is. Nobody goes to Cedar Point on Saturday anymore 'cause it's too darned crowded. Crowded enough, in fact, that they were running five trains (five?) on Gemini. In recent years they never have run more than four before CoasterMania. And if they're going to run five, why not go head and run all six? But again, they were running more than the usual number of trains, but that didn't change the fact that the park was really crowded. I guess I won't be taking many rides!
I checked my watch. Then, oddly enough, I headed for the Red Garter Saloon. Glutton for punishment, perhaps? Remember, last week I attended the show in there and emerged nearly deaf! Well, with little else to do, I figured I'd pop in and see if the situation improved. I did take certain precautions, specifically making sure I had a clear escape route, should my exit become necessary.
It did not become necessary. As a matter of fact, the show sounded significantly better than it sounded a week ago. It was not merely quieter, it was much better balanced, and actually sounded decent. The sound man was less impressed, as I know at least two microphones died in the middle of the show (aren't batteries wonderful?) but that made the show that much more impressive, as the performers traded out microphones literally without missing a beat.
I went out into the crowded park, and rode a few rides, took a few pictures, and gravitated back to Dragster where someone actually had to point out to me that sometime during the day, the big racing slick tires were removed from the backs of the five trains. Hmmm...the tires were there at lunchtime! The ride was running at a more regular interval, though. I took a ride on the train and counted 46 skeletons and a disembodied pair of hands in Boneville, which actually matches the sign. You know, it's amazing how much there is to do in that park when the coaster lines are ridiculous. At about 6:00, things started to moderate a bit as the first of the coaches started to leave. That gave me a chance at the coasters in the back of the park. Ultimately I ended up on Magnum as I almost always do. It had been a long and productive day. And Sunday morning I was supposed to have breakfast at the Merry-Go-Round Museum.
I did return to Cedar Point on Sunday evening, but only long enough to take a couple of Magnum rides before going home. In all, the NAPHA event was a whole lot of fun. Of course, we were all sworn to secrecy not to divulge the nature of the NAPHA ERTs because if the secret gets out, everybody will want to attend the NAPHA events and the ERTs won't be so amazing anymore. But I can tell you that it was a great event, in one of the best parks around.
--Dave Althoff, Jr.
Next: Paramount's Kings Island (#3)
Back to Trip Reports 2003