"Whatever they did, it worked!"
Traffic through Chicago was light, but there were some areas where I could see snarls and back-ups. When I approached a critical decision point, I saw a back-up on IR-84, and an electronic billboard proclaimed that the Skyway traffic was "light". So, remembering the hell I had sat through last summer, I opted for the Skyway, IR-90.
![[Chicago Skyway at night]](pic/skyway640.jpg)
This
was, apparently, a different circle of hell. And apparently, not a very popular
one. Which in this case was a Good Thing™. Lanes disappeared from either
side, and suddenly I was alone. Then my lane started to disappear. Concrete
barriers on both sides with the space of about 0.85 lanes in the middle. Flood
this channel and you'd have a log flume.
"Stay on target!" I thought, for no readily apparent reason as I drove through this seemingly endless trench. I checked the mileage. I drove on. I thought I was annoying the living crap out of the guy behind me by driving at the posted speed limit (hey, I'm bigger than you...) but I checked the rear-view and there was nobody there. "Almost...there..." I thought. I finally escaped The Trench through the tollbooth (I paid extra for this crap?) and into Northern Indiana. It was right around Midnight, and time to start querying motels.
Uh-oh.
![[My hotel room]](pic/hotel640.jpg)
Exit
after exit went by, and at each one a motel clerk informed me that there was
no room at the Inn. I've been here before. I was plagued by visions of the crummy-but-expensive
rooms I've stayed in East of Kennywood. Well, I got the expensive part right,
though the integer portion of the total was still only two digits. I almost
got the last room, though, and I did get the last parking space [Footnote
1]. I entered the room, which was about the temperature of a
meat locker. Since I hadn't used the camcorder at SFGAm, I left it packed up.
Shortly after I arrived, I had things well arranged, and the room looked like
almost every other motel room I've slept in: dark.
Morning came a little earlier than I required to Rensallear, Indiana. It was late enough that I had missed the no-extra-charge breakfast [Footnote 2], but early enough that if I really wanted to I could stop someplace on my way to Indiana Beach. I checked out, jumped in the car, and headed South. In very little time, I was parked in the free parking lot at the island end of the park. I grabbed the camera, and headed for the park. Halfway across the suspension bridge, the camera started graphically yelling at me, something about not liking the humidity here. Uh-oh!
It was lunch time, so I went on down the ramp and walked down the boardwalk. Indiana Beach is sort of the antithesis of Great America so far as the way the park is laid out. It's a straight line from the Ferris wheel, down the boardwalk past most of the rides to the arcade, ballroom and Skyroom restaurant. After some consternation, I finally decided on a corndog, chili cheese fries, and a root beer float. Some time ago somebody warned me about the root beer, claiming it "wasn't very good," contrary to the claims of signs around the park. It seems that Indiana Beach serves its own variety of root beer. Well, the warning was entirely accurate, but not necessarily because there is anything wrong with Indiana Beach root beer, but rather because of the entirely unacceptable manner in which it is served.
In my travels, I thought root beer was one of those things that Indiana took seriously, along with corn, basketball, and wooden roller coasters. Root beer is a product which is ideally served extremely cold, preferrably in a heavy glass mug which has been cooling off in the freezer for several hours. I was, then, understandably shocked and surprised when I was served a root beer float made with warm root beer. Once the ice cream melted (well, that which I didn't eat) the root beer was still warm, and adding ice to the cup didn't help...the ice melted, and the root beer remained warm. I was beginning to think the special feature of their local root beer is that it decays exothermically! Ick!
So my day was not getting off to a great start. My camera was still complaining about condensation, so I bought my first-session ride pass and used it to ride the Hopkins chairlift back to the island so I could dump the camera in the car. Then I returned for some proper coaster riding.
My first stop was the Lost Coaster of Superstition Mountain (LoCoSuMo). Unlike a lot of people, I actually liked this one last year. Like a lot of people, I liked it more this year. Some of the dark-ride stunts are returning to the ride, including a train effect and a very large explosion. My favorite, though, is the animated skeleton sitting in an old Superstition Mountain car, looking over the elevator lift. Our train pulled into the lift and started up; this guy asked us if we trusted the elevator, and pointed out that he wouldn't...and he's already dead! Anyway, when we reached the top without incident, the train cut loose and started rocketing around the structure. I don't know what they did to this ride since last summer, but the result is a much less violent ride. It's still a wild ride, but it has been slowed in some spots, straightened a little in others, and in general it has been made into a much more approachable coaster than the ride that opened last season. Now if only they could figure out a way to do away with the netting. Unfortunately, as much as I dislike it, I think the netting is less objectionable than most of the alternatives I can think of (yes, I've ridden the Ice Mountain Bobsled at Enchanted Forest). Anyway, LoCoSuMo is without a doubt the most creative application of roller coaster engineering I think I have ever seen.
On down the boardwalk, I took a ride on the Galaxie, whuch has never been known for being a fabulous coaster. It's a little different this year, too. I'd heard that Indiana Beach normally uncouples the trains and runs single cars early in the season, but this is late July...and the ride is running single cars. I asked an operator about it, and he indicated that the lift drive was replaced, and the new drive isn't quite powerful enough to run the two-car trains. Well, it's a plausible explanation, anyway. The Galaxie runs fairly well even with the single cars, certainly better with its old-style SDC cars than the Python at Coney Island. I think the Galaxi is a decent design, but it suffers from that long helix in the middle at the high end; SDC should have taken better cues from Schwarzkopf and split the helix, or put it lower on the ride. It just tends to feel a little slow, but then I guess that makes up for the short track.
On down the midway, I finally reached the Hoosier Hurricane. It's always been a good solid coaster, and last year they did some black magic on it that turned it from a good ride into a great ride. The park was fairly busy, so there was a bit of a wait even though both trains were running. I got my ride in the red train, which, I get the impression is the ride's secondary train. Although...the red train bears the worst scars from the long-standing "ride runs every fifteen minutes or when train is full" rule, as the interior is covered with graffiti. In visiting parks, I've noticed a funny thing about graffiti: It is a form of vandalism which is associated (in the park, at least) with idleness. At Cedar Point, for example, while ride queues are frequently full of people, graffiti will usually only be found in the areas closest to the station, in those areas where people wait during ride breakdowns. Elsewhere in the queue, so long as the queue is moving, there is no graffiti. Accordingly, the markings and carvings in the Hoosier Hurricane train can probably be directly traced to long delays in the station on slow days. Now that the rule is gone, I wonder if that will preserve the trains a little better.
Out on the course where it really counts, the Hurricane was flying. It wasn't quite up to the standard it set last season, but it is still running remarkably well, delivering airtime in large doses in all the right places. There's just a little more vibration on some of the peaks than last year, but that's really not a bad thing.
Across the parking lot from Hoosier Hurricane is the park's real stand-out coaster, Cornball Express. I took a seat in the back of the train, dropped the lap bar, and off we went. There really isn't a long wait for Cornball's back seat as everyone seems to go for the front, which is interesting because Cornball is so obviously a back-seat ride. Okay, so in the back you're slightly less likely to get wet on the first drop than you are in front (assuming you match up with a boat on the flume). Cornball's compact layout is a bit like Pegasus at Big Chief's, except that it runs a whole lot better...it is, perhaps, what Pegasus would have been if Pegasus had been a great ride. Of course, what makes Cornball a great ride is the series of airime moments, made even better by the spot where it does the Skyliner thing where you're airborne and pulled in four different directions almost at once. It's a ride that reminds you that a roller coaster is a three-dimensional experience, giving you translation and rotation on all three axes, something that coasters don't do very often. It's just a little thing, but it's no mild family coaster.
Indiana Beach had one more coaster for me to ride, the Tig'rrr, a Schwarzkopf Jet Star. I was the next-to-the-next-in-line when abruptly the operator grabbed a piece of what appeared to be conveyor belting and laid it over the station brake. The ride was shut down just in time for the downpour to start.
Without a doubt, this has been a lousy summer, weather-wise. For the entire summer, Columbus, Ohio has had four 90-degree days, and patterns of as many as twenty consecutive days with severe thunderstorms. With statistics like that, it's surprising that my park visits this season have not featured more washouts. But through careful planning and dumb luck I have not had to deal with much rain this season. But of all the parks that would feature rain for my visit, it would have to be Indiana Beach, a park that doesn't seem to handle rain very well.
The rain lasted for about a half hour, punctuated with thunder and lightning. Finally the storm quit and the rain let up, but didn't stop. I took the opportunity to ride the bumper cars. Indiana Beach has a decent set of bumper cars, and typically a bunch of incompetent drivers who tend to get all jammed up in one corner of the floor. On this particular afternoon, the bumper cars also featured an operator with a particularly exasperating habit. After each cycle, the operator ventured out onto the ride floor and personally straightened and repositioned each and every car on the ride so that they were all pointing in the designated direction and not touching other cars. The procedure took several minutes after each cycle, and was quite frankly causing the park patrons waiting in line to express their displeasure in extraordinarily graphic terms. And they are right; I have ridden a lot of bumper cars, but never before have I seen an operator express this degree of obsessive-compulsive behavior before letting people out onto the ride. It turned a short line into a long wait, and eventually turned a long line into a really really long wait. Quite frankly it's one of the silliest things I've seen a ride-op do. And I have seen ride operators do some prety silly things!
I finally got my bumper car ride, I had a corndog aboard the Pronto Princess (the original Schafer Queen excursion boat now convereted into a restaurant) and since the rain had quit, I finally got my Jet Star ride. I think the Jet Star is easily one of the finest knockdown coaster designs I have ever ridden; it's a shame that the world seems to be filled with Galaxis and Zyklons instead of Jet Stars and Wildcats. I guess Pinfari is cheaper than Schwarzkopf, but sometimes, design-wise, you get what you pay for.
I continued to work my way down the boardwalk. The rain hadn't made the crowd any smaller, but it did make the air much heavier and stickier. It was also late enough that the two ride sessions were overlapping, and the lines were getting long. I checked my watch and remembered that I lose an hour going home, and decided it was about time to leave.
On the way home I took a quick detour past the Old Indiana Fun Park site. A new, very tall wire fence has been erected all the way around the perimeter of the site, which appears to be larger than the former park site. I don't know if it is because I didn't get as close, or if they've done some demolition, as the major OIFP buildings seem to be gone now. The site isn't totally clear, though, as I spotted at least one of the Omeggatron tubs, what appears to be a Ranger frame, and a bunch of coaster parts strewn about in the yard that doesn't get mowed anymore. I guess that stuff will now serve as playground equipment for game-playing game [Footnote 3]. Such a tragedy to lose rides like that. Ah, well...
Indiana Beach was a good way to end the weekend. Along with Kiddieland, it nicely offsets the programmed design of Great America. It was an interesting weekend, full of somewhat new experiences. Three new-to-me coasters, two new-to-me parks, a ride on the improved LoCoSuMo...now it was time to go home. And spend the next month writing the trip reports.
--Dave Althoff, Jr.
Footnote 1: I know there was another room because a traveler I had met in a motel lobby at a previous exit checked in right after me. [Return to Text]
Footnote 2: There's no such thing as a free breakfast...[Return to Text]
Footnote 3: I've heard that the current owner of the Old Indiana site is turning it into a game reserve. Note the absence of the letter "p". [Return to Text]
--DCAjr
Next: Paramount's Kings Island (#6)
Back to Trip Reports 2003
