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"I must be absolutely nuts."
The I-X Indoor Amusement Park is an annual event: a month-long Spring carnival that takes place in the ancient tank factory on the grounds of the Cleveland Hopkins Airport. It lets the I-X Center fill the building when there isn't much else going on, and it gives the carnival a long-term indoor date.
When I got up on Saturday, the temperature was in the mid 30's, and snow was beating against the bedroom window. It was obvious that I wasn't going to get anything done on my backyard project today, so I thought, "Why not?" I grabbed the camera, jumped into the car, ran a few errands, and started driving North.
During the trip up, there was a mixture of rain and snow falling, but it was odd in that it was a mixture of rain and snow, not the usual mixture of rain and freezing rain. With the temperature above freezing, the snow was melting on contact. So for the drive up the roads were decent, but the driving conditions were not. High cross-winds made for a rather hairy trip. As I entered the Cleveland metro area, things got nastier as the snow started to just barely stick. What had I gotten myself into? Things were worse than had been predicted...when I arrived at the I-X Center it was about 6:30pm and there was a long line of cars pulling into the parking lot, paying the $5 parking fee at the tollbooth. Last time I came up for this, one of the event sponsors picked up the parking fee, which I thought was a fantastic idea, but they didn't do that this year. Event admission is $18; it cost me $12 with a coupon supplied by the local WB Network affiliate and printed from their website. There are many discounts available so nobody should have to pay full price to get in.
The layout is a little odd, in that in order to fill a nearly square hall, it's laid out in rows; the effect is kind of like taking a very long midway and setting it up like a Cedar Point queue block. Many times during the evening I found myself able to see where I wanted to be, but entirely unable to get there without walking all the way to one end of the hall or the other; there is no center aisle cutting through the show. The show is similar to previous years, but not the same: instead of two units of Bates Amusements, this year there is one unit of Bates Amusements and one unit of Mid America Shows. Both operations have a nice selection of equipment, although I saw more ride gondolas out of service among the Mid America rides. That said, Mid America has a lot of midway amenities out there and a couple of really spectacular pieces such as the KMG Freak Out (a 16-passenger version of the KMG Fireball/Chance Revolution/etc) and the Soriani & Moser Top Spin. Scattered all over the hall were these large signs with a picture of a giraffe and detailed information about height requirements, so that kids could find out their size before waiting in line. It appears that Bates has also implemented a system for designating rider heights, except that their system seems to use a bunch of symbols for each ride. I never saw a translation table for the Bates height symbols, though I wasn't actually looking for one, either.
Entrance to the event is through the extensive Kiddieland area, which backs up to a petting zoo (E. Coli, anyone?). The kiddieland area takes up about two and a half rows of floor space, with a number of standard kiddie rides. What is less standard about these is that most of the Bates kiddie rides have been trailer mounted, even if they are not normally trailer mounted rides. This means the Bates rides all have integrated fencing and nice smooth diamond-plate decking. New this year, if memory serves, are entrance arches on a couple of the trailer mount rides.
Moving on back through the hall I come to the big rides. It's mostly the usual selection for this event. Bates spectacular rides include the drop tower, Inverter, Screamer (think feet-dangling, one-armed Kamikaze), plus many others...all of Bates' rides look brand new, including the Eyerly Rock-O-Plane (NO SINGLE RIDERS means I didn't get to ride), Chance Zipper (heck that one may BE brand new...) and the Frank Hrubetz Tip Top. Bates also hauls around an ARM Quasar which is almost always in good working order. I mention that because there are other shows in the area that carry Quasars and I never figured out why as I never saw them operate. Oh, and they also brought along their Dartron Hurricane, Chance Yo-Yo, and Dartron Cliff Hanger. It wasn't clear to me who owned the Zamperla Skater, which is a variation on the Rockin' Tug, and quite impressive.
Mid America Shows brought several pieces to the show, including the aforementioned Freak Out and Top Spin. Because I am familiar with A of A's Fireball, the Freak Out just looks weird to me because it is so small, and because it is square. I'm not a big fan of the Soriani & Moser Top Spin, but it was kind of cool to watch the operator's display, which shows a wireframe model of the ride doing its thing. Mid America also provided a Ferris wheel, several kiddie rides, a cable-drive Tilt-A-Whirl, a Tornado and a Scrambler. My general impression was that Mid America's rides are in slightly rougher shape than the Bates rides, but that really isn't saying a lot. Bates' rides are practically in showroom condition, which means that any little dent on a Mid America ride tub is going to stick out like a sore thumb. Mid America's equipment is also in generally beautiful shape, and both of these shows appear to be excellent examples of what modern carnivals should look like.
Perhaps the most unusual ride at the event (unusual for a US carnival, anyway) was something called a Twister, which is a Scrambler variant. It looks kind of like a Scrambler, except that it has a diamond-plate platform, Fiberglas tubs, and the whole thing is covered with flashing lights. It's a nice, gaudy piece, almost too much flash for this show.
The longest line in the hall was back in the corner for the White Water flume ride, which I thought rather odd considering how cold and nasty it was outside. If I wanted to get that wet (and it's not a horribly wet flume...) I would have just walked out to my car. The other back corner of the hall contained an old Zyklon coaster, all run by hand, running with more cars on it than I cared to count. The coaster was showing its age, but was still in pretty good shape, and the crew was pumping people through very effectively.
Missing this year were some of the Bates rides I've come to expect over the years, such as the Cycloid, the Zero Gravity, or the Downdraft, all of which are on the other unit. Overall, it felt like there was a smaller ride package than usual, and a larger crowd than usual. More of the room was devoted to stuff other than the carnival, such as the petting zoo and the entertainment stage, which itself seemed to be a bad idea. The loudest noise in the room...yes, louder than the Hurricane or the Tip-Top; louder than the Zipper; louder even than the Zyklon coaster...was the incessant, but utterly unintelligible noise coming from the main stage. I guess it wasn't too bad if you were standing directly in front of the stage, but anywhere else in the hall it just sounded like industrial noise.
Overall, it wasn't really different enough from past years to be worth a return visit for me, particularly given the less-than-optimal driving conditions. When I left the hall, I had to clean two inches of new wet, heavy snow off of the right-hand side of my car (the left was clear) before I could leave, and from Brook Park down to almost Mansfield was a driving challenge: snow was coming down rapidly, blowing all over the place, and accumulating on the pavement. Because the temperature was above freezing, the snow was heavy and slushy, so traction was not a problem, but actually seeing the road and identifying the proper lane position was. All of the road signs on the southbound Interstate were totally obscured by snow. I never heard how much snow the Cleveland area got, but I know they've set a record for the winter now. Driving home in this mess, I decided I must be absolutely nuts to drive through this kind of weather just to get in an early-season roller coaster ride, on a Zyklon no less. Had I never been there before, it would have been a most noteworthy and worthwhile park visit, but because it was very similar to the show given in past years, and because of the bad weather for the drive, it really wasn't, for me, worth the hassle. That said, if you are in Northeast Ohio and want to see a couple of very nice carnivals in action, it's worth a visit.
The I-X Indoor Amusement Park runs through April 17.
--Dave Althoff, Jr.
Next: Paramount's Kings Island (#1)
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