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"I was expecting to hate it"
Saturday, May 3 was a preview day for Kennywood this season, and having already been to Kings Island twice, with Cedar Point not scheduled to open for another week, it seemed to be a good candidate for a park visit. So that's exactly what we did.
The park was not terribly busy, and we were able to park in the first row of the middle level of the parking lot. That means an escalator ride and a hike across the paid parking lot to get to the gate. We had bought and printed our tickets in advance on visitkennywood.com. That site suggests that an even deeper discount is available at Discount Drug Mart, and even lists the Central Ohio locations, but we made the decision to go rather late, and I learned after I got home that the people working at the Central Ohio locations of Discount Drug Mart have never actually even heard of Kennywood. So the online tickets were our best available deal. When we got to the park, our tickets refused to scan, but they granted us admittance anyway. This seems to be a year for ticket systems not to work properly; we had a similar problem, you may recall, with our season pass vouchers at Kings Island.
We had made arrangements to meet friend Pete at the park, but we were running late. It just so happened, though, that Pete was standing just inside the park past the entry tunnel as we walked in. We exchanged greetings, then proceeded to the Jack Rabbit. On the one hand, the Jack Rabbit never seems to change. It always delivers a fine ride, demonstrating to the world what it means to be a Kennywoodie, giving a smooth ride and of course that incredible airtime on the double dip. On the other hand, the more things stay the same, the more things change. Jack Rabbit now has a thoroughly modern control system, and this year all the trains kind of changed color, so now the trains are green, blue, and orange. It's hard to tell, but I wonder if they built a new train this year as they did last year. I didn't ask, but it would make sense if they are spending three years to totally replace the trains on the ride with new ones identical to the old ones. Last year I noticed new track on the run from the station curve to the first drop. It was hard to miss, as it was modern-gauge treated lumber, and I took note of how it was integrated into the ride's structure which is mostly constructed using larger gauge boards for the track. This year, I noticed that the high turnaround at the far end of the ride has been re-tracked, but this time the new track is the old-style large-scale lumber. I wonder how they get the raw materials to maintain the ride in this way. Actually I was joking in line that they might have to get it from Knoebels [Footnote 1].
Of course, a good ride on the Jack Rabbit is naturally followed with a ride on the Racer. Like the Jack Rabbit it has received noticeable amounts of trackwork in the off season, and as always was running quite well. This one does suffer a bit with the combination of individual seat belts and PTC's new-style open seat divider. Conceptually, I like the open frame divider because it gives people like me a little more room to spread out, but I don't like the fact that it seems to be made from a wide base material (I'm guessing rectangular steel tubing) with a rectangular cross-section. I'd much prefer something that was itself narrower (like the old dividers) or at least circular in cross section. That's exactly what PTC used in their prototype for the Texas Tornado train; I wonder why that wasn't the design used on the wood coaster train some ten years later. Anyway, the seat belt issue is two-fold. One is that the long inboard buckle ends tend to get tangled around the seat divider. The other issue is that when combined with the old-style handlebar, they are almost impossible for the crew to check once the lap bar is down. Yet check them they must, because the Racer ran for more than 75 years without them, so the locals are not accustomed to them. Add in the lack of urgency brought on by single-pair-of-trains operation, and they take a slow dispatch process and make it even slower. It really is the one blemish in this Kennywoodie's otherwise better-than-usual performance. And it is, after all, the first day of operation.
We noticed that the Aero 360 was operating, which is significantly better than the ride's condition the last time I saw it (which was "partially dismantled"). As usual, I declined to ride the thing. You know what would be great in that location, in place of the double Hawk? How about a giant gondola-type Ferris wheel?
It had been raining sporadically as we made our circuit of the park, so the Auto Ride was down for the day. We took a circuit or two on the Lil' Phantom now that it no longer has a maximum height limit. Thankfully it isn't the High Speed Thrill Coaster by any means, but its hills and curves are still pretty potent. We returned to the midway and ducked into the train station just as a massive downpour erupted. A massive downpour that tapered off into a shower as we left the station, and stopped incompletely as the ride ended. How convenient!
We switched off for a couple of rides on Thunderbolt. The repairs performed last season on the helix and on the first and last drops have held up quite nicely, so the Thunderbolt still holds its own with the other Kennywoodies.
Across from the Thunderbolt is Kennywood's newest attraction. At the corner of the building where the mill wheel once stood is Ghostwood Estate, Kennywood's new dark ride. After seeing the tragedy of Garfield's Nightmare many people were prepared for the worst with this new ride. In a little less space than the Gold Rusher facade took up, Ghostwood Estate is huge. It's a small and efficient footprint, but the building is about 50' tall, and from the top of Phantom's Revenge you can see that it may well be the tallest building at Kennywood. On the midway is a queue space that reminds me of the Den of Lost Thieves at Indiana Beach. Directly above that is the boarding area, and above that is a compact two-story mansion house. I have no idea what, if anything, is up there. Anyway, the line moves surprisingly fast for a dark ride, proceeding in batches of about 20 people. We're taken into a room tucked in behind the game joints, probably in the space that used to house the big waterfall in the Gold Rusher. The room is a somewhat neglected foyer with a large portrait of Mr. Ghostwood on the wall above the fireplace. It's a little like a mixture of the entrance hallway and the stretch rooms in Disney's Haunted Mansion except that the door in the back of the room has a large red EXITsign over it. The portrait proves to be a high-definition computer animation, and Mr. Ghostwood gives us the history of the estate and explains our mission: to chase away the ghosts who have taken up residence since Ghostwood's death. There is no politically correct nonsense here...we're to be equipped with a special GUN.
At the conclusion of the welcome message, we proceed out the back door of the room and up a flight of stairs. The boarding area is directly above the queue house. The tiny cars each seat four riders, are equipped with lap bars, and the aforementioned special guns. The cars themselves are electrically operated and use a detection system and an onboard program to follow a wire buried in the floor. I couldn't tell whether the cars are battery operated, or if they use an induction system for power. Other than the wheels, the only thing that gets closer than about 4" to the floor is a static drain. The car takes off and carries us on a tour of the Ghostwood Estate.
Let the hating begin. The little car pulls into the show building, which, like the Gold Rusher is in the space above the games building. The entrance hall features Lord Ghostwood himself on a high definition screen welcoming us once again, and targets are scattered everywhere. Just as we feared, the room is...ah...
....ummm...
...Good Heavens!...
...The room is immaculately detailed, with everything constructed in full relief. There are some video monitors and projected elements (looking like portraits hanging on the walls), but there isn't a cardboard cut-out in sight. There is also an obvious lack of flourescent paint. Everything, and I mean EVERYTHING in the house is presented in great detail, including several animated and not-so-animated characters who look creepily real. There are hundreds of stunts, some as simple as lights that turn on and off, some are complicated animations, and some are classic dark ride stunts, like April's "favorite", a noisy blast of air that shoots through a curtain on one of the door frames. All of the stunts are triggered by shooting at the targets, and you really do have to hit them dead-on. There is a laser on the gun so you can see where you are shooting. The wire guide system allows the car to do a couple of neat tricks that would be impossible for a more conventional track system to manage. The ride progresses through several rooms of the mansion, and gives us lots of opportunities to fire away at Mr. Ghostwood's uninvited houseguests. In the end, this ride pretty much blew everybody away. This ride is to Garfield's Nightmare as Phantom's Revenge is to Little Bill's Giggle Coaster. We may have been prepared to hate it, but Ghostwood Estate really is worthy of comparison with...okay, I'll come out and say it...with Disney's Haunted Mansion. It's just a whole lot shorter and you have these silly little guns. Kennywood has a winner on their hands with this one!
We made it around to Phantom's Revenge just as the second train was pressed into service. There was some down-time on the ride during the day for some unspecified problem that had them running empty trains for a while, but in all our waits for Phantom were pretty short, not more than about 20 minutes at any time all day. Phantom's Revenge is a strange little ride, built in Kennywood's grand tradition of remodeling old rides (Pippin -> Thunderbolt, Old Mill -> Garfield's Nightmare, Steel Phantom -> Phantom's Revenge) into new ones. It's a little strange, mostly because of the way it is shoehorned into the site, because of its unique hybrid trains, and because it does things that no other ride has even considered. Kennywood keeps tweaking the magnetic brakes on the end of the ride, but they have the thing dialed in very nicely right now. The last hump could be a little more potent, but it doesn't need to be, and as it is, it's still April's favorite steel coaster. Personally, I still prefer the Magnum XL-200 but I freely admit that is partly because of location and comparative ride length. I agree, the explosive airtime on Phantom's last series of hills is unlike anything anywhere else.
One of my disappointments last season was that Kennywood had discontinued the tangerine frozen drink they had sold throughout the park in 2006 in favor of "blue" and "red" flavors you can get at any gas station. I'm still disappointed this year, but there has been an interesting improvement. One of the joints on the main park side of the Phantom's Revenge lift hill, across from the Pirate is now a pull-your-own frozen drink stand. For a few dollars you buy a refillable (for a price) mug in one of several sizes, then pull a flavor or combination of flavors of soft frozen drinks from an array of about a dozen continuous freezers. They have a nice selection of flavors available, but unfortunately the tangerine isn't one of them.
Speaking of food offerings, the cheese on a stick still has not returned, but we were able to get tacos at the taco stand, something that proved to be quite difficult this time last season. Elsewhere in the park, we rode the Whip, we skipped the Exterminator, and when we rode the Swing Shot it scared the heck out of both April and Pete. Personally, I really like those big swing rides, but I really don't like the seating configuration...the seat angle is too acute for me, or really for any ordinary human, to really fit comfortably. The back really should be tipped back a little instead of straight up and down, and just a few more degrees between the seat bottom and seat back would make it a whole lot more accommodating. Anyway, Pete and April both say they feel like they are falling out on the highest swing. I don't get that feeling at all, but I enjoy the airtime. I get to float above the seat, suspended in mid-air, with the ride right there ready to catch me. It's very gentle, and I am really not frightened by it. I dunno, maybe I've just been at this long enough that my body and my brain have worked out when it is appropriate to be scared and when it is not. It isn't that I don't scare; I got scared at work today when I was standing on a 2' stepladder (It's all about the *ladder*; the 10' stepladder didn't scare me). We took a couple of rides on Pitt Fall and I noticed that the seats have been replaced. The new seats are quite a lot deeper than the old ones, supporting riders' legs way out in front of the shoulder bar the way they should have all along. We also noticed that the safety belts seem to be more accommodating.
We finished our day by riding all of the coasters again. One of the best views of Kennywood after dark is really from the top of the Phantom's Revenge where you can see some of the more spectacular lighting packages from the air. To combine that view with a spectacular steel coaster, that's just an added bonus.
--Dave Althoff, Jr.
Footnote 1: Knoebels' other major business is a lumber company. I don't know if that includes a sawmill or not. [Return to text]
--DCAjr
Next: Cedar Point (#1)
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