The DC to Atlanta Coaster Halloween Road Trip - Carowinds

[disjunkie]

We had around a 3 and half hour drive to Carowinds. We were intending to stop at Chimney Rock but when we passed through it was rammed so carried on to Lake Lure for lunch. I wanted to call in here as some of Dirty Dancing was filmed here, it’s really a beautiful location and had a nice lunch, I had fish and chips and Neil had pecan encrusted trout.

We stayed at the Comfort Inn at the Park as it was across the street from Carowinds. This was a basic hotel but it was clean and only around $90 for the night.

There are a lot of rollercoasters at Carowinds so we attended Scarowinds on the Friday then had day time tickets for the Saturday. Admission was good value, the saturday ticket particularly was $55 for admission, parking and a meal which i thought was a bargain. We bought fast lane for both days which was expensive, $75 for the Friday and $90 for the Saturday.

We walked to the park on Friday but there was no crossing so we had to wait a while for a gap then run, so wouldn’t be the best if you had kids with you! A great skyline to greet you though when we finally got to the car park.

The park was crazy busy on the Friday, we did two haunts which weren’t great before the crowds got too big, then concentrated on the rides. Some decent Halloween theming around though.

I think this was my favourite coaster line up, Fury 325 is a B&M giga coaster and what a ride, the sheer speed and drop were incredible, my new No 1 coaster. (Photo taken the next day!)

Copperhead Strike opened this year and is a Mack launch coaster, I enjoyed it, great hang time but it could definitely do with a bit more punch on the launches.

Intimidator is a B&M hyper which I really liked, lots of floater air time. We did the mine train which is called Carolina Goldrusher which was surprisingly good for its age with some fun little elements. Although this is another Cedar fair park the operations were worlds apart from Kings Dominion, with the ride crews being excellent, really churning out the despatched and particularly the Fury crew, not taking any nonsense from the predominantly teenage crowd that were their that night.

Although the haunted houses were weak here, surprisingly some of the scare zones were actually pretty good. The scare actors had loads of props to hide behind and a couple actually startled me by jumping out or using sliders to slide right in front of you. The HHN scarezones never really do anything for me as when you can see people coming it’s just not scary to me, this set up worked well.

We returned on the Saturday to get plenty of re-rides on fury, copperhead and Dominator, as well as some of the coasters we missed, including Carolina cyclone, flying cobra’s, a pretty rough wild mouse and a solid B&m invert in Afterburn.

I was disappointed the rides main dark ride was down but we did do Boo Blasters which was an old shooting ride which was ok. It was very busy in the park again but fast lane allowed us to get everything done we wanted. We grabbed pizza for lunch which included with our ticket and it was standard theme park food. I ended up really liking this park, surprisingly becoming my second favourite of the trip.