Themepark road trip , live

[ali-s]

Monday 27th June CEDARPOINT

Hotel guests get early entry to the park at 9am , but we have 3 mornings here so decide to have a lie in, followed by breakfast in the room. I have brought bowls ,spoons, mini cereal boxes and breakfast biscuits. The hotel shop sells milk and non vegetarian yoghurts.

It's 11.30 by the time we enter through the hotel guest entrance. This is the biggest park and hardest to navigate, with no paper map and very few signs we do a lot of doubling back and walking in circles before finding what we want. We often resort to asking a park employee, but they don't always know the whereabouts of anything out of their section. I have downloaded the app on my phone, but trying to see the screen in bright sunlight as well as follow a screen sized map is frustrating. We resort to using the steam train that goes from the middle to the back of the park, it goes through a well themed 'boneville 'area with skeletons .

Steel vengeance is our first coaster, another hybrid wooden that gets a 9/10 , I love all the twists and turns. My top 5 seems to be all hybrid/wood or wooden coasters.

We ride several of the lesser known coasters, Rougarou , Raptor , Gemini ( another Grand National copy , but slower ) corkscrew and the mine train a couple of 7 out of 10s, 2 6/10 and 5/10 for the worlds slowest , roughest mine train. We also do the power tower drop ride, good view from the top, but a tame 6/10 .

It takes us ages to find somewhere for lunch . I made a note of the places that serve vegetarian meals, thinking it would save time, but they either don't exist - we fancied Subway , but the app repeatedly took us to a hot dog snack bar , or the vegetarian option is salad and fries 🙄. I find 1 place with a proper salad bowl on the menu, but they have sold out.
We end up with chicken nuggets and fries, bbq beef and fries and premium salad and fries. My premium salad was a bowl of lettuce, 6 cherry tomatoes, a bit of sliced onion and a scatter of cheese.

Cedarpoint is the worst park so far for food choices, all the parks ( with the exception of Holidayworld) have been pretty poor . The standard entree +1 side is $16.99 , the choices are chicken tenders, hotdog, burger ( both served in a dry bun with no trimmings ) pizza or salad. The sides are fries, breadsticks, mac n cheese , pasta salad and occasionally , potato salad. Panda Express makes a welcome change as the sides are chow mein or fried rice. None of it is worth the price.

Our passes are saving us money on drinks, but again, there is only so much pop you can drink. Iced tea and minute maid are the 2 non fizzy options, water is free but I wish tea and coffee were on the plan, though I haven't seen either in the parks.

We stay until park close at 10pm. We have 3 coasters left to ride tomorrow, then we'll have done them all. So far we are disappointed with Cedarpoint, it hasn't lived up to the hype. Yes it has alot of coasters ( 16 ? ) but it seems to be quantity over quality. Millenium force and Steel Vengeance are the only ones we are wanting to ride again. Along with the lack of decent food and trying to navigate around the park it is nowhere near the top of our list.

[Sandraoh40]

Wow what a trip!
You have been a couple of places I have looked at so thank you for sharing. We love pinehurst but I like having a breakout from it and have fancied pigeon forge and Dollywood. Enjoy the rest of your holiday!

[ali-s]

Tuesday 28th June CEDARPOINT and CEDARPOINT SHORES


We make use of our early entry this morning. We are in the park by 9.15 and head straight for Steel vengeance. But there is a line of people sitting on the wall beside the entrance and a regular announcement that ' this is not an early entry ride, this ride opens at 10am ' . Seems only a handful of rides are open early. We decide to wait anyway. We should be able to ride within minutes when it opens. By 10am there are 2 lines, one of people waiting since 9am and now a fast pass line. We end up waiting another 15 minutes as they merge the fast pass people in on the platform. We haven't saved any time at all !

It's still worth the wait, 9/10 all round. Iron dragon , Maverick and Gatekeeper were next, 7/10 each, you know you're in for an ear bashing by the restraints when signs in the queue advise you to remove earrings. If I'm bruised or hurt in any way riding a coaster it gets marked down, no matter how good it would otherwise be.

We've now done all the coasters except Blue streak which is temporarily down and Top thrill Dragster which has been closed for 10 months due to an incident causing injury. I'm not sure I'd have ridden it if it was open, it looks insane !

For lunch we head back to the place that had sold out of salads yesterday. I manage to get one today , it's ok, but not as tasty as it sounds. Broccoli, cabbage, radish, bean sprouts, seeds ( though I didn't find any ) among other green stuff, chopped strawberries added a bit of flavour. DH had chicken tenders, DS a veggie burger.

Hunger satisfied DS and I want to do the waterpark. We walk back to the hotel to change and leave DH there to catch up on football news. It's a short walk to Cedar shores and it's not very busy. We get 8 slides done, 1 was closed. All rather tame . The tube slide in the dark was fun and the raft ride where we were paired with 2 larger ladies was a laugh. The weight on their side made the raft go alarmingly far up the side of the slide.

We are back at the hotel by 6pm, we don't fancy going back into the park but we need something to eat. I break my promise again and we go to TGI Fridays in the hotel. I had vege burger, DS chicken tenders ( he's going to look like a chicken) both served with fries ( I never want to eat another fry )DH wasn't very hungry so had loaded potato skins and a dessert. Cost way too much considering we meal credits we could have used in the park , but at least the food had some flavour ( and my burger came with all the trimmings )

After dinner we go for a wander along the boardwalk, the name given to the path between the hotel and the beach. For some reason I wasn't expecting a lake to have a sandy beach. Lots of people are swimming and the shallow water is quite warm.

There is an all female band playing but we only hear 3 songs before they finish. I'm still not convinced Hotel Breakers is worth the money, but must admit I like the location and convenience.

[ali-s]

Wednesday 29th June CEDARPOINT and HOME

So , it's here, our last day . I feel like Kennywood was so long ago . I'm ready for home now, I think 3 weeks away is my limit and we've been here a little longer than that. We are flying Pittsburgh to Heathrow at 9.50pm , so have plenty of time to do a few more coasters or stop somewhere on the way to the airport.


We head back into Cedarpoint just after 10 ( not bothered with early entry ) . It's been cooler here at Cedarpoint, in the mid - high 20s with a nice breeze. I like heat, but find humidity so draining. We go straight to Blue Streak which we are yet to ride, it's working today, another decent wooden coaster, it gets a 7/10 from me. We ride Gatekeeper and Valrvn again , Valrvn gains another point from me 2nd time around, 8/10 and Gatekeeper moves into DHs favourites. If we had only done Cedarpoint I'm sure we would have rated all the coasters higher, it's only because we have ridden so many that we are comparing them all to the best.

I want to buy a fridge magnet for my collection, but none of the shops near the guest entrance stock them so we walk down to the main entrance where I find a few to choose from.

Lunch is at Panda Express, vege spring rolls and fried rice for me. It's now 2.50 and I want to leave for Pittsburgh by 3pm so we use our passes to get one more drink then speed walk back to the carpark ( we loaded the bags after checking out this morning ) . It's a 3.5 hour drive to Pittsburgh International and I want to allow for traffic and storms.

We make pretty good time. Google does the 'a faster route has been found ' thing several times and I accept it before remembering I chose the rural route via Akron and we are now going via Cleveland, but it's too late to change it and the traffic isn't too bad. We also have a disconcerting moment when the map disappears, the screen goes blank and directions stop😯 This is the 3rd time it's happened, don't know if it's my phone or Auto Android at fault, but I'm able to pull over and reload the map. The first time it happened on the Interstate and caused a minor panic until DH could get it started again.

We arrive at Hertz at Pittsburgh airport just before 7. A sign directs us into a gloomy underground carpark and a dead end lane. A woman appears from the gloom and asks 'returning ?' I reply and she says 'just leave it there ' . Returning cars in South Africa always takes a while as they are checked over and paperwork studied, I couldn't believe we could just take our bags and walk away.

In the terminal we pass the BA check in with half a dozen people waiting, go to the loo and return to find a line that snakes outside the roped off area. A staff member is asking ' is there anyone here from last night ?' 😯, seems a flight was cancelled and people have been moved to this flight. We get talking to a guy from Cornwall and that passes the time until we're checked in. Security was quick in comparison, we check the board for our gate number and see 2 flights, same code, same destination, one is on time, one is delayed until 2am. I choose to believe ours is on time🤞 We actually board over an hour late. They kept calling the groups up , but the line wasn't moving, think they must have been seating people 1 person at a time 😆 once onboard we had exit seats and DS was seated 4 rows away . The captain apologised for the wait and admitted he didn't know why it had taken so long.
The flight home only took 6.5 hours, and our trains were all on time, and we got seats ( miles away from the luggage, but if someone wants our dirty laundry they're welcome to it &#128518

We fetched the dog from the kennels ( had to keep reminding myself 'keep left ' , but I only stalled the car once &#128513 and got the washing on. Now 2 days later the suitcases are empty and waiting to be put away until next trip. Not sure where it will be, but doubt it will be the USA, it's so expensive compared to years ago, and I don't want to ever eat another fry 😆

[anji]

Thanks so much for your very full report! Lovely to have something different and full of ideas.

I admire your stamina for keeping going through all those rides!

[Goldia]

I really enjoyed reading along with your road trip report. Phew, you must be shattered now you're home! It was great to see some places I had never even heard of, thank you for sharing it.

[mick]

Thanks for taking the time to do your trippie I really enjoyed reading along, it was nice to read about a different sort of holiday 😁

Sounds like you had a great time visiting so many parks and riding lots of coasters


Joan

[cornishfrogboy]

Great trip report and I have learnt plenty.

Thankyou.

[Anne]

Another fabulous report from you Ali Thanks for doing it.

[orlandosgr8]

Really enjoyed reading your trip report, so much explored and so many coasters! Thank you for taking the time to post it