Our Cedar Fair Park Tour Part 2: Canada’s Wonderland, Niagara Falls, and Dorney Park.

Welcome back!  Hope you enjoyed Part 1 of this post.

Park 3/5: Canada’s Wonderland, Toronto, Canada.
“Canada’s Premier Amusement Park”

It was quite a trek up to Canada and it was my first experience driving across an international border.  It was also the coldest park of the trip by far.    We also spent the least amount of time at this park because we didn’t get there until noon and they closed at six in the evening.  But it was very empty and we enjoyed walking on to (i.e., not waiting for) almost every ride there.  The park is full of great rides and ended up being my favorite by a landslide.

My favorite three intense rides:

1) Leviathan.  I knew this ride was going to be great as soon as I saw the wicked sea monster statue.  This ride, like Millennium Force, is very similar to Fury 325 since it is only 19 feet shorter, three mph slower, and three years older.  The trains and layout are very similar as well.  But Leviathan’s multiple high hills, tunnel, and turn-around really won me over.  This is another ride that, to Mr. Meena’s chagrin, I would choose over Fury.

     

2) Behemoth.  Ironically, Behemoth is a land monster, but this coaster is located next to a pond.  This ride is fast, smooth, has lots of air time, and it goes right along the edge of the pond so that you get to see the most adorable ducks.

3) Vortex.  We rode three different suspended coasters on this trip (The other two were Bat  and Iron Dragon) and this one was definitely my favorite.  It starts by going up the huge mountain in the center of the park, over the top, and then drops down the side giving a fantastic view.  My favorite part of the ride is the low turn right over the water.  The ride glides so fast over the water and leaves you feeling exhilarated and relaxed at the same time.

Photo by Oliver licensed under CC BY_ND 2.0.

Favorite moderate thrill ride: Night Mares.  Have I told you that I LOVE spinning rides??  It was a good thing Mr. Meena took his dizziness medicine.  This ride is my favorite spinning ride to date for a couple reasons.  The first is that you get to stand up in a jail cell like contraption made for two people.  There is padding but you still get moved around a bit.  The second reason it’s my favorite it that it spins from horizontal to completely vertical and you go almost 50 feet up in the air!  I got to see a very interesting view of the park and I would have ridden this all afternoon if Mr. Meena had wanted to.

Most unusual ride: Thunder Run.  The first unusual thing that I noticed about this ride was that it was quite long (10 cars long, in fact).  I didn’t really know anything about this ride before we got on it.  The train (literally, it’s a train) takes off and goes right into the mountain.  I was so confused because there was no lift hill, we just all of a sudden were going around and around inside the mountain.  It turns out this is a powered coaster, and the front of the train actually pulls the cars along!  It was so quirky that we rode it twice.

Most concerning ride: What? Another category?? I know, but there is just so much at Canada’s Wonderland that deserves to be mentioned!  Did I tell you this was my favorite park?  This award goes to Time Warp.  This coaster was one of the first true ‘flying’ coasters.  The cars come into the station looking like this:

Basically you climb up the rungs at the bottom, lie flat, and stick your head and hands out the top and say a prayer.  The attendants come though and slam some plastic “reinforcement” over your backside (which better be small to average if you want to ride comfortably… just saying).  Oh, and to keep you on your toes the cars keep moving almost the whole time that this is happening.  This ride is chaos!  People are jumping off, crossing to get their belongings, hopping on the cars, trying to exit, and the attendants are rushing around… I have to say I don’t think it’s all that safe.  Once you are (kind of) secured, the car is rotated so that you are lying down facing the ground, and then you are pushed up by a turnstile.  Once you are at the top you begin a flying journey that pretty much guarantees you will lose anything that you left in your pockets (they even stopped the ride to look for someone’s keys while we were there).  I think the scariest part is how easily the ride can throw you around inside the metal contraption.  Mr. Meena and I were able to prevent this fate by bracing ourselves against the handles at the top and the rungs at the bottom, but if you aren’t strong enough to brace yourself or if you aren’t positioned correctly then you are in for a rough flight.

Honorary mention: Wonder Mountain’s Guardian.  This is the third and most recent ride to interact with the mountain.  I don’t usually like shooting game rides, but this one surprised me.  It’s new (May 2014) and has a lot of bells and whistles, including 3D screens on both sides of the track, with one of the screens being 500 feet long.  I’m not going to release any spoilers here, but there is a surprise in the ride that made my stomach do one of its rare flips.

Something that made me go “Eh?”: Trying to find the bathroom.  I was so confused.  I finally figured out that this was a bathroom:

Also, I was quite surprised to find out that you can order crepes at a food truck in this park.  I think there were two different varieties offered.  Normally all I can get in the south is a pretzel or a chicken leg, so this was quite the delicacy!  Another fun experience was watching a Dad trying to win his kids a toy at one of the park games by playing hockey.  Oh, Canada.

Overall impression:  If I could only return to one of the five parks that we visited, it would be this one, even though I think that Canadian parks must have different safety standards than those in the United States.  I could write a small novel about all the ways the park entertained and delighted me.  It had quite a few of the smaller spinning rides that I like so much.  It was also fascinating to visit Canada.  We met nice people, spent some of their beautiful money, and actually pumped gas before we paid for it!  Very trusting, those Canadians.  I might also have fallen in love with Tim Hortons when I learned that you can have a donut as your side when purchasing a meal.

Detour to Niagara Falls.

After we got back to the U.S. we stopped to see Niagara Falls before heading to the next park.  Neither one of us had ever seen it and the drive there was under an hour.  Plus, the countryside of New York state is just gorgeous!

Niagara Falls might be the most tourist-oriented place I have ever visited – and I’ve been to my share of them.  The maps that are provided direct you to the paid trolley and ferry rides and not much else.  Eventually we figured out how to walk to the falls without paying anybody.  And let me tell you, I have never seen so many selfie sticks in my life!  They were everywhere!

I also never realized that the falls have plenty of green space around them or that there were multiple waterfalls.  We walked and walked and there were just so many different falls!  Perhaps I was a little under educated here, but I definitely suggest planning more than an hour if you really want to see the whole place.

This was my favorite are in the park because a lot less people were willing to walk all the way over there.  I don’t like crowds.  This is also the part that is apparently in Canada according to our cell phone provider and their “international billing rates”.  We were totally standing on American soil in this picture.

We then drove to Pennsylvania for the next part of our trip.

Park 4/5: Dorney Park, Allentown, Pennsylvania.
“Two Great Parks for the Price of One”

This park is really proud of its water park, the “Wildwater Kingdom”.  Unfortunately it wasn’t open when we were there so I can’t back up their claims.  This was the smallest park that we visited and it was only open on the weekends this early in the season.  We made it work with our schedule and were happy with the smaller crowds – even though it was almost entirely young school children.  I was especially excited because this was the first park we visited that Mr. Meena had not been to before.  There are very few parks on the east coast that I can say that about.  It’s nice to get to experience something together for the first time.

Don’t even try to contain my excitement.

My top three intense rides:

1) Hydra the Revenge.  I love this coaster because of their unique “jojo roll”.  The designers of this coaster decided to put an inversion between the launch station and the lift hill, successfully making it the first coaster with a pre-lift hill inversion.  How cool is that?  Everyone is ready to ride the coaster, but first they get to do a slow, almost lazy inversion.  That is my kind of coaster design.

It’s kind of hilarious because the park built Hydra over the space where the Hercules coaster used to be.  In Greek mythology Hercules kills the nine-headed monster Hydra, but Dorney Park has put a spin on this by bringing the monster back to take revenge on Hercules.  You have to love their improvisation.

This ride also gets points because it takes you upside down seven times and it was the first floorless coaster I rode that didn’t terrify me.

2) Stinger.  This coaster is basically the same as Carolina Cobra except it is inverted instead of sit down.  There was a ride like this at Kings Island but we ran out of time and had to skip it.  When we were in the loading station there was a song playing on repeat that gave instructions to get in your seat, lower your harness, and to take other safety precautions.  It was one of those gimmicky songs that the workers must go insane having to listen to all day long.

It’s a shuttle track, going from one end to the other and then returning.  We were in the front and my favorite part was the first lift hill because we were being lifted up with nothing underneath us, which provided a great view.  I loved being flung backwards from an inverted position and also getting up 5 G’s on this ride.

3) Steel Force.  We were almost to the launch station when this ride had a mechanical failure and the workers evacuated the whole line queue.  We were a bit disappointed, but it was the last coaster of the day for us so we decided to wait by the entrance.  It only took about 20 minutes for it to reopen and we were nearly run over by a stampede of small schoolchildren trying to re-enter the line.  But we did make it on the ride and I really enjoyed how much leg room I had in the car.  The ride was fantastic, going up 200 feet for the drop, having two tunnels, a great turn-around by the pond, and many butterfly-inducing hills at the end.

Favorite moderate thrill ride: The Whip.  This ride is nearly 100 years old (est. 1920) and is the oldest at the park.  Each car is attached to a chain that is quite literally whipped around in an elliptical orbit.  The cars are vibrantly colored, the ride is unusual, and the attendant was happy to tell us about the park history (having experienced much of it himself).

Most unusual ride: Demon Drop. This is not your typical drop tower. You get into a metal cage with three other people and are moved backwards to the base of the tower. You ascend just like an elevator and then are slowly brought forward to where you will drop.  The car falls straight at first but then goes into a curved section so that you are lying on your back at the end of the drop. Then you are dipped even further backwards to return underneath the track to the launch station. There are two cool facts about this ride, the first is that one of Mr. Meena’s coworkers actually helped design it back in the day, and the other is that Mr. Meena rode this drop tower when it was located at Cedar Point (pre 2010). Same ride, experienced in two different parks!

Overall impression:  I was a bit wary heading to this park because no one that I talked to had heard of it before.  Even though it was the smallest park that we visited, it did not end up disappointing us.  It had many of the smaller spinning rides that I am a fan of.  It’s ride Meteor actually uses two hydraulic arms to spin riders in opposing circles, making it stand out as a fun and unique smaller ride.  We would definitely return, especially if it meant a trip to the famous “Wildwater Kingdom” next time.

After Dorney Park we just had to drive past Hersheypark to take a look at their beautiful coasters.  Alas, we couldn’t include it on this trip… but we did get to see the Hershey kisses along the road!

Is anyone else craving chocolate now?

Be sure to check out part three of this post where I talk about visiting Kings Dominion and our money saving trips.