Coasters for a Cure

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Day 1: Driving to Kansas City
Day 2: Worlds of Fun

Most of the facts in this post were taken from Wikipedia. Since we don’t have internet access in the Ford Escape, I won’t link to each individual page used. To avoid a complete play-by-play walkthrough of our entire day, we’ve compiled some notes about likes, dislikes, and points of interest, and will try to provide a nice overview of our day. Think of this as an extended highlight reel.

Worlds of Fun is located in Kansas City, MO, a short ten or so hour drive from Cincinnati. Worlds of Fun is one of the “original” Cedar Fair properties, acquired in 1995. I say “original” as opposed to one of the “new” Cedar Fair properties, when CF purchased the Paramount parks in 2006. One of the things that I’m looking forward to most about this trip is traveling to all the different parks and checking out the differences in day-to-day operation, ride operation, employee attitude, etc., and I’m pumped about getting to visit some new parks! Some have been owned by Cedar Fair for over a decade, and for others this is only the 5th season of operation.

We arrived at the park just before the park opens to the public at 10am on Saturday, and scored a rock star parking spot in the 2nd row. The first interesting thing of the day was when our Platinum Passes with Kings Island as our home park didn’t scan correctly at the parking gate. Some lady looked at our passes, wrote down our license plate number, and told us to have a nice day. Worlds of Fun employees did a fantastic job of directing cars and filling the parking lot with as many cars as possible. No Gold Pass Parking sections and no Premium Parking; unless you were handicapped or driving a bus you parked with the rest of us. Extremely quick and efficient, and mirrors the operation of Cedar Point.

The main walkway to the entrance was a long, blacktop driveway that appeared to host various Worlds of Fun offices. The ticket booths and gates were painted blue and constructed of wood, and gave the entrance an old school feel, which we really liked. We stepped right up to the entrance, where once again our passes didn’t scan correctly. A nice supervisor guy took our passes to guest relations for us so we didn’t have to wait in line, gave us some bootleg-looking ticket printouts, and then we were in.

Worlds of Fun is themed in five different worlds: Scandinavia, Africa, Europa, the Orient, and America. Our first time around the loop of the park we didn’t necessarily pickup on the theming, but the second time through paying more attention it became apparent. I enjoy good theming as much as the next guy, however, I don’t think it’s required and think sometimes parks try too hard to build rides to match the theming in a particular area. I felt that Worlds of Fun did a pretty good job theming things appropriately, and if Patriot was located anywhere other than Americana I probably would have left.

The first ride of the day was Spinning Dragons, located in the Orient. Wikipedia tells me that this is a spinning roller coaster, and in 2004 was only the second of its kind. Riders face each other in four-person cars that travel around a steel track contained in a large rectangle area, almost like a full-sized, permanent carnival roller coaster. The actual car has a mechanism that allows the car to spin freely around twists and turns, so you are not always facing forward/backward/sideward, or any other ward you were facing when the ride started. This ride was actually really cool, and was a great way to start the day, While it might be in a different category for not being extremely tall and extremely fast, I think this was one of the most fun rides I’ve ever been on.

Bolliger & Mabillard makes some great coasters, and Patriot was no exception. With the red, white, and blue track, it made for a perfect attraction to ride over the 4th of July weekend especially since it can be found in Americana. An inverted coaster, you fly and flip (and kick the sky) through over 3000+ feet of track on Patriot. The only negative with this ride, as with most inverted coasters, is that it can be tough to see what’s going on because the car in front of you blocks most of your view (unless you sit in the front row in which case there is no car in front of you). A fast, smooth ride, developing rides like Patriot is why coasterboys love B&M so much!

We were taking a photo of ourselves after riding Mamba with our # card when some nice lady asked if she could take the photo for us. We told her that would be great, which is when she mentioned our shirts and that she heard about Coasters for a Cure on the news that morning! How cool! The great people in the PR department at Worlds of Fun and I contacted some local news stations…apparently one of them decided to pick up the story! However, there was no interview and NO MORE QUESTIONS! We did have a few other people ask us about the trip, and definitely heard people talking about our shirts, so that’s pretty cool! Maybe they’ll check out the website and donate some money!

Boomerang was funny because it has literally the exact same track layout and exact same color scheme as Invertigo at Kings Island (and probably others), except it uses a standard coaster train and riders don’t face each other. It’s a neat ride and offers a cool experience, which I enjoyed. Boomerang was built before Invertigo, so it gets points for being the original. The ride attendents used this catchphrase as the train left the station: “This isn’t the Prowler, we won’t attack. This is the Boomerang and you’re coming back!”

A bit later we made our way over to Prowler. Prowler won a Golden Ticket Award in 2009 for Best New Ride. In general I’m not a huge fan of wooden coasters and Abi pretty much hates them, so we weren’t sure what to expect from this beast. When we sat down in the cars it was almost like sitting on a La-Z-Boy at home. There was a ton of cushioning in the seats and on the sides, and the thing was seriously comfortable for being a car on a roller coaster train. The best word I can use to describe the ride experience is “wow.” Thoroughly impressed and completely thrilled with Prowler, we promptly stepped in line again for a second ride. There are ridiculous twists and turns and small hills and more turns and more twists and incredible speed, and at no time did I have any clue where I was. It was awesome! Abi got off the ride with a huge grin on her face and she couldn’t believe herself that she actually liked the wooden roller coaster. The ride is less than 100 feet tall and reaches speeds upward of 50mph, but it sure felt like a heck of a lot faster. The track was smooth and fluent and the trains almost seemed to glide along like it was no big deal. Wow. We stopped back again once it was dark and proceeded to ride two more times, both rides equally as awesome as before. Prowler has some serious game, and is near the top on my list of all-time favorite roller coasters.

Around 5pm it started raining. It wasn’t too awful, and as far as I could tell all of the rides were still operating. However, we were getting hungry and thought it might not be a bad idea to leave the park for a couple hours to find some Kansas City BBQ. We ended up finding a place pretty close to our hotel…but the Arthur Bryant’s restaurant was actually located inside a casino! We figured that since we were already there for dinner we might as well drop a few quarters into some slot machines to see if we could get lucky and pay for our hotel or something…but unfortunately we were not big winners! Let’s head back to the park!

Overall the day was a huge success! We had a great time at Worlds of Fun riding new rides and checking out a new park. The park has a great layout, and was really nice. There are tons of trees all over the place, which provides a lot of shade for those hot days. I always think it’s cool when rides use the natural, hilly terrain of the area, and numerous rides took advantage of these Kansas City hills that I didn’t know existed. We even got to ride a coaster during their evening fireworks display! Worlds of Fun was great, we’ll see you at Valleyfair on Monday!