Cedar Point 8/6: The Good and the Bad

Good news! I had a business trip to Cleveland Monday 8/6-8/8! This finally gives me an opportunity to visit Cedar Point over some down time Monday 8/6! Bad news! When I finally pull into the parking lot at 4:30PM I realize the park is bursting at the seams. I planned on stopping by AAA in Sandusky to pick up a discount admission (6 bucks off) but due to the time crunch I decided to pay the full price admission and not waste any more valuable time.

Before my trip I mapped out the park and decided to execute my “must ride” list in a clockwise fashion around the park. Getting in the queue for Raptor I quickly realize I will not make a dent in the list. Sigh. Raptor was a 2 hour wait. Having been on Montu at Busch Gardens Tampa a few years ago I decide to take my losses and head to Millennium Force….on the top of my “must ride” list!! Walking over to MF I take a peek at the line for Mantis and, again, take the punches like a man. There is no way I can afford to wait in what appears to be a 2 hour wait. I visited SFMM a couple of years ago and rode The Riddler so at that point I decided I would hit MF, then Maverick. The MF queue was also a 2 hour wait but the time actually moved quickly. They have good music playing from an unmanned DJ booth and the park patrons are well behaved. During my entire visit, I saw absolutely NO LINE CUTTING!!!! None of the annoying “EXCUSE ME” from pushy and rude entitled people as they pass you by in the queue. There was none! Absolutely none!

On this topic of park patrons, I must take a moment and say Cedar Point has the right idea- make everyone wait to ride the rides. No flash pass. No legalized cutting. It sends the right message and I think it may actually REDUCE line cutting by not creating an atmosphere of haves vs. the have nots. Just a thought. Or I might be totally wrong- Cedar Fair parks attract a different crowd than Six Flag Parks do. I won’t get into this argument though.

MF is a great ride- do not get me wrong! The list hill is noticeably longer than any other coaster but the first drop didn’t seem to have the “kick” I thought it would. I am a fan boy of Intamin coasters and having SFA as my home park I ride Super Man all the time. I used to live in New England so I know what a world class coaster can be- SMROS at SFNE. I guess what I’m saying is…..I almost like SMROS at SFNE better than MF. Perhaps I wouldn’t feel this way if I could get to know MF more intimately. I only got to ride it once and had to wait 2 hours to do so.

I then headed to Maverick but when I saw the queue spilling WAY out into the midway and heard the estimate wait of three hours, I again took my losses and headed to Mean Streak. At this point, it was 6:30PM and I needed to quickly get some more rides in. Mean Streak was only a half hour wait. MAN! What a great coaster this COULD be, or ONCE was! There were trims on the first drop! There were trims everywhere! Did this ride used to be insane when first built?! It must have been. Please fill me in!!

My next ride was supposed to be Magnum, but it was closed. I asked the attendant blocking the entrance if they were planning on opening and she said not likely. Sigh. I decided to hit Wicked Twister. I always wanted to experience WT as it is so unique! On the walk over, I watched a few trains of TTD take off. Wow! Cedar Point has the right idea with the placement of this ride vs. Kingda Ka. Watching TTD launch is a sight to see. You can see the fear in the passengers faces just before take off. At SF Great America Kingda Ka is shoved in a more remote section and there is a limited viewing area of the launches. I arrived at WT and am glad to see it only has a 15 minute wait. What a great ride! I sat in the back row and loved every minute of it.

I then headed for MAX Air. It is such a unique ride and also seems to be a rare breed. I don’t know of any other amusement park that has one. It only had a 20 minute wait and I had no idea how fast it swung back and forth. Very cool indeed! At this point, it was close to 8:30 and I had an hour drive back to my hotel in Cleveland. I had to wake up at 6AM for an early morning meeting so I decided one more ride than I had to sadly depart. I decided on Blue Streak. This is such a classic woodie with some bursts of sick air time. It reminded me of a shorter Wild One at SFA.

All in all, a great day at Cedar Point but man was it crowded. I need to return when I have a full day in the mid week and catch all the major rides I had to pass up. Cedar Point has a great vibe to it and I cannot wait to get back. *** Edited 8/11/2007 3:01:37 AM UTC by palwine***

You should have bought a season pass.

How much are they? I also live in VA so I probably won't be back to OH this year unfortunately.

Disappointed to hear some of those wait times.

I thought I remember reading a few reports that the Maverick queue is a maximum of two hours with the whole queue filled.

I was also a bit surprised you had to wait two hours to get on MF. However, if the queue was full and there were a few overweight guests (delayed trains) it can add up pretty quick.

I fully believe, however, that Raptor's wait was a full two hours. Raptor has been getting pretty ridiculous the past couple seasons, and I've seen it first hand how slow the queue moves now a days. I remember when you would just fly through all of those queues in 1 hour flat...you would almost never stop walking. I worked there two seasons ago and can say that someone working the crowd position can drastically help with capacity. However, you can't do too much if the trains just aren't moving. I can attest that working Raptor can be tiring, but I never had a major problem having my seats safely checked in time for interval.

Nice TR. Next time make sure you ride Paddle Wheel Excursions. Short line, long ride, major fun if you get the right Captain.

Just imagine how long those 2 hour lines would be if the park let some people stand in more than one of them at a time.

Seems like you really "got" Cedar Point. Most people complain about Dragster's location, but the atmosphere it creates is awesome. I haven't been to the park when its been that busy, sounds like you caught it on a bad day.

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Disappointed to hear some of those wait times.

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Heck no. Long lines means high attendance. For a day in August, that is pretty average for waits at CP. I would be disappointed if everything was a walk on.

MaxAir and Delerium (PKI) I believe are the only Huss Giant 'bees.

I was also at the Point on 8/6 and everything had long wait times. Along with those waits were downtime between Dragster, Millennium, and Magnum went down at 1pm and never reopened (people had to evac. the train on the lift).

I waited for Maverick, when the line was overflowing out into the midway, even with that, it was only an hour and a half, maximum. People see the line and skip it, when in all actuality, on that day, it probably had the shortest line of any of the big coasters.

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ApolloAndy said:
MaxAir and Delerium (PKI) I believe are the only Huss Giant 'bees.

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In the US, but aren't there a couple in Japan?

^^Yes, at Fuji-Q

But after reading this TR, I'm starting to really dread going to CP anymore this year as the wait times are just getting beyond ridiculous and it doesn't even really matter when you go as recently weeekends, weekdays, morning, night, it's all freakin' busy!!

CP needs either Flash pass or better ride operations asap!! I cannot remember a busier summer than the 2nd half of this one! At this point, I don't even want to hear about bad attendance for the 3rd quarter at CP!

After my trip to CP I couldnt see myself not waiting in line, if it was the hour and a half for TTD or the 45 minutes for MF, it wouldnt feel right any other way.

^Also if this was any other park those lines would be a lot worse. Almost all the rides at Cedar Point are extremely high capacity.

As for Mean Streak...I'm of the opinion that this ride was NEVER all that good. I rode it opening day...and quite a bit the first few years. It has always been a ride that looks cool...but under-delivers.

As for wait times.....

People 31 years ago waited 3 hours to 6 hours to just ride Corkscrew. People 30 years from now will wait 3 hours for the big ride someday too.
Imagine how many rides built in the 70's that DIDN'T have the throughput they do today! Cedar Point had a lot of em!

If you are going to CP with expectations that you "have to" ride the bigguns, on any day in July or the first 3 weeks of August, and you're not willing to wait some, well, you're going to be disappointed. Same goes for mid-October, when the weather is still pretty good and folks are in the Halloween mood.

On the other hand, overall park capacity is so large there that even during the peak days of summer, you can really enjoy yourself without doing much waiting, provided you stick to the "lesser" attractions. We save the headliners for early season, and the lull between summer and peak Halloweekends crowds. But, we're not afraid to go during peak summer or mid-October, we just have our sights set on different stuff.

What's more, some of those "lesser" attractions are pretty darn good in their own right. They aren't necessarily all shiny and brand-new, but they still provide for a fine day.

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palwine said:
The MF queue was also a 2 hour wait but the time actually moved quickly. They have good music playing from an unmanned DJ booth and the park patrons are well behaved. During my entire visit, I saw absolutely NO LINE CUTTING!!!! None of the annoying “EXCUSE ME” from pushy and rude entitled people as they pass you by in the queue. There was none! Absolutely none!

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What about the teenage to college-age girl I saw crawl through about ten rows of queue railings at MF? Just because you didn't see it doesn't mean it doesn't happen. Boy, I hope you're right about the music being good from an unmanned d.j. booth, because when it was manned it was absolutely terrible.

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On this topic of park patrons, I must take a moment and say Cedar Point has the right idea- make everyone wait to ride the rides. No flash pass. No legalized cutting. It sends the right message and I think it may actually REDUCE line cutting by not creating an atmosphere of haves vs. the have nots. Just a thought. Or I might be totally wrong- Cedar Fair parks attract a different crowd than Six Flag Parks do. I won’t get into this argument though.

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Excuse me? Me and my friends got into the park an hour earlier than everyone else to ride MF and Maverick two days in a row because we paid for the privilege at Breaker's Express.

Please don't make out CP to be so full of noble intentions either. Have you checked out what it costs to stay onsite or at some of their resorts or properties? For that extra hour we got in that you didn't get it gave us a lot more time to ride other rides and not wait in line for two of the bigger attractions. The way I look at it, we "flashpassed" both the MF line and the Maverick line.

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..I almost like SMROS at SFNE better than MF. Perhaps I wouldn’t feel this way if I could get to know MF more intimately. I only got to ride it once and had to wait 2 hours to do so.

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Trust your instincts. Even if you got to know MF more intimately, you wouldn't change your mind.

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Wow! Cedar Point has the right idea with the placement of this ride vs. Kingda Ka. Watching TTD launch is a sight to see. You can see the fear in the passengers faces just before take off.

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I think Great Adventure made the right choice for what land they had available. Imagine this ride in the center of the park, and you'd have to move multiple rides, trees and the Skyway to put in in, unless they ran it the other direction from the Boardwalk section to the tollbooths--and even then would it fit? I like the shade at Gadv. where the ride would theoretically fit versus the concrete jungle of where Dragster is placed.

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All in all, a great day at Cedar Point but man was it crowded. I need to return when I have a full day in the mid week and catch all the major rides I had to pass up. Cedar Point has a great vibe to it and I cannot wait to get back. *** Edited 8/11/2007 3:01:37 AM UTC by palwine***

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You've unfortunately entered what my friend refers to to as the guilt time of the year, when parents realize that they haven't taken the kids to an amusement park yet, and everyone is trying to get that last trip in. Try returning in June next time. I think you'll find the lines to be a lot shorter, and definitely schedule two-days as you're going to need them! It's really a bummer that you missed Magnum as well.

Intamin Fan, there is a cheaper way to get early entry, just buy a Season Pass with Joe Cool. In fact, next month they should have a sale where they give you JC free with any SP.

One time I saw some girls trying to skip the MF line to catch up to friends, the entire queue ganged up on her an booed and hissed until she got back in her spot. It was brilliant. Line pushing does happen at CP, but its weird, people seem a lot more guilty about it in my experience, and get busted far more often than at other parks. But then again, I haven't been there for a full day when it been this busy in a long time.

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I think Great Adventure made the right choice for what land they had available. Imagine this ride in the center of the park...

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That doesn't make it better. There is just such a cool atmospher of moms, dads, younger siblings and scaredy cat fans that sit in the stands and wait for the riders to roll up to the launch. People stop and watch in awe. It changes the feeling of the launch area too, cause everyone is looking at you. Its the same thing at Hershey only less impressive because of the speed.

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The way I look at it, we "flashpassed" both the MF line and the Maverick line.

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But you don't get to skip the lines all day. I think thats his point right? They aren't putting out other guests all day long who are waiting in long lines while resort guests are skipping them. Its for one hour every day, and the amount of resort guests who are putting out early morning patrons is pretty mimimal...the resort isn't THAT big. *** Edited 8/12/2007 2:27:47 PM UTC by eightdotthree***

Sweet! I can't wait to go back to CP in a week. I should have gone today. But that does suck about the crowdedness of the park. August, is by far the most crowded times of CP, due to everyone going to school and wanting to go one last time.

But getting there at 4:30 wasn't the best decision. Probably the only one, but that's a Season passer time.

Cedar Point, Audioslaved mentioned, has great capacity, and long lines is the fun of CP, but not all the rides. These past weeks have been a time for Camps and Programs to bring their students to CP. And they get there around 11am, and the Raptor line is like 2 hours. so they wait until 4pm, because they leave at 6pm, to ride Raptor. Just something I've noticed, also experienced being one of those groups in the past.

And Maxair is one of the largest.(Stating the obvious) Delirium at KI isn't as big as MA. I was excited to ride it, then I noticed that MA is just that bit bigger to provide an amazing ride. MA seats 50 and DE has about 40 seats, and that makes a difference.

IMO CF has to start to offer a lo-q system to there parks its good buisness. I am going to CP this week and I hate lines they already offer a VIP package so why not add Flashpass? A few years ago they had that freeway hand stamp which at least was something now they have nothing. Thats the one thing I hate about there parks. You would think they could use the money, thats why I hope someone does by CF out because they would be smart enough to put it in. Thats millions of dollars they could be making and it would probably increase their attendance which is lacking.