PKI: Last Saturday of the season

I never go to PKI on Saturdays because I know the lines are outrageous.  But when my brother gave me 24 hours to accept a free ticket, and considering this was PKI's last weekend of the year, I accepted.

We took off from Columbus about 8:30 a.m. and got to the park around 10:30 a.m., including a stop at McDonalds and a 10-minute, one-sided conversation with a lonely old woman at the McD's information booth, sparked by an innocent remark in passing from me.  Yikes...  She told us she raised former Reds great Dave Concepcion and shared with us what she was doing when JFK was shot.

Anyway, we get to the park and are pleased to see no coasters are down for the day.  We make a beeline for Son of Beast. 

The line started well inside the entrance, and all the mazes were closed.  With the wait for the front seat, it took us about 40 minutes to sit down.  I guess you could call it sitting down as the seats contort your body into some strange and heretofore unheard-of position.

But the ride:  It was running slow.  The drop is fun, the loop is fun, the drop into the loop is fun, the helices are pretty good...but overall, still not a satisfying ride experience.

From the SoB lift, we noticed that the entire parking lot was full. 

On to Flight of Fear.  The line was all inside the building.  My brother was worried about hitting the Beast before the crowds found it, so we went back there instead.

The Beast line started by the first maze (closed).  We had some time to study Tomb Raider: The Ride, which looks like.....an office building.  Whee!

Front seat, the Beast, 30 minutes later.  It's just a whole different feel than SoB.  Rough, but in a lateral way, not kidney-thumping rough.  All the skids were on hard, but it is still so much fun to fly through the woods like that.  Even if there are no leaves on the trees.

As we got off the Beast (world's longest exit ramp!), we saw the line was much longer.  We hightailed it to Vortex and jumped in line near the entrance.  Then I saw something I've never seen before at PKI:  Vortex running only two trains.  No wonder this always-fast line was moving at a snail's pace.  We jumped the line after 5 minutes, deciding that we'd both ridden it an infinite amount of times anyway. 

Now my bro wanted to ride Top Gun, but I convinced him that FoF is better, much better, now.  Urg....now the outside maze was completely full.  Exactly 1.5 hours later, we were in our third and final front seat of the day. 

This is such a top-5 ride.  The final spiral lasts forever, at super-high speeds, and I love the "floater" corkscrew finale.

On to Top Gun.  We were disgusted to see that the line was completely full.  That's like a half-mile of people.  Drop Zone line was full, wrapped around the ride, and way out into the Action Zone.  Same with Face/Off.  Even Adventure Express was out into the midway.  Forget this, we said. 

We left, and had fun for the next hour, driving around in the hills and valleys behind the park, trying to find a place where one can view the back sections of the Beast (does anyone know if such a place exists?).  We didn't find that, but we did find many awesome roads, a beautiful old abandoned factory in Kings Mills, a long dead-end road along the Little Miami River lined with great houses, a covered bridge and other cool bridges, and more. 

Thanks for reading.

-----------------
You can't spell "dishonorable" without "honorable."

The reason the lines are so outrageous is because there is little to do in that park considering how long it has been in business.  They have 24 adult rides.  That doesn't allow for the crowd to be dispersed very well.  This park's policy has been to remove rides instead of maintaining them, with no replacements. 

We went sunday with thoughts of renewing our season passes, but the huge crowd and the limited number of rides made us change our minds and in fact left after only an hour there.  A season pass is a better value at Cedar Point, at least when the park is crowded, there are enough rides to control the crowd.

---

had fun for the next hour, driving around in the hills and valleys behind the park, trying to find a place where one can view the back sections of the Beast (does anyone know if such a place exists?)

---

My husband and I did the exact same thing a couple of months ago. We never did find a good viewing place.

UPDATE on driving around:  According to terraserver.com, the dead-end road we found, which ended in a covered bridge to someone's property, is very close to the Beast.  Here is the link:

http://terraserver.homeadvisor.msn.com/image.asp?S=10&T=1&X=3682&Y=21788&Z=16&W=2

As you can see, there is a field on that person's property that has a path leading right to the Beast.  Wonder if he'd give us permission to take it?  Probably not, since the covered bridge had NO TRESSPASSING and BEWARE OF DOG signs on it.

*** This post was edited by Den on 11/5/2001. ***

I think that the land and road of which you speak is actually owned by Paramount`s Kings island as their property extends all the way ot the little Miami River, seen in that shot.
-----------------
www.geocities.com/coastersrz I`ve ridden Son of Beast 62 times!

You can't tell this from the satellite photo, but there is a huge elevation change between the river and the Beast.  I bet if you climbed that ridge, you'd have a great view of the Beast's middle section. 

I want to be clear that I do NOT condone tresspassing....but....has anyone ever sneaked back there and had a look?  DISCLAIMER:  Doing crap like this is what gives coaster enthusiasts a bad name; that is why my Beast search will never take me off public roads.   That said, when I was a kid, I often walked randomly through woods not knowing whose property I was on.  Anyone ever "accidentally" ran into the Beast?

-----------------
You can't spell "dishonorable" without "honorable."