Trip Report - Cedar Point (9-19 and 9-20)

What an unbelievable weekend! After a leisurely drive Thursday night with a stop at Red Lobster, an hour spent at Books-A-Million, and a good night's sleep, we awoke on Friday morning ready to finish our 5 hour drive to the park. We needed to there by 5:00 P.M. for ERT

and, based on last year, thought the park crowds might be slack. And were they ever.

We started off the day with 10 consecutive rides on Millennium Force without having to leave the station. I was not aware of a shortcut gate that was present until the ride operators opened it for those who wanted to ride again without having to walk all the way around. We used this gate and usually got right back on the train we had exited since they were running three trains through the course at breakneck speed. We could actually have stayed here all night and ridden the ride close to 100 times if we had wanted. Alas, we were at Cedar Point, so there was more to do. We walked around the park, getting rides on Maverick, Dragster, Magnum, Skyhawk, and MaxAir. In between those, we hung out at the back of the park in front of Carn Evil (a great name) waiting on the new haunt, Terror Island, to open so we would have the chance to walk over an area of the park generally not accessible to the public: Millennium Island. It was themed up with scary pirates and tons of mist so we were ready to head out of there since neither Guy nor myself are excited about the scary haunts. We eased up toward the front of the park, took a spin on Raptor and then meandered over to Blue Streak. It was running very well and, since it was a coaster we had not ridden as often as most of the others, put 10 quick laps on it. We had a blast there as Blue Streak is very similar to our local Cannonball at Lake Winnie. This was an example of some "Old School" fun before we grabbed a quick snack and headed

back to Millennium Force.

It was here that we had our best rides of the night including possibly some of our best ever rides on one of our favorite coasters. Our 11th and 12th rides were totally insane as the coaster seemed to have really warmed up and was flying along the course and out through Terror (Millennium) Island. The mist was unbelievable as there were large portions of the ride where you could not even see the other riders in the train. We rode seven more times giving us a total of 17 rides on this one coaster in one day. All together in a little over 2 hours, we rode

Millennium Force 17 times. I have been at CP where the wait for one ride was longer than the entire time we spent riding the coaster.

We left and spent a couple of hours the next day getting pictures. We did hold out for a ride on the front car of Mean Streak and it was actually a good ride. Mean Streak catches a lot of flack from coaster enthusiasts but we both like it as long as we lean up and ride in the front seat only.

The crowds were horrible on Saturday so I suggest visiting on Fridays in Spetember. The one problem that you will face on Fridays as that the less popular rides (Mantis, Gemini, etc) are not open. There were around 10 of the 17 coasters operating when we were there. They were all open on Saturday but evidently there is not enough staff to run them along with the numerous haunts on Fridays. We did not really care as we had already ridden these rides and were more interested in riding the higher ranked coasters and getting some good pics.

Our final tally included 17 rides on Millennium Force, 10 on Blue Streak, and 1 each on Maverick, Magnum, Dragster, Skyhawk, MaxAir, Raptor, Wildcat and Iron Dragon. That was 35 total rides in approximately 7 hours on Friday and 1 ride on Mean Streak on Saturday. That was as good a time as we have ever had during our numerous trips to Cedar Point. Ride on!!!