Hershey, Pennsylvania – Thursday, June 12th, 2008

After a night of riding Fahrenheit we were back at Hersheypark early for the opening ready to see what their orange and blue beast looks like during the day. Well, not too early since you have to factor in the time it takes to find a spot in their enormous parking lot and catch a tram up to the front gates, and then actually make it through those gates. The ticket taker regards my half-torn mess of a ticket with the same look of skepticism that a liquor store clerk might regard a fake ID being presented to him by a 16 year old, while I helpfully try pointing out that the messy, smeared magic marker scribbling all over it clearly says NOT VOID. I’m let through and we’re into the park.

Hersheypark has some very curious geography. There are at least three very distinct areas to Hersheypark. First there’s the main entry way, which is very high class and full out with mature trees and extensive architecture, almost like it had been transplanted from one of BGE’s nicer hamlets than anything else. Then there’s the old park area that contains rides like Comet and Great Bear, which feels much more like a standard thrill park only one located deep in the rocky Appalachian mountains, with tons of naturally occurring vegetation growing along the steeply sloped riversides, and with the rides and pathways snaking narrowly along the hills and valleys. But then there’s the newer part of Hersheypark that’s home to Midway America and the new Boardwalk water park area. Stand in the middle of that section and you’d almost feel as though you are located somewhere in an open prairie, with hardly a hill or fully grown coniferous forest within hundreds of miles, let alone just on the other side of the park. What’s even weirder is that there’s no place where the switch between these geographies is at all noticeable, the entire park feels continuous from one side to another.

And speaking of this newer side of Hersheypark, I must confess that I really don’t feel that the location of the Boardwalk was the best long-term strategic planning for Hersheypark. Actually it does fit in pretty well by making use of the Roller Soaker and Tidal Force as supplementary attractions in their fledgling water park, but ten years in the future I wouldn’t be surprised to find that because of it’s placement smack dab in the middle of Midway America they’re going to be limited on expansion room for both the dry park and the water park. But I suppose it works well for the time being, and the water attractions were certainly well-populated on this sunny June day, which is also where we eventually found ourselves, waiting for a chance to cool down on the Roller Soaker.

Having been on the Flying Super Saturator at Carowinds earlier that year I should like to point out that the ideal place to sit on these suspended water coasters is facing backwards, especially if you’re still wearing street clothes. In the front every single hose, fountain and waterfall will be aimed directly into your lap, and at some velocity to make sure it soaks all the way through. Backwards you at least have the front to deflect everything that’s coming at you and the hoses will have to ‘chase’ rather than ‘meet’ so thing don’t get much wetter than a particularly sloshy log flume, just make sure you don’t have anything on your feet you don’t want to remain squishy for the rest of the day (shoes, socks…). Plus there’s the added thrill of going backwards and not knowing when the next geyser is going to hit, which is particularly thrilling for a mild aquaphobe such as myself. After enjoying Roller Soaker and the Super Saturator at Carowinds I’m quite disappointed that the newer model Slippery When Wet was out of commission on my trip to Hard Rock Park. While rides like Top Thrill Dragster are now seeming the status quo for me, no matter how many times I ride them I will always have a small amount of dread in the pit of my stomach before boarding a water attraction that, if unlucky, I might have to spend the rest of my day walking around to the tune of “squish, squish, squish…“

How about we do Lightning Racer next? Yeah, sure I like that idea. Some people dismiss this ride claiming it lacks any and all intensity, which I may partly agree with, but I’d prefer a different term: graceful. This ride along with Thunderhead I think represent the two opposite poles of what GCI does best with their wooden coasters: Thunderhead has it’s raw intensity and rapid pacing, while Lightning Racer has it’s beautifully drawn curves and original concept. Unlike other ‘dull’ rides with overdrawn or empty spots, there’s never a moment on Lightning Racer where you’re not doing something or where the pace has slowed down more than it should, it’s just that everything is done with a perfect, fluid gracefulness. I suppose that does make it more of a high-class family thrill ride than anything else, but considering Hershey’s demographics I’d say that’s a wise choice, especially when you can also take your pick for a coaster like Storm Runner instead. For me my absolute favorite part of the ride is the side-swipe alley, where the Thunder track charges over Lightning and then vice-versa in rapidly choreographed succession; while other rides race or duel, here’s the one coaster moment where the trains do both at the same time. Also for those of you curious, I personally prefer the Lightning track, although if asked why I honestly can not think of a single specific reason for why.

I did get a chance to try a few more Fahrenheit rides. First time was early in the day where I think we did the back seat again, the wait was on the order of some 40 minutes. Then later that afternoon, when my dad had gone back to the car to take a nap, I got on two more quick rides after it had just reopened from a break-down. Again, once in the back, and the other time in the middle row (I had asked for the front, but being a single rider I was left with no option but to be paired up). One thing I would like to add to my assessment of Fahrenheit that I really noticed on my rides in the back on the second day was that, coming out of the dive from the Norwegian loop is really strong airtime in the back, and by that I mean borderline painful, almost on the same order as that found on the Rolling Thunder hill of El Toro (and those that have been on El Toro will know that’s nothing to scoff at). I also got a ton of rides in on Storm Runner, which has had short lines all year apparently since Fahrenheit has drawn many of Storm Runner’s old crowds away. Perhaps that’s just a result of building two like coasters right on the other side of the midway from each other, a redundancy almost without precedence at any other park… except just further down their own midways where you also have a mirror of two GCI wooden twisters right next to each other.

I’ll use that thought as a segue into my review of Hersheypark’s other GCI… you know, that one… The Wildcat. I should preface this by stating that on my previous visits to Hersheypark (2002 and 2004) I had never been a big fan of The Wildcat, but at the same time I could never really tell for sure since I only rode it once in ’02 and then twice in ’04, and out of those three prior rides I felt I still hadn’t gotten a chance to know it well enough to make any real judgments on it, besides that it was probably a bit rougher than I would have liked it. Well the waits were plenty short on this visit and I was really feeling like racking up a bunch of Wildcat rides on this visit to make up for opportunities lost on other trips, especially now that it has the improved comfort of Millennium Flyer rolling stock (although I did feel a bit conflicted on the use of new trains since the differences in wheel bases do give a different riding experience than that found on the PTC trains, and with Lightning Racer right next door I was worried the rides might now really be a bit too similar).

Well, my opinion of Wildcat has basically improved by quite a bit. At once totally GCI and yet it’s still something quite different; with longer, underbanked turns it’s a very different style of pacing than anything you get with modern GCI’s, and the remaining roughness mixed in with the hard laterals and some other brutal moments (most notably a moment halfway though a long 180 degree turn buried underneath the superstructure where the track seems to ‘skip’ down a level producing a sudden jolt of air and oppositely angled laterals). There’s also an off-ride aesthetic beauty to this ride that I think has sadly been disappearing from GCI’s rides over time, especially looking at off-ride construction pics of a coaster like SFMM’s Terminator Salvation.

At one point while I was waiting in line by myself for the front row of the Wildcat did a pair of VIP guests get to cut in front of me. Normally I dislike these kinds of services since the park is profiting over what is really my loss, but at least Hersheypark has figured out who is really paying the burden of these fast-pass VIP services and the ride attendant gave me two vouchers for a free small soft drink at any of the park’s concession stands. This was a nice treat because so far on this trip I had been drinking almost exclusively small complementary ice waters to save money, and upon indulging myself with a Sprite later that afternoon I realized that I should definitely keep that practice up. Jeremy’s advice to anyone planning to visit parks on a hot day: never hydrate yourself with carbonated beverages (which at most parks means anything they serve except for water). I literally went from feeling like I could take on anything regardless of the high heat, to feeling like I just wanted to be put in a medically induced coma in the span of about 10 minutes. Thankfully I recovered not long after getting another ice water some time after riding the Sidewinder (which, by the way, is one of the nicer Boomerangs I’ve been on; at least they’ve landscaped the surrounding area to a proper western theme rather than just leave it over a concrete pad) I saved my second voucher for when I could actually have a meal to go with it, which ended up being later in the evening at around 6:30. I had not eaten breakfast or lunch, and I was waiting for my dad to return from his mid-afternoon break so we could get something to eat together, although he had told me around 6:00 even. So by 5:00 I’m feeling quite hungry, by six o’clock I’ve finished with a ride on Comet and am at Sooperdooperlooper where we’ve agreed to reconvene, and I end up re-riding that one a good eight times in a row while trying not to faint from hunger, until I finally decide to just take a seat outside the entrance and wait until he arrived, which he finally did, and I gorged myself on the cheapest and most lightweight meal I could find off the menu at the ‘Gourmet Grille’ in Minetown. Such is the price one must pay when one’s objectives are both marathon coaster riding and super frugality in the face of $4.00 gasoline.

From here it was on to an early-evening ride or two of The Great Bear. A question has been raised by one of my dear readers about whether the Great Bear is a disappointment. My reply is that it really isn’t, just as long as you set your expectations right… and please don’t confuse that to mean ‘low expectations’, just that they can’t be quite the same as with any other B&M invert. The Great Bear is sort of the Lightning Racer of steel coasters: a grand, austere high-quality thrill ride meant to win over the adoring hearts of families looking for a fun thrill rather than the enthusiasts looking for something more hardcore. In fact I might say that the biggest disappointment with Great Bear is it sort of ruins the forestation around Sooperdooperlooper’s first half, although it’s first three inversions do have a very powerful presence while seen from the Comet Hollow section of the park. Other than that, after the final flatspin the designers just gave up completely and found the easiest way to thread the track over existing buildings and landscape to get back to the station area. But the ride starts off great with the original helix first drop, which in my opinion really takes advantage of one of the main benefits of having an inverted coaster, which is that sensation of flying and swooping high above terrafirma, which is a great way to start the ride with. You might catch some airtime in the back when the ride decides to dive towards the ground into the business end of things. Then there’s the full-sized loop-Immelmann-zero-g-roll combo which is great no matter what seat you’re in. After that the pacing changes into the riverside section of the ride, which isn’t anything intense but between the cool flying sensation of cruising just above such a great setting, and that it nicely sets up the final, quite intense flat-spin, I’d say it’s far from a disappointment (just don’t factor in the post-flat-spin section of the ride into your overall assessment of things). Alright, so it is a fairly short ride. So what? If you’re traveling on a Saturday in July, then you may be in for a disappointment. Rectify that by visiting on a weekday in June, where the lines are plenty short, if not walk-on, and you can get as much Great Bear joy as you can possibly care to handle. As a side note, I also think the Great Bear has one of the best name/color palate of any B&M coaster. If Cedar Fair had overseen the installation it’d probably have bright blue and red track and orange supports and named something like Abominator.

From here it was on to a quick stop at the relatively new interactive darkride Reese’s eXtreme Cup Challenge. A question has not been raised by one of my dear readers about whether the Reese’s Dark Ride is a disappointment, so I’ll pose that question myself here, as that was my main curiosity in trying out this ride for myself. My reply is that it really isn’t, just as long as you set your expectations right… and by that I mean at rock-bottom, and even then it might be preferable if you bring an industrial drill to see if you couldn’t penetrate the rock to get at the magma below. Then you might actually be impressed. Hey! The laser guns actually all work! There’s a cool roller-coaster-hill-type-segment of track at the end with some strobe effects! Okay, the theme itself is painfully lame, which is made worse by the fact that they try to pretend to be cool rather than just realize that they’re no better than the Small World attraction at Disney. And the scenes mostly involve flat, 2-D cutouts. Unless you’re a dark ride enthusiast or traveling with family with younger kids then you can safely skip this one.

We tried for another ride on Fahrenheit, but as we arrived I found they were cycling an empty train. This could be good, could mean that there queue is currently empty and they’re just about to re-open. So we gather with the small group that has formed at the entrance, and after waiting several minutes with no more trains cycled it becomes clear we might be in for a bit of a wait so we decide to ditch it in favor of some more rides on the GCI pair. After a ride on the Wildcat together I try to convince my dad to give the Wild Mouse a go as well. He declines, which is too bad because the ride I get is completely unbraked, one of the better modern production model Wild Mice around. I sense after eight days of parks he’s starting to wear out, even after the long mid-day break he took. Hang on, we’ve still got two more parks to do after today…

Well, Fahrenheit was dead and the crowd completely cleared out after getting back from Midway America. The night was upon us and I was rather let down by Fahrenheit’s closure, as I would have really liked to have gotten another front row ride in. Six rides in total is decent enough, though, and I honestly couldn’t have asked for more after our trio of re-rides from the previous night. Plus, with Fahrenheit out of the picture, that means only one thing left to do to finish our final hour or so at the park:

Storm Runner

If lines were short the previous night, they were really dead tonight. I had already gotten plenty of rides in earlier today thanks to the low crowds (including one hilarious moment, for me at least, when we ran to catch a walk-on row after arriving in the station and my dad got caught in the closing pneumatic gates. “Those things are really powerful,” he testifies.) I had been on Storm Runner twice in its opening year, but lines were very long back then and it broke down in the evening, so to be honest I never felt like I got anything out of those rides and couldn’t say whether I liked it or not. Well I got plenty of rides this time around, no less than twenty earlier that day as well as a good six or seven more runs that evening (plus the one ride from the night before).

If there’s one thing about Storm Runner I really don’t like, however, it’s the total lack of pretensions in the station. Painted the flattest white with red trim imaginable and lacking in all other sorts of ambiance (like some of Maverick’s “epic adventure” music that plays in the queue prior to boarding) even once you’re on the ride there is almost no build-up to the launch itself besides a voice saying “Now get ready, here we go!” like we’re about to start a video game level or something. Despite a dual loading platform there are only two trains (inspection of the blocking system shows that’s all it will allow), which means that you get almost no time before or after to reflect on the ride before you’re back in the loading platform being hustled off to make room for the next group of riders (and we were only just departing from this same platform, what, 45 seconds ago?). Now I know a lot of people will say that these things really shouldn’t matter too much so long as the ride itself is great, but to discount these psychological tactics I think would be a huge oversight.

Now, about that ride itself…

To be honest the launch is probably the least memorable part about the coaster, which perhaps speaks to the relative weakness compared to rides like Top Thrill Dragster or Kingda Ka, but more likely speaks to the amazement of what follows. Storm Runner doesn’t work quite like those other one-trick monsters where it’s all build-up to one blisteringly awesome moment (since I’ve already established that there is next to no build up anyway), but neither does it work like a standard coaster; the entire experience is still all so brief that by the time you get to the end, the launch is still in your short term memory. And actually I think the launch might metaphorically represent what the rest of the ride is about: every moment is part of a spectrum of continuous build-up in intensity that lasts from beginning to end.

Take the top hat. A much better element than the launch, with my favorite moment actually being a slight pause at the top where I realize how perilous my situation is positioned on a tight apex between two vertical sections of track with absolutely no controlling devices besides gravity, hell not even any supports holding up this track. When I’m normally on a coaster this extreme my perception of reality seems to take place in some sort of alternative hyper-reality in which self-consciousness and awareness become grossly distorted (the only way the brain can cope, I suppose), it is this brief moment at the top of top hat where everything slows down enough that I am suddenly confronted with perfect awareness of my own existence, and the realization of what is immediately to come is incredible.

The fall out of the top hat out-performs the rise into it by being longer with more vertical track, and the bottom of the pullout where the top speed of 75 mph is achieved takes place in a shaded ravine that is completely black in the nighttime (the approach along the launch runway is lit as if it’s a race track). The next element approximates the first by being a similar pull-up into a straight-up/straight-down maneuver with a pause at the top, only things are one-upped again by the top this time taking place upside down, and the pacing between these first two maneuvers is also quickening.

Now it’s time for moment #3, another pull straight up, pause, straight down progression. Only the pacing changes into something other-worldly here. From the steep rise into the barrel roll is a sharp pull of airtime, possibly the strongest experienced so far. But before you can sit down you’ve already rolled upside-down into the barrel roll so you are still hanging out of your seat. Somehow the roll between the barrel roll and snake dive is done with enough rotational flip to sustain that airtime as the train then rolls right-side up and then back upside-down a second time for even more airtime. Then it’s the vertical dive out of the snake dive for more airtime… wait a minute, how many different types of airtime was that, all back-to-back? Four, five? (straight ejector, hang-time, outward rotational, hangtime/rotational/fall-out) That is probably the longest sustained, most absurdly mind-blowing airtime I’ve ever been able to imagine. But honestly, the pacing and progression of this element is doing so much that I hardly even noticed the continuous airtime on my first rides around. The progression here is again a continual increase in intensity, with first just the ‘standard’ airtime on the crest into the element, then the introduction of the rolling, which seems to accelerate throughout the element until it reaches its zenith with the snake dive which combines the rolling and diving sensations (before that moment experienced individually) into one fluid motion.

After this highlight the ride finishes things off with this time the most nimble pacing on the ride so far – an incredibly quick tip to the right-hand side before naturally skirting leftward for a final hill over the trees with an odd little right curvature immediately before entering the brakes.

Crowds were so light that evening that we even had the honor of taking the very last ride of the evening, as the only people on the entire train. I had been hoping, since they had been launching with nearly full trains just prior to our last ride, that our launch would have been exceptionally powerful relative to the lighter weight of the train, although that didn’t end up happening. Regardless, here’s the photo I purchased from the occasion.

Storm Runner I was ready to dismiss as being nothing more than a showcase of a few neat elements that have nothing to do with each other, plugged back to back in an all-too short ride time that hardly qualifies it as a truly complete coaster, let alone a great one. What I got was a coherent ride progression with intensity that I had been looking for in Fahrenheit (but didn’t quite get there). Before going on this trip I made a wager with myself that Fahrenheit would ultimately occupy the #5 spot on my steel coaster list when I got back (I had been hoping for to knock Millennium Force out of my top 5; with Magnum, Maverick and Raptor also in my top 5 I’ve been terrified I’d appear a CP fanboy, yet my next choices after MF couldn’t quite compete). While that unfortunately didn’t quite happen with Fahrenheit, Storm Runner managed to impress me enough, especially upon reflection of those final night rides, to move up into my top five steel overall.

Next: Knoebels Amusement Resort

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