Sir Willow
Joined: May 2001
Posts: 3553
View Park/Ride Count
|
During my SRM trip in May/June of 2002, Indiana Beach was our stopover after SRM at Holiday World and on the way to SFGreat
America. Being a small park, we didn't spend a lot of time there. So I
probably won't be spending a lot of time on the trip report. But for
the coasters I do grade, I'll use my old 1-10 scale with 0's and
negatives being really really bad.
We arrived, parked, and paid our $2/person general admission fee to walk
accross the bride and enter the park. Once there we stopped at a ticket
booth that had a "large" amount of help and bought our ACE special
wristbands (buy one get one free). We took a brief pause to look at
LoCoSuMo, which was closed. It looks like it's going to be a great, fun
coaster with lots of surprise dips, twists, and turns. Unforutunately
they didn't even test run it while we were there. Oh well.
Additionally Tig'rr (Schwartzkopf Jet Star) was also closed, with it
looking like they were chaning out the kicker tire that puts the trains
on the lift hill.
Indiana Beach is also an interesting park, situated right on the coast
of a lake, it looks like it could an oceanside park with some of it's
rides built right out over the water. The park was clean enough, but
had one major problem- a lack of color. Almost everything was painted
was white (with the exception of some coaster supports which were plain
unpainted steel), and in addition to slow moving ops this became my
major, and about only complaint about the park. It would look so much
nicer with more color and a little creativity on paint schemes.
The entry to the coasters was also a bit confusing, being a bit
difficult to find since they were not on the main strip, and there were
no park maps handy to pick up and look at. A couple painted on a couple
of walls (one without even Cornball on it yet), but park maps are one of
my big things. Also an interesting side note was how many rides had
signs saying they wouldn't dispatch or start until there were a certain
number of riders. While I understand why they have them up, it came
accross as a bit tacky to me, and definately gave the impression that
their business line was hurting enough for them to put restrictions in.
Not a good impression.
Our first stop was Cornball Express. Cornball has received a lot of
hugely positive reports, so my expectations were high. Probably to
high, especially after a weekend of Raven and Legend. So after my first
ride I wasn't hugely impressed. It was fun, and had some good pops of
air, and definately worth a reride. But it took it a few rides to grow
on my and start looking at the coaster on it's own merits. Cornball
does have some great headchoppers and after riding it a few times here,
then coming back later it steadily impressed me. Including both ride
sessions, I'd give it a 7.5 or so, but I'll give a little more detail on
it later.
From there we headed on over to Hoosier Hurricane which by appearances
would be the better coaster with a lot more airtime. Ahh, but how
appearances can be deceiving. While HH has a great looking layout, it
never delivers what it seems capable of with pretty much none of the
airtime that it looks like it's going to give you. I've heard that IB
is looking for a family coaster without a lot of thrill. HH is it, they
don't need to look. My daughter would have loved this one, but I'm
almost afraid that even she would have found it a bit on the boring side
after a ride or two. It was interesting though to see it's second train
sitting near the station not doing much of anything. Score- 5.
We walked around a bit, and took a couple of rides on their double shot.
For those that may remember my trip to Castle Park in CA a long while
back, I mentioned riding their S&S tower, which was supposed to be a
double shot, and was pretty sure that it was only running with one shot.
After riding IB's version, I'm totally convinced of it. And in some
ways I'm happy about it. It's still a fun ride, the second shot, at
least for me, gave a fairly violent shot of air that hurt the shoulders
meeting the otsr's. Listening to us you probably heard soemthing like,
"whooooo, airrr, whooo..shot..ooo, OUCH!, wheeeeeeeee til the end" or
that may have just been me. Definately worth a few rides, but don't do
to many in a row. :-)
We took some rounds on a few of the flats. Nate rung up the high score
on the Sally ride (570 I believe), and no one else came close. Even he
was convinced at the end that he just had a particularly good gun on
that trip. We also took in a quick round each on the Galaxi, which is a
pretty typical installation and operation as far as I could tell. If
you need a score on that one, I guess it would be around a 5 or so.
Back to Cornball for a bit, and we had the pleasure of running into
Coaster Bob once again. I guess I'm just lucky but I've run into him,
and feel like I was being followed sometimes, on both of my trips out to
the area now. I'll let others tell you about him, as I just have a very
hard time attempting to describe the guy without being able to add in
visual and sound effects. But it was interesting watching him hop over
the rail for a cornball reride (which all of us did) and watch his
companion trying to figure out what she was going to do since she was to
big to go through the rails and not limber enough to go over them. I
think she finally walked all the way around, but am not sure.
It was around this time though that Cornball bit me and finished up my
riding at IB. I had one spot on my right side that was a little sore
for all the rides on Raven and Legend, and Cornball got it good and hard
on one ride. I wondered for a bit if I might have cracked a rib cause
of how much it hurt. So I was pretty much done then while the rest of
the guys grabbed another ride or two, hit a round on the YoYo swings
over the water, and then a couple took a trip through their walkthrough
fun house. I'll let them fill you in more on those when they get their
trip reports in (big hint there guys!!) But from there it was out
accross the bridge and back on the road on our way to Great America,
where I took over in the bonkers department.
|
