Cedar Point!

[elionwyr]

Wednesday morning, Bones saw that Cedar Point was offering 300 free tickets to the park to those willing to be there at 7AM for a shoot for The Travel Channel.  Participants were told they'd be asked to ride MaxAir a bunch of times, maybe be on camera talking about the ride, definitely be on camera during the ride.

The park is about 4 hours from where we live, but we decided to go for it...even though it meant getting up at 3AM.  Which eventually meant actually leaving closer to 3:30AM. We weren't sure we were going to get there in time but...la!  We made it, all three of us wearing Doctor Who t-shirts (geeks represent!) with only a few minutes to spare!

To our relief, we weren't the last people in line, and - as suspected - the line didn't actually start to move into the park until closer to 7:30AM.

..Which meant I had time to go snap this picture.


(Little did I know there are a total of 50 animated dinosaurs scattered around the park! But. Spoilers, sweetie..)

We were taken into the park and quickly past varied silent rides.  (O hai dinosaur!)

..Until we got to the nausea-inducing MaxAir.  We were instructed to get on the ride, FOLLOW THE RULES, sit where you were instructed to sit, and if you felt like you were going to be sick, TAKE A BREAK.  If you were good, then as soon as you got off the ride you were asked to get right back in line. Some of our fellow stars-to-be never made it onto the ride.  A big bunch of us - I was in this group - rode once and decided, "Yeeeeah, that's enough fun." It's a neat ride, though personally speaking I can't do a lot of spinny things without my stomach rebelling.  Alas.

There were cameras mounted right beside seat #10.  This was of course the coveted seat, and the folks in charge would swap people out of seat #10 to get riders they felt would give the best reactions.  (They chose women every time I looked over to see what was going on.)  I gather they did some reaction interviews. They definitely did some walk-by camera shots of people sitting on the non-moving ride.

Filming went on until..I'd say about 9:30.  The park was slowly starting to open around 9, and we saw some of our fellow would-be-TV-stars drifting over to get into line for other rides.  Bones and his kidlet had ridden MaxAir a second time and decided they were done, too, so we embraced our inner pirates and  joined a roller coaster ride line instead of sticking around watching the filming.

I've not been to Cedar Point before, and was charmed by seeing some of the more 'old school' rides.  We took a whirl around the bumper cars, and then moved on to the gas-powered cars-on-a-rail ride.  Bones let his kidlet drive, joking he'd better start getting ready for her looming driving permit days.  I rode alone, thinking of how much I loved this ride when I was about her age.  I can't remember now if it was at Hershey or Dorney, but I used to take this ride very seriously as potential proof of my ability to be a safe driver.



We moved on a ride new to me - a 'high speed' carousel

There are sets of three horses per section and as the ride goes faster, the horses charge ahead/fall behind in their groove on the platform.  It goes nearly 15mph.  I was utterly charmed.

We ran through FrontierTown, which was mostly closed...but the theming was lovely.


(You can't make it out, but the sign on the left advertises a cure that 'repels ghosts, ghouls, vampires, werewolves, devils, ogres.')


Another random dinosaur!


The park has a steam-driven train, powered by coal, that goes around the park.  We hopped on for a ride.
It was a little like a haunted hayride, because we got to pass through "Boneville," a series of scenes populated by animated skeletons!  We were going just a bit too fast for me to snap pictures, but it was very cute.

Then there were more rides and a lot of 'wow it's hot' and just as we were about ready to be done for the day, we decided to go find those dinosaurs.


"O HAI!"