Day 2; June 14th
King’s Island – King’s Mills, Ohio
Once again, we woke up at six, excited for our day. We left our hotel around 6:45 AM and arrived at the park just before nine(we stopped at a Waffle House), beating Jerry, Marcus, and Taylor. We found Justin and Joe, and while waiting for the park to open, we met up with Kevin (a member I invited from SSCoasters). Finally, at around 9:20 AM, they started letting people in. Unfortunately, Joe was not able to enter for some Diamondback ERT, which was a real bummer. While Joe waited, we went.
Why hello there King’s Island!
It looms over everybody as we walk towards the entrance:
Finally, after months of watching and waiting, we were here. We were really going to ride Diamondback. This was the climax of the trip:
The air gates open and you sit down in a spacious bucket seat that beats most la-z-boys and pull down your clamshell restraint. The train is dispatched and it’s a steep, but quick climb up 215 feet. You crest the top and look out over woods. Down you go, plummeting to 80 miles per hour. In the back, it’s a good 3-4 seconds of pure ejector. Up the second hill you go. Out of your seat you come again, as the pull on this ride is greater than any other B&M hyper I’ve been on. Down into the ravine and up the third hill; out of your seat again. The hammerhead turn is next, which taken at a nice speed and has some good forces in it. The trim does bite going into the fourth hill, but it doesn’t ruin the ride. There is still good pull at the top of the hill that crosses under the third. Next is a helix which whirls you around, up into the mid course brakes for a breather. These brakes bite as well, but still, it doesn’t kill the ride. Down into the ravine you go again and over two hills, both with nice, sustained floater. Into the final helix, the ride aligns itself for one of the signature parts of the ride: the water splash. You barely even feel the train slow down as it runs through it and up into the brakes, which smoothly stop the train. In the back, if you turn around during the water splash, you’ll see nothing but a 40+ foot wall of water, threatening a misting.
Overall, Diamondback is an incredible roller coaster and no doubt King’s Island’s best. They did an outstanding job with the whole ride, and as of now, it’s sitting at number three in my top ten. The only thing that I can find wrong with the ride is the helixes don’t have the extreme G-forces like Goliath or Titan, but I can definitely live without it.
I didn’t want to break up the review, so here are all my photos of Diamondback:
Money shot:
Probably the only picture that does the water splash justice:
Motion Blur:
After three rides on it, one a front row with Kevin, we met up with Joe and another friend of Kevin and mine, Ben, and his friend, Jay. We got in line for another ride and Joe was ecstatic. He loved it from start to finish. It was Ben’s first time to King’s Island in two years, and he loved it as well. We got off ten minutes later and met up with a third friend from SSCoasters, Jimmy. Now that we had everybody together, we headed for The Beast. It was interesting hearing everybody’s opinion on the ride.
I also got my photo with Kevin, Ben, and Jimmy, all four of us SSC members:
Backlot Stunt Coaster was next. We had a group of 13, and took up an entire train. Aidan was the lone wolf and rode in the front row of the next train, all by himself. I can see him in 5 years driving a Mini Cooper.
Vortex Followed. This is one of the better Arrow loopers out there, and if Arrow knew how to bank and heartline, they would have a phenomenal coaster here.
Firehawk was next on the list. Everybody thought X-flight was better. This was also one of the longer waits of the day(excluding SOB). We went next door to Flight of Fear afterwards. While in line, we were watching the mini show they had going and at one point they switch to a ‘security’ camera of the queue, because the people in line are in a ‘quarantined area’. The only hitch was that the camera was pointing at an empty section of queue. As for the ride, I still like it. The inversions are very disorienting in the dark and the forces in the turns during the rest of the ride are pretty nice.
We went to Racer, expecting a race, but we didn’t get one. It was very sad. The ride is very smooth though, which made up for the lost race.
We ate lunch at Panda Express. Delicious.
Adventure Express came next. This is one of the better mine train coasters out there, as it’s mainly in a ravine and is very very fast.
After this, it started to sprinkle. We tried Drop Zone, but it closed when we got in line. At this time, we had to say good bye to Jimmy, so we shook hands and parted. Son of Beast was still running so we headed there, only for it to close while we were waiting. We stayed in line since there was nothing better to do. Marcus even fell asleep. Taylor got lucky I guess:
We waited and waited, and after an hour and a half or so, they were cycling trains. We got on, and I’m not lying, it was actually a smooth ride for once. The rain did the ride wonders. It was fast, smooth, and the rose bowls, while still bad, were tolerable this time.
Kevin and Ben enjoying Son of Beast:
We did Flight Deck next, which is one of the better suspended coasters out there. It’s fast, it has great forces, and it swings quite a bit. Here’s a bad POV I took:
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cfBvM6UT5QQ[/youtube]
Here’s an offride as well:
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d_mZCGreHnw[/youtube]
Drop Zone was open again, so we headed there. What a rush this was. I had a fist of space between my legs and the restraints. My legs felt light even before we started ascending. We got to the top and plummeted. It was the single greatest experience of freefall in my life. 300 feet to the ground, I could hear Taylor and Joe screaming over me. Absolutely brilliant:
It started to sprinkle again, but we waited by Invertigo. Kevin had to leave before Invertigo and Ben and Jay stayed to ride, but left when they got off. It was great to finally meet them, as well as Jimmy. After we had a nice ride on that, we headed for the Kiddy coasters. We got to ride the Fairly Odd Coaster, which was Jerry’s 250th coaster, as well as a credit for Joe, Pat, Athena, Aidan, and Taylor. We also rode Runaway Reptar while we were over there. On the way back, we took a spin on the Scooby Doo dark ride, which wasn’t worth it. There were no sights on the blasters to aim, so our scores were terrible. Pat’s gun didn’t even register. I got 60 points. Somehow Athena ended up with 450 or something like that. It must be geared for little minds
. The high score was only in the 600s though.
The Eiffel Tower is a must do while you’re at King’s Island. We went up for a bit, took some pictures, and went down. While I was up there, I took an offride video of Diamondback:
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kGseCK88BKY[/youtube]
Athena and I also took a very nice picture of us with Diamondback from the top:
We went back to Delirium next. It was the only ride we were missing. Most people thought it was better than maXair. I though it gave a nicer ride, although they probably have identical programs.
We were getting hungry, so we headed for Skyline Chili. I got a regular 3 Way(spaghetti, chili, and cheese), and it was delicious, with a capital D. Some other people got some too.
We wanted to reride Racer and actually get a race, so we got one. Here’s CoasterForce on The Racer:
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H9sRPm2YNto[/youtube]
Time for some rerides. We headed to Diamondback. Jay returned since he had nothing better to do, but he brought The Pants with him:
I’m going to Hot Topic as soon as I can and I’m going to find myself something similar.
We only had about a 15 minute wait for Diamondback again. I left a ton of space on my restraint and I was coming a full six inches out of my seat. It was getting very dark as well, which added to the experience.
Our final ride was a night ride on The Beast. After waiting for the fireworks, we were on. The ride was just like a horror film. We were racing through the woods with nobody around, it was pitch black out, there was a light fog hanging over the trees, and the roar of the train wrapped it all up. The Beast used to be number 80 on my list, but it’s now been bumped up to 41 because of that ride. Absolutely incredible.
We walked up to the front of the park, a bit sad that our weekend was over already. We all had an amazing time at both parks. We got on plenty of rides, we made new friends, and we strengthened friendships with current friends. We shook hands, gave hugs, and said our final good byes, hoping we would be able to see each other again before next year. 39 hours after we woke up on Saturday morning, we got ready to sleep and put all the events of the weekend into our memories.
By the way, we woke up around ten the next day, and at a gas station we stopped at, we saw this:
Marcus and Justin came to my mind right away
. We got home around 4:00PM.