Re: USA - CA/Midwest (Pt 9: KY Kingdom, Beech Bend)
The next day was the final major park of the Trip,
Holiday World & Splashin’ Safari, which is a bit over 90 mins west of Louisville, over the border in Indiana in the interestingly named township of Santa Claus. Another sleep in this morning, because that part of Indiana is in a different time zone to Lousiville.
On the road towards the park you get a great Glimpse of the Voygage, and I also got to see the bits of track in a field for Thunderbird, the launched B&M Wingrider they are opening next year.
The park is a bit different to what I expected, its on a bit of a hillside, and very green and leafy.
I headed straight to the opposite corner of the park for
Voyage. This is an enormous wooden coaster by the gravity group that features a few big hills, a twister section at one end with 90 degree banked turns, some more hills on the return trip, and then another twister section with an underground tunnel to complete the ride. Sailed straight into the front row. My initial thoughts were “Is this really the #1 / #2 wooden coaster in the world?” Don’t get me wrong, it’s a beast and very long, and very wild, but the airtime didn’t seem to be as powerful as it is made out to be, and it does run very roughly. I did a back seat ride straight after and given how long it goes for you really do get that feeling similar to being hit in the kidneys. The best part of the ride actually comes after the MCBR. You come up a hillside, and it is at ground level and it looks like the ride cant do much more, but the land drops off again, and there is a good set of airtime hills after. The 90 degree turn section at the midpoint is great, but the turns at the end are a bit torturous.
Next it was on to
Gobbler Getaway , a Sally Shooting Dark ride, which was a real visual treat and despite being cardboard cutouts with UV lighting, felt like being a storybook. There was a nice “grandma” animatronic, very realistic, telling the story in the queue, which is that you are shooting, no sorry, calling the turkeys from their hiding spots to save thanksgiving. The guns make a repetitive “gobblegobble” sound when you shoot. Much like the Boo Blaster dark rides at the Cedar Fair parks it seemed really hard to hit targets, but I did get a few of the turkeys to pop out from their hiding spots. In the end where you reach a scene of the thanksgiving dinner table it turns out the protagonist has had a change of heart, and pizza is on the menu rather than roast turkey.
Looking across you can see the splashdown flume and loading station of the failed “
Pilgrims Plunge” ride which closed after only a few years of operation. Will be interesting to see if they incorporate the existing infrastructure into a more reliable water ride.
The next coaster I hit was
The Legend which follows a rather twisted out and back layout along the side of a hill, and passes underneath a few of the slides in Splashin Safari. The ride is only running one train at the moment, and things looked fine…only one queue switchback full, and then I got into the station and realised there was a whole other section to wait through. Really excellent ride, and properly disorientating in the sense that you lose track of if you are heading away or towards the station, quite lengthy too (extends further back than it looks in the queue). Very solid.
The final major coaster in the park is the
Raven which is the smallest of the bunch, but excellent, follows a terrain layout including a sweeping turn by a lake. The whole time you are rushing through a mature forest and keeping a fast pace. Can see why this was voted one of the top wooden coasters back in the early 2000s.
For lunch I got a grilled chicken burger, which was very good. What made it extra nice is you got your lettuce, tomato, pickle and onion in a little plastic bag, so it was kept cold while the burger was hot. This brings me to the other big thing Holiday world is known for…Free soft drinks! Everywhere in the park are little buildings with Pepsi postmix machines, each with about 12 or so varieties, including all your regular soft drinks, powerade, ice tea (the latter two being good options because I don’t like fizzy drinks)
At the other side of the park was the
Howler, a Zamperla Jr Gravity Coaster, except this one ran freakishly smoothly.
On the way I passed
Liberty Launch , an S&S Double shot, which was my first encounter with one of these, and you get two full launches up and down. Nice airtime.
For the time being I’d done all the dry rides I wanted so I headed into
Splashin Safari.
It’s supposed to be African themed, but the park seemed to have a real naivety when it comes to African theming. There were a few faux stone animals at the entrance, but the rest of the buildings and landscaping was just generic American style theme park buildings. You couldn't even argue that they were cape dutch style.
African:
Not African:
A really big water park anyway, perhaps mid way between the size of Whitewater World and Wet n Wild Gold Coast. 2 Wave pools, two big kids water play structures (and a toddler area, with slides like Wet n Wild Jr in Sydney). On top of that there were heaps of raft and multi person slides.
First one I hit was
Baluki which is a behemoth bowl (much like my local 'Rip' at Whitewater World) except it had a couple of extra turns at the start. Thrill wise I think ours is probably better due to having a steeper drop. Oh, but capacity was great because they’d send rafts before the first one was out of the bowl!
Next I did
Mammoth which is an enormous Hydromagnetic slide. Unlike other ones, this uses circular 6 person rafts. It really is a well run high capacity operation, and the single rider queue is great. Two groups of 6 are batched in the loading station, you stand as a group on scales and if you get a green light you board. Rafts move continuously through the station on a slow conveyer, and then onto a shorter conveyer that accelerates you match the speed of the main uphill conveyor. On the uphill conveyor it’s basically a conga line of rafts going up. From the top its into a short tunnel, and down the first drop. The ride is excellent fun, and better than the regular sized ride of this type (Seeing the reactions of fellow riders adds to the fun). It’s A very long ride too, so the drops and uphill sections seem endless. I’m guessing the rafts must weigh a fair bit because at the bottom of each drop is a permanent pivot crane.(presumably to lift rafts out in the event of one not making it up a hill)
Next door is
Wildebeest which is another hydromagnetic rocket slide, but with your regular 4 person rafts, like the one I had ridden the previous day. It was run much the same, and also had a single rider queue, except you got way more water sprayed in your face compared to Deluge. Like deluge, this one also lacked a splashdown pool at the end.
I headed across and tried out
Zoombabwe a rather lengthy enclosed family raft slide . You got some decent wall time, and this was aided by the ride having some of the turns with the radius of the slide widened, giving the raft a bit more opportunity to splash up. A lot of dark slides drill random holes drilled in the side to make it feel like you are flying through space. This one had African patterns and iconography drilled in at a few points.
After taking a few pics I tried out the slides at
Hyena Falls. 3 of the slides are just generic 1 and 2 person raft slides (quite short…helix, drop, helix drop etc) which were average, but one of them was a Proslide Pipeline Wave. This is like Bombora at WnW Sydney, but scaled down for use by 1 and 2 riders rather than cloverleaf rafts (groups of two use a whirly wheel raft). I liked this one, good pop of weightlessness at the top.
From this end of the park you can get another glimpse of the construction of Thunderbird.
I asked at guest relations if it would open later in the day and they said it wouldn't.
After some re-rides on Mammoth and Wildebeest I did
Zinga which is the first ever proslide Tornado as far as I know. They're a pretty standard slide, but a good one.
I thought the old queue area made out of PVC pipes looked very cheap.
Jungle Racer is a run of the mill head first mat racer, with a timing system (times of 6 seconds to get down the slide were pretty typical) It was 10 lanes ride, so that’s a lot of riders per hour!
Watubee was a teal coloured open air family raft slide, which was fairly middle of the road.
The last slides I had to try were
Otorongo, another three single and double person raft slides. One was just a double downhill drop, another was a helix and big drop, and the 3rd was a long pitch black downhill slide.
Whilst I still had boardies on I donned a shirt I went across to the
Raging Rapids. The loading station is cut into the hillside, so straight from the station you go through a tunnel, from there the course switches back and forth a couple of times, passing through a flooded western town along the way. It was okay.
I did a 3rd ride on Voyage, in the middle of the train to see if that improved things, but it was much the same.
Frightful Falls is the parks flume ride, this one also starts out with a tunnel, which was quite claustrophobic because its not just a trough cut into a tunnel, but the boat more or less floats through a concrete culvert underground with quite a low ceiling. After a few turns its up a straight open air lift hill and down the drop.
The last ride I tried was
Eagles flight , a Flying Scooters type ride. This one was built in the 70s, so I was hoping I could get it to snap…I could get a bit of twisting going, but still nothing crazy like you see in some videos.
With that it was almost closing time, so I finished the day with extra laps on the Raven and Legend, which had barley any queue at this point.
Quick question. Heap of American parks seem to have these kid flat rides where the canopy umbrella spins around...Who makes them?
I got a few sunset pics of Raven from the outside of the park by the lake, and then got in the car back to Lousiville.
Overall, it’s a very solid park, quite pleasant, though the rides are fairly middle of the road. The B&M should really add to the place.
It was freezing and the sun wasn't quite up yet.
((((( , and the 360 degree dome cinema.