Michigan’s Adventure

USA 2014 Blog Day 4

Saturday, 7 June 2014 Ian

Greetings from Michigan! Didn’t need to be on the road this morning until 08:30, so grabbed a light continental breakfast at the hotel before heading off on our 5 hour drive from Canada back into the USA. Again the border crossing was quick and easy and we were on our way in no time. Temperature was in the early 70’s although quite cloudy so felt quite humid. Michigan’s Adventure is a fairly small park so we were only aiming to spend the afternoon there.

We first visited this park in 1999 with the Roller Coaster Club of Great Britain to ride Shivering Timbers – their huge woodie that had opened the previous year...which was riding fantastic. We returned with the club in 2003 and found that it wasn’t riding quite as well as the trains were bouncing when riding uphill – so we were interested to see how it compared today. Verdict ... much better than our previous visit and it was clearly visible that they had done some re-tracking and replaced some of the wooden structure.

The park was pretty quiet as half the visitors were in the water park, so we were hoping for many goes on the rides. However, Shivering Timbers had the longest queue simply down to the fact that the loading and despatch process was so slow due to having only 1 x ride operator checking the seat belts and lapbars on both side of the train. However, this soon changed about 20 minutes before the park closed when they needed to clear the queue line and the staff were due to finish their shift! All in all we really enjoyed the park and the rides, and set off at 7pm when the park closed and headed for Chicago - 4 hours away. Catch up with y’all tomorrow...