Mt. Olympus & Bay Beach Amusement Park

USA 2014 Blog Day 6

Monday, 9 June 2014 Ian

Hiya folks. We had another early start this morning as we had a 3 hour drive to the first of the two parks that we were visiting in Wisconsin today. We first arrived at Mt.Olympus at approx. 10am to a car park already jam packed full of yellow school buses – not a good sign! We were surprised to find that the park are now charging $15 for the car park that was previously free. Fortunately we had some vouchers to get us into the theme park for $15 each instead of the usual $45 each. On entering the park it was rammed with school kids and the queues for the coasters were already huge. As we were only scheduled to be there for about 4 hours we had no choice but to join the queue for Hades 360 – the largest of their 4 coasters.

We had ridden this before the coaster was modified to include an added inversion so were excited to see how it was now riding along with its new train design. We stood in line for 2 hours 10 minutes before we got on (almost as long as it took to drive from Chicago to Wisconsin!) and both thoroughly enjoyed the ride. It’s a shame that all their coasters only have 1 train with no option to add another, as this doesn’t help the queue times at all. We quickly took some photos and shot some video before having a ride on Cyclops which had not been running on our previous visit. Unfortunately by this time we had to leave so didn’t get chance to ride the remaining 2 coasters Zeus and Pegasus – although we have ridden these before so not too disappointed. However, had we not have used our discount vouchers it would have cost us the equivalent of £33 each for our ride on Hades 360 - so could have been a lot worse!

We had another 3 hour drive to our second park Bay Beach Amusement Park, home to their wooden coaster Zippin Pippin. This coaster was originally located in Liberty Land in Memphis, Tennessee and was Elvis’ local park and favourite coaster. Bay Beach is a tiny park beside the lake (with the surrounding area being very industrial) with a few children’s rides dotted around. Zippin Pippin is only $1 each to ride (60p) so we purchased enough tickets for 10 goes. What a great ride this is...really fast and smooth with lots of airtime. The ride operators were fantastic and took our photo for us sat in the train. They also let Adrian take his camcorder onto the coaster to film it whilst riding.

Everyone was so friendly here and couldn’t be more accommodating. They even had 2 trains running on the coaster even though there were not enough guests to fill one (they just sent an empty train around whilst loading people into the 2nd). What a contrast to the mornings events - it really was a game of two halves! What we hadn’t bargained for were the bugs - being by the lake and the sun just starting to set, they came out in force to play and on our last 3 rides we had to shield our faces as we were just being splattered. Gross but couldn’t stop laughing...had a fantastic evening and well worth the visit.