Kings Island

USA 2014 Blog Day 18

Evening all ... we are blogging you today from Mason, Ohio where we spent the day at Kings Island. This is one of the parks that we have visited the most in the USA over the years. The reason for adding it our itinerary this year was Banshee – the world’s longest inverted coaster that opened this season. The park have installed this in place of ‘Son of Beast’ the huge wooden coaster that stood between 2000-2009 but was demolished (for various reasons) and in memory of the coaster the park have placed a memorial headstone in the new queue line for Banshee. Nice touch.

Having our Platinum season passes meant that we were able to enter the park ½ hour earlier than the paying public and Banshee happened to be one of the early ride sessions - what a result! This meant we were able to gets our rides in before the crowds descended. We were walked over to the ride by the security guards and everyone was surprisingly civilised staying in single file rather than the usual stampede that you find at other parks.

So how was the ride? Yes it’s very impressive looking, a good long ride, and floats nicely ... but somehow lacks the thrills and intensity of similar designed ones we have ridden in other parks as the elements are too spaced out. We had been told that the first half of the ride was fairly steady with the high speed kicking it for the second half, however we didn’t find this as it seemed to stay at the same pace throughout the ride even at different times of the day. Good addition to the park.

Saturdays are always the parks busiest day but our schedule meant that we had to be here today, so we had written it off as a chilled out non-riding day due to the expected queues, but much to our luck the crowds didn’t arrive until midday meaning we had ridden everything by lunchtime which was great. The Beast (wooden coaster) is having a really good season and is far less braked than previous years, so we had two consecutive rides. We took timeout after lunch to take a trip up the observation tower to get some nice 360 panoramic shots of the park.

By the time we were due to leave the queues for the more popular coaters had grown to 1½ - 2 hours wait, so couldn’t have worked out better for us. All in all we had great weather, great food, great atmosphere, and the park staff and guests were all polite and friendly. This is definitely the best day we have ever spent at this park.

We had a 4 hour drive to tonight’s hotel in Cleveland, Ohio, so decided to stop off at an outlet shopping centre to break up the journey. Adrian did well with yet another Adidas vest and a pair of trainers as everything in store has a 50% discount off the lowest ticket price – he loves his bargains! I however left empty handed as the trainers I wanted weren’t available in my size (as with the T-shirt that I wanted in the park). Not sulking at all !

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