Cedar Point

USA 2014 Blog Day 19

Greetings from Ohio. Well we left our hotel in Cleveland this morning for a 50 minute drive to Sandusky where we to gain entry into Cedar Point an hour earlier than the public with our Platinum passes (sadly it’ll be the last use of our Cedar Fair passes on this trip). It’s a long 13 hour day in the park starting at 9am and finishing at 10pm! The early rides available to us were Gatekeeper, Millennium Force, and Maverick, so we headed straight over to Gatekeeper, their new signature flying coaster as we had ridden the other two coasters before.

We were on the front seat within a few minutes and it’s a very nice smooth ride with an interesting twist through the small openings in the tower structure to the parks new entrance gate. It’s probably the best type of this coaster we have ridden, although compared to the likes of Millennium Force and Top Thrill Dragster, these flying coasters just feel tame and don’t give you that ‘buzz’ you crave for. Next was Millennium Force (300ft Giga coaster) which was just running fantastic as it always has. I had a quick run over to ride Maverick (launched multi inversion coaster) which Adrian sat out as it’s a rough ride ... and I mean rough!

The park was starting to fill up quick and looking at the queue line for Top Thrill Dragster we decided to invest in a ‘Fast Lane Plus’ wristband which would enable us to bypass a majority of the queue, and reduce our wait to around 15 minutes - easily an hour quicker than the normal queue. At $90 each they were not cheap, but a must at this park if you want to get all the coasters done and re-ride the best ones. Top Thrill Dragster was an absolute dream launching at 0-120mph in 4 seconds and shooting you up and over a 420ft hill with an in-line twist on the way back down. It was this coaster that Adrian spent months losing weight for as he had seat belt issues on our last visit - but not today as he got straight on without giving it a second thought until I congratulated him!

As we had so much time in the park today we took time out to have a nice sit down meal in TGI Fridays (rather than the chicken strips & chips usually on offer at the parks!) and they even sold Cider which went down a treat as it’s the first I’ve had since we’ve been here. The park was much busier than we expected for a Sunday but we got all the rides done that we wanted to do. The bugs were out to play again and the park was full of them and it got worse at dusk – time to avoid the front seats now and ride at the back! This park always gets Muffle Head Flies for just 2 weeks in June and we always seem to be here for them.

Our last hour was spent riding Top Thrill Dragster and we were on one of the last two trains of the evening sat in the back seat whilst the firework display was in full swing – just a perfect end to the day.

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