The G-Force Blog: An Opening Day Review

Sorry this has taken so long. I just graduated college this past Saturday so the time before hand was a bit stressful!

Anyway on to the review!

I had the pleasure of visiting Kings Island on opening day. While the day was quite special, it was a great day overall.

I got to the park right around 9:00am. Went to the admission gates and my platinum pass wouldn't work. Stood in line for 20 minutes for Guest Relations to tell me that my pass wouldn't work probably at all this season that I'd have to stop in to GR every time I visited. My pass is from Carowinds, didn't have any problem going from Carowinds to Kings Dominion. However, I was told that Carowinds passes had an issue with the Kings Island system. Headache right there!

Anyway, went to Diamondback once I got into the park. Both queue houses were already full, this was just for ERT! As soon as we rode a perfect ride of Diamondback we went to Beast, however it was down. So we decided to ride the "new experience" on Crypt. The queue area was sweet! However the ride itself was pretty much the same. We met up with some great friends there and headed to Coney Mall to check it out. Vortex, Action Theater and WindSeeker were not operational. So we went to ride Flight of Fear. The queue for that was almost under the Racer. So we decided to ride Racer. The line for that was spilled out to right in front of Outer Hanks. We decided to stick it out since the queue house wasn't open. Once we got to the queue house, we opened the queue rails. We were next in line when we saw a train get dispatched with an empty seat that had it's restraint open. That's a big no-no even if there isn't a guest in the seat. The crew caught the mistake, stopped the train at the bottom of the lift hill and corrected the problem. The sent the train off and the next one (ours) came into the station. 15-16 of us, (Kings Island Central members) were on the train. We got dispatched and as we got 2/3 of the way up the hill we had a slight jolt that turned into a quick stop but then went again. We moved an inch or so more and we stopped. We sat on the hill for about 20 minutes with crew and area supervisors coming to check on us. Since most of us have worked at the park or been to the park enough we knew we'd be evacuated. The area supervisors came to us to let us know we'd be evacuated and helped us on our way.

I decided to break off from the group to find lunch. Which interestingly enough, met up with the group in the Festhaus to watch American Country. This by far was an amazing show! Afterwards my friend and I decided to go ride some rides. We headed to Action Zone to get some rides over there..but to our amazement the whole section was pretty much down except for three rides that had a 2+ hr wait. We went to ride Vortex (it finally opened about 2:30), then Racer (successfully ridden), the Train and Diamondback. He then left and I met up with some other friends.We did a mass take over on Diamondback. It was a great ride as well! Then we ended up going to Beast. Well Beast was easily a 1.5 hr wait. It was worth it because it turned into a night ride! What was really cool was seeing WindSeeker lit up! (Pictures and video at the bottom) Afterwards we checked out WindSeeker, walked through Snoopy's Starlight Spectacular and then to Diamondback for the last train of the night.

Although many rides were down and I got evacuated off of the Racer I had a great day. I evened out my number of rides since it opened to 355! Can't wait for my next trip!