Kings Island News

Just a quick list of news about Kings Island:

• There are now 4 operational webcams at the park that you can check out at any time at Kings Island Web Cams
• Sponge Bob 3D will no longer be playing in Action FX Theater!!! It will be replaced by Dinosaurs Alive 3D per Kings Island Twitter Account
• In a separate conversation with KI's PR manager, Dinosaurs Alive 3D will be charged and there will be a $7 combo ticket to the Dinosaur park and movie.
• Kings Island will begin Daily Operation on May 13th per Kings Island Twitter Account
• There was a flash mob of expecting mothers on opening day to the song "Baby" by watching it here 10 cents will be donated to the March of Dimes Flash Mob at Kings Island Video
• Fans of KI Entertainment has stated there are 4 new shows at Kings Island this year, American Country, Hot Summer Nights, Peanuts Party in the Plaza and Peanuts Pirate Adventure!!!
• Dinosaur's Alive is coming along great! It's slated to open on May 26th! KI Dinosaur's Alive
• Kings Island's WindSeeker as well as Cedar Point's, and Canada's Wonderland's have been delayed on opening. All three have/will not be open for the parks opening weekend. Theme Park Tourist News Story on WindSeeker
• Coney Mall has been completely overhauled and looks great!

All media above was provided via Kings Island Twitter Account

Don't forget to leave some comments! Would like to hear what you have to say about the news posted above!

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!

Courtesy of Jordan Hill---group on Racer stuck!

All of the pictures are mine except the one that is captioned.

Would love to hear your response! Leave a comment! 

WindSeeker Update

By Chris:




Sorry again for the delay in blogs friends. I'm wrapping up my senior year of college so you can imagine it's a busy time of the year for me.

You know who else is busy? Kings Island. Kings Island recently released via their social media including www.visitkingsisland.com (after a bit of teasing) that we will be getting a walk through Dinosaur Adventure to open up on May 26th for an upcharge of $5. Work has started already for that! KI has also tweeted that the Crypt is getting some ride enhancments as well during the offseason.


So here's what you want to know about WindSeeker as of today. This is what park PR Manager, Don Helbig has told me.


Vertical Construction has been completed on the tower. The ride aparatus will take a week to ten days to be completely built (already underway). The LED lighting package for WindSeeker will be similar to Snoopy's Starlight Spectacular. Coney Mall will be completely done mid-April. With WindSeeker taking center stage near Action Theater, guests will enter Action Theater to the right of WindSeeker near the exit of the ride. The queue line for WindSeeker will be to the left of the ride. I had asked Don if the former Flight Commanders ride pad was considered for WindSeeker. Don stated,  "We wanted the attraction in Coney Mall and the spot where it is was determined to be the best spot for a variety of reasons. Balances the skyline of the park from that location."


Other questions were submitted from other fans through me to Don. As for plans to repaint the Racer the original scheme Don said, "No plans for this year to paint the Racer. When the time comes to repaint the ride, the original colors would be great. But it doesn't stay looking like that for long which was the primary reason the track was painted black in 1991."


Another fan asked what all can we expect from Coney Mall besides WindSeeker, new curbing and pavers. Don replied to the question with, "A fresh new look for the entire area. Buildings will be painted, some additional seating areas, addition of Dinosaurs Alive!"

Here is a time lapse from Youtube of the veritcal construction!


This is going to be a beautiful ride.

WindSeeker Update

By: Chris

Again all, sorry for the delay. There hasn't been too many off season updates. However, I'm excited to let you know that WindSeeker is well underway at Kings Island.

The construction crew at Kings Island has certainly been busy since our last WindSeeker update in December.

Coney Mall has been getting a ton of work as well. The WindSeeker Plaza is certainly shaping up at the end of Coney Mall.

Kings Island's Twitter has also been giving us wonderful updates. 

All pictures below are from Kings Island Twitter. 

Windseeker parts started to arrive at Kings Island on February 22nd.

It is quite amazing how big these pieces are! 

Don't forget you can check out the live webcam on the WindSeeker plaza at http://www.visitkingsisland.com/public/fun/webcams/index.cfm

Here's a video of the first piece at KI.

 Here's another video of pieces arriving at the park!

Finally here are three time lapses of the Windseeker Plaza construction!! 

 

 

I don't know about you, but I'm am really excited about this ride! Hope you enjoy this update on WindSeeker. Be looking for more updates as this ride goes vertical! Also be looking for a Trip Report on Kings Island's "sister park" Carowinds and possible a trip report on KI's true sister park, Kings Dominion after the first weekend in April! 

Don't forget to leave us comments! If you don't know how, check the "Contact Us Page" for instructions! We look forward to hearing from you and any ideas you may have!

Park Dreams

By: Chris

First of all I want to apologize for the lack of updates. Life can be crazy at times and add college in there you get a lack of time to even think!

With my past few times of going South 71 past Kings Island I've had some day dreams of the park, going and riding Diamondback, eating some Larosa's Pizza in the Festhaus, etc.

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The day dreams inspired me to look and see if some people had dreams about both Kings Island and Cedar Point. So I looked to the fan forums to do some research. Here are a few examples I found, enjoy! Nothing has been edited, minus taking poster names out.

•  I dreamt that I was in the Eiffel Tower and every thing was normal so I leaned against the bars to get a better look at DB but and then they dissapeared and I was falling (in slow motion). all i could think about was hitting the ground so I did what spider man would do and shot webs out of my finger tips and crawled back up the tower when i was safly in side the tower i looked around and everyone didnt even noticed what just happened. I turn around to look at where the bars had disappered and they were there again. I was so confused to say the least! This is what happin when you take Nyquil before bed!!!lol "
• I had a dream that a TTD train completly fell off the top of the tower. I was in the park as it happened, and i saw everyone running for cover. Then, and this was the weird part, they got a giant crane and started to take ttd down as everyone was still in the park! So, I then went on the tallest and fastest rollercoaster in the park, millennium force. Yeah... weird dream indeed!
I dreamt that I was being taken on a pre-dawn tour of the park by someone who was either Don Helbig or Jeff Probst, (or an amalgamation of them both), and there was an elevator inside the mast on the top of the Eiffel Tower, which, in true, dreamy illogic was over 3,000 feet tall! ...and I still couldn't see my house (dang it!) ...so, As I came out the top, there was a beautiful, curvy roller coaster with otherworldy supports (like something out of "Alien") silhouetted against the predawn twilight, rising a thousand feet out of the mist-enveloped treetops below. The supports featured an almost dragon-scale texture, and was lighted with slowly sweeping, ghostly-white, "Pink-Floyd-ish" robotic lights, which revealed a chrome-plated quality as the material sparkled. I reached for my trusty Flip camera (you know, because you gotta record your dreams...) Anyways... I felt a heat source so I turned around, and finally found the blinking aircraft beacon, and was amazed at how tiny it was. Suddenly, the wind picked up, and the mast started to sway violently, and the elevator, for some strange reason, had been removed for maintenance while we were up there; but the tour guide knew of a secret escape chute inside one of the leg supports of the tower, so we all jumped in and the gut-wrenching sensation of falling woke me up.
• Well, my brain went into overdrive last night, apparenty what I ate for dinner made me have weird dreams again.I dreamed that who ever truely owned Millenium Force had died, and that Cedar Point could no longer run the ride as it was designed. Cedar Point had to redesign a few sections of the ride so they could run it again.The major thing that changed was the 1st over bank turn. They kept it low to the ground, and twisted the track so when you went around the curve you were on the outside of the track, about 3 feet off the ground. They changed the cars to Single Cars so all seats were the front row, and made them larger so people up to 300 lbs could ride the ride. Then up in the front of the park they had announced the new ride for 2011. It was called the Demon, or Demons Return. The structure was an identical version of Demon Drop, but the cars were those robotic arms/simulator cars. And it was a space shuttle simulator ride of sorts. So just as I was about to try the new ride, my alarm went off and woke me up. - All I know is I better watch what I eat before going to bed, or I better get to Cedar Point this year real soon.
• I had this wild dream that I was on Magnum with my friend, and we were at the top of the lift hill, and the ride stopped. My friend got so scared that she unbuckles our seat belt, somehow pulls up our lap bar, and gets out of the train, making her way down the lift hill stairs. Just my luck, the train starts moving again, with my seat belt undone and lap bar up, quickly latch the seat belt, pulled the lap bar down, and prayed my friend would be okay going to the stairs. Well, as we were cresting the hill, my friend's shirt gets caught on the side of the train, and as the train goes down the hill, she is pulled down with it, and falls to the ground. When I got off the ride, I ran into Soak City to try and where she had landed. And oddly enough, she had survived the 205 foot fall, and wasn't even harmed! In fact, she was sitting on a bench eating cotton candy like nothing had happened!

Wow some of these are quite the trip! Have you ever had a dream about Kings Island or Cedar Point? Leave us a comment telling us what happened in your dream!

http://www.cedarpoint.com/_upload/groups/aerial08.jpg

Sources:
Point Buzz Dreams
KICentral Dreams

Don't forget to leave us comments! If you don't know how, check the "Contact Us Page" for instructions! We look forward to hearing from you and any ideas you may have!