Kings Island – Right on Queue
We hit the road in mid afternoon, driving from Cedar Point to Kings Island, me & AJ & Josh & Kevin & Evan. It’s a few hour drive across the scenic flatness of rural Ohio. Our plan was to get a few hours in at Kings Island this evening. This wasn’t do-or-die, since later will be a scheduled full day at Kings Island.
I drove. We stopped every once in a while to accommodate Josh’s bladder, which is a common factor over the entire trip. We stopped to get food and gas at a McDonald’s, and also gas at a Chevron. Since I alone had eaten in Cedar Point (mmm, BBQ!), I didn’t eat here.
Driving along, news comes in that Cincinnatti and Kings Island are experiencing their daily apocalyptic Ohio rainstorm. Every outdoor ride is closed! Guests are fleeing in terror for the exits! There’s a chance we won’t get any ride time tonight, but we press onward.
Highlights from an Ohio road trip
And Josh starts to feel absolutely sickened, moaning and wailing. Even now I’m not sure exactly what was going on, if he had a stomach bug or was just being a hypochondriac. At any rate, he suddenly declared “
No more roller coasters for life!,” and as the guy with the car this meant trouble. Or so it seemed. Josh’s older brother AJ knows his schtick well, and haggled out a compromise with Josh. He’d drop the rest of us off at Kings Island, and chauffeur poor Josh to the evening’s hotel.
Reaching Kings Island at last sometime around 6 or so, the rains have just cleared up. There is hardly a soul to be seen. The park is wet, empty, and everything’s running again! Kevin, Evan and I unload to take full advantage of a totally vacant theme park, while AJ begins the two-hour hotel round trip. (Blame Cincinnatti traffic and the fact we’re staying way the heck off in Kentucky.)
A totally empty theme park!
For now I’ll forego any description of Kings Island’s look or layout. Their central Eiffel Tower replica is but a blur as we race by. No time to take in the ambiance yet, every ride is a virtual walk-on and we plan to conquer this major park in a mere few hours.
That quest begins with
Banshee, possibly the park’s best coaster. (Consensus seems impossible, with others preferring Diamondback or The Beast.) Banshee is
the B&M invert, among the genre’s newest (2014) and a world record holder. As with similar rides like Raptor, Banshee is a series of wild and creative inversions – vertical loops, Immelmanns, dive loops, pretzel knots, zero-g rolls. It handles these elements very smoothly thanks to B&M’s experience, with every twist feeling very naturalistic even while a rider’s equilibrium is eradicated. Due to sloping terrain, Banshee gets faster as it goes, meaning a nice dramatic escalation when many coasters seem to climax on their first drop. Banshee’s finale, arguably its climax, is a super slow inline twist which seemingly holds you weightless upside down for several seconds.
My enthusiast buddies Kevin & Evan say Banshee would be the world’s best invert…
if it had better restraints. The harnesses are a bit more restrictive than on other B&Ms. I’m not experienced enough with coasters yet to critique restraints myself.
Following, we decide to continue touring systematically. Nearby is
The Bat. Well, its entrance is nearby. The (empty) queue is a ¼ mile trek through a forested ravine, and part of that walkway is totally flooded. We each take different approaches to crossing the pool, from Kevin’s running leap to my railing trapeze walk. (I’ve chosen to wear dress shoes on this trip after finding them more comfortable to walk in than hiking shoes, and I can’t get ‘em wet.)
The Bat is an Arrow suspended coaster, like Iron Dragon. Unlike Iron Dragon this one has some true intensity to it, with a pretty decent drop down into a quarry and some sharp turns which really put strain on the swaying cars. It might be the wildest of its type still surviving. The Bat’s remote location hurts it the most, despite a cool rocky canyon setting, due to the constant views of a Great Wolf Lodge.
Next up is
Drop Tower. I looked it up, that’s the name. I sit this one out since it seems to have harsh deceleration at the bottom. Meanwhile Kevin, as a cliff jumping hobbyist, is a connoisseur of drop towers (
here’s his Top 10 Drop Towers list). Evan’s fine with ‘em. From off-ride it seemed pretty typical. I’ll be doing more interesting towers later on.
Now, while I
thought we’d continue touring systematically, we then proceed to walk straight past Adventure Express, The Racer, Firehawk and Flight of Fear, straight to
Vortex. Kev & Ev seem pretty nostalgic for these old Arrow Dynamics multi-loopers. Vortex is certainly an important ride, the tallest ever when it opened in 1987, with the most inversions then at six. By all accounts it was once an exceptional ride.
I fondly recall when Viper opened a few years later at Magic Mountain. It was my favorite coaster ever at the time, with its similar height and loops. Time hasn’t been kind! Viper and Vortex are both the roughest rides now at their respective parks. We’ve progressed technically since then. While today’s designers use complex computer modeling, back then layouts were created with wire hangars. Calculations done by hand. There’s a vintage charm, sure, not enough to overcome the pain and the headbanging. One of my least favorite rides from the trip, unfortunately.
Afterwards we skip past many more queueless attractions (Backlot Stunt Coaster, The Beast) straight to
Diamondback. It’s a great example of modern smoothness, a B&M hypercoaster so comfortable and relaxing that the 230’ height barely registers.
The ride layout is very familiar. Big lift hill and drop, progressively smaller hills along an out-and-back layout with a twisting banked turnaround. B&M’s seating feels more exposed than something like Intamin’s Millennium Force. For my taste, it’s less exciting and less aggressive. Can a ride be
too smooth?! Perhaps. At no point does Diamondback feel out-of-control. It has perfectly-shaped hills. There’s a zen to that which makes it many folk’s Kings Island fave.
Diamondback loses steam past its brake run, which is a common issue. It trades big hills for a fairly redundant helix. The big splashdown finale is great, a modern update on a time-tested coaster trope, and it’s a fantastic iconic moment on-ride and off.
Some say Diamondback has a rattle, which makes me snicker.
Nearby is the ride we’ve been putting off…
Mystic Timbers. The hope is to wait until AJ returns, since none of us have yet ridden this 2017 marvel. But we give up and ride it anyway. AJ then arrives immediately afterwards, and we all ride it again.
Mystic Timbers is a modern wooden coaster by Great Coasters International (GCI to its friends). GCI is known for making family-friendly woodies, which is exactly what Mystic Timbers is, and exactly what Kings Island needed. It’s a bridge ride between Planet Snoopy and The Beast nearby (it’s basically “Beast Jr.”). Not terribly tall – just over 100’, and with a gradual banked drop. Not super fast or aggressive, but filled with little repeating hills at a variety of unusual angles. Unusually for a GCI it’s an out-and-back layout (crossing the White Water Canyon raft ride) instead of twisting spaghetti bowl craziness.
There’s plenty more to be said on Mystic Timbers, on its theming and its infamous shed, but those aspects of Kings Island I want to hold onto until we return in two days.
For now let’s go over to Mystic Timbers Sr., AKA
The Beast. To me, it’s Kings Island’s best ride, and that tells you a bit about my coaster tastes. This one is divisive. Kevin thinks it’s overhyped. Says it does nothing. So what’s it do?
It goes off into the forest and back. Lasts 4 minutes, which is eons in coaster years.
Now…I could say A LOT more about The Beast, but it’s so central to our next day in Kings Island that let’s leave it a shadowy mystery for now.
The Beast is a beast, and I’m out for the count after this. AJ follows Kevin & Evan back to redo rides we’ve already done, which seems redundant to me. Besides I’m hungry – I’m the only one who avoided McDonald’s – so instead I venture out to the International Street entry area in a beastly food hunt. I mercilessly devour theme park pizza!
It’s now the final half hour before Kings Island’s 10 PM closing. The sun has set – it went down while we were on The Beast, which is ideal. International Street sparkles with nighttime energy. Dancing fountains glow with ever-changing colors. So does the Eiffel Tower. A musical loop adds magic. I pause, pizza sauce dripping down my chin, as the ambiance reaches near Disney levels of charm.
Then the fireworks start!
There aren’t many non-Disney parks which still offer nightly fireworks. Kings Island is special. Theirs are fairly low-key, just some smaller bursts over 5 minutes accompanied by pop songs. Still I love that they do this. It’s a great little punctuation to the day.
And while no one managed to do
all of Kings Island’s coasters in our short few-hour window (due to interest, energy, or otherwise), we certainly could have…and we will again soon.
Up next: Our longest day. Two parks. Hundreds of miles.
