Day 10

Day 10 would see us starting the day with Indiana Beach before we headed out of Indiana and into Illinois for some small parks in Chicago. Every night had been spent at a different hotel but we thought it'd make sense to spend a couple of nights here.

For breakfast we went to the Monon Family Restaurant and we really liked it. It was nice to just kick back in a family run place listening to the locals' conversations. I had the omelette and it was better than the Denny's ones.

Indiana Beach was not new to me but Steel Hawg, the El Loco coaster was. On the previous visit this was sitting in pieces in the parking lot waiting to be assembled. It wasn't very good :(

Bogus camera station.

Thomas was up for trying the Deep Fried Oreos, but this concession didn't open today.

The Dragon Wagon is not the usual dragon wagon, being bigger than the travelling variant. It also differed in that we were allowed to ride it with no fuss. This ride is now closed and is due to move to a new park in New Jersey.

I had to make the operators aware that we were riding a coaster that was closed.

How sour is their lemonade?

The park has 3 wooden coasters. Cornball Express was good fun.

This park had our third Schwarzkopf coaster, Tigrr and a lot of time was spent letting Thomas ride and catalogue this.

It's still a good ride and easily the best ride in the park.

The large out and back coaster, Hoosier Hurricane is alright. It's in a great location beside the lake.

Loco Sumo is a very unique ride and quite fun, although I'd prefer it if the trains came with no roofs. They're quite claustrophobic.

No!

This was a stupid idea. 3 scoops of ice cream wrapped in candy floss. The scoop on the left is called Superman Ice Cream and is unique to this part of the US. I wanted to try that for sure; the candy floss wrapping was an impulse purchase. Never again!

Den of Lost Thieves is their shooting dark ride. It's ok.

The carp were gathered in mass to say "hi" to me. It's been years since I'd seen these guys and they're still mouthy as ever.

Some roll-a-ball-bingo thing.

Indiana Beach is an ok half-day park. It's location isn't great but it has a quirky boardwalk vibe to it.

Saying goodbye to Indiana we headed out to a few FECs in South Chicago.

Haunted Trails was our first one. One of two parks in the area that had coasters when we started planning the trip. However the other branch in Joliet removed their coaster a few months ago so we dropped that, and the Blues Brothers Jail, from the trip. This one in Burbank was still around.

The park were quite surprised to see 4 adults riding this silly thing, but it wasn't a problem to do so. I was set up to have to negotiate to ride these ones this afternoon but they were no issue.

Kicking it old school!

Our second hit was Safari Land, an indoor jungle-themed entertainment centre.

Located in a dimly lit corner of the park was a rather good tiger-themed rollercoaster. It wasn't as embarrassing to ride as the previous one.

This is a rather good video game.

A very quick stop indeed, as beside the coaster there wasn't really much for us to do other than watch other patrons loading bags full of tickets from the game machines.

The final coaster of the day was in another FEC park.

and it was another Python Pit and again there were no issues being allowed to ride this one. Thank you Chicago.

and that was the last of our coasters for today.

Our drive into Chicago went fine, the city was busy, but expected considering we were downtown.

For dinner we decided to go to Giordano's famous for it's very deep pan pie pizza. However there was a queue and a very irate chap who'd been waiting 90 minutes for his walk-up group of 20 (should have planned that better). We hadn't made a reservation but was told it'd be about 40 minutes and they'd text us when it was time. So we went for a quick walk around the area.