Day 2

Day 2 would see us getting up early for a quick sightsee in DC before driving down to Williamsburg, Virginia visiting two parks along the way. The larger park where most of the day would be spent was Kings Dominion and the smaller being Central Park Funland in Fredericksburg, a little FEC with a new small rollercoaster. The opening hours of the latter park didn't work in our favour at all as it opened at midday which meant we'd spend the morning at Kings before driving back to visit later in the day. The slightly extended opening hours at Kings made this plan feasible, we just needed to decide whether it'd be worthwhile sacrificing the riding of lots of good rollercoasters for this one. We'd decide later in the day.

We decided to drop the DC sightseeing as the guys who'd had a long previous day preferred a lie-in and there were also crowds gathering in DC for a protest march, something that is happening more and more often unfortunately. And finally there was an element of not wanting anything to do with the president and getting the hell out of Dodge. So, like a banana, we split.

I've been to Kings Dominion 3 times previously and Central Park Funland was new.

As we'd be visiting a lot of parks in the Cedar Fair chain on this trip it made sense to buy the annual season pass, which three of us would collect before the park opened (the 4th had already been out for a week and picked it up at Dorney Park in Pennsylvania). It cost around $200 and is good for a year so do the maths if you're planning a big trip, this may work out better, and you get perks in the park too such as discounted drinks (something we kept forgetting to do however). I'm not sure what caught the eye of the group here but the processing centre is to the left of the entrance, and it was an extremely slick operation taking just 5 minutes to get us through. All these other people were Season Pass holders too ready to take advantage of the early entry (another of those perks).

As well as having the anthem played before the park opened they were doing this. I'm not sure why it'd be done so routinely. We give thanks like this once a year, surely doing it daily devalues the thank you and turns it into theatre instead, and some might argue conditioning? Anyway, we missed the silence later on and didn't see any one else stop either. I guess once you're in the park the outside world is forgotten, albeit temporarily.

This wasn't good. One of the signature rides in the park wouldn't be running today, and chatting to some of the people in the queue it had been done for a while. Ironically they were waiting for a part to arrive from Germany; had we known our German guys could have brought it ;)

and that's Volcano, a rather fun coaster and one we were hoping to get during the exclusive ride session as the throughput on it isn't the best. But with it down we didn't need to worry. As I write this, in August it's still being advertised as not running on their website.

So we started our day with rides on Intimidator 305, a rather crazy ride for my first coaster of the trip. It's still holding up pretty well with a couple of the group noticing a little grey out at the start. I didn't feel that at all, perhaps due the adrenalin kick I got from being on a proper rollercoaster again. It'd been over a year so I was allowed. 

From there we darted over to the new Candy Apple Grove section of the website for the park's latest addition and the only new rollercoaster in the park for me. Twisted Timbers, our first Rocky Mountain Coaster of the trip. This opened this year and is built onto what was The Hurler rollercoaster, an unmemorable wooden rollercoaster that needed some improvement.

The fruit buffet they'd laid on for us in the station was a bit waxy..

The coaster now has an steel track laid on top allowing the ride to do all sorts of incredible manoeuvres. This for example is the first drop, which now takes you upside down for the start of it. The layout of the ride is really fun with no dead spots at all. One odd fact is that all the turns are to the right, something I forgot when I misread a blind turn over a hill as wanting to go to the left before being flicked the other way. Of all the coasters made by these guys that I've ridden this was one of the better ones, but not the best - that still goes to the first one I ever did, Medusa in Mexico City.

We saw these signs a lot throughout the trip. I'd question their honesty though as there were very few modern phones in the box, and I suspect they just bought a lot of old phones to fill it. 

The boys getting the signature photo. A great ride!

Opposite that the mouse coaster has had a bit of a retheme to fit into this apple grove theming. It's now called Apple Zapple, which I guess went through diligent market research before deciding that was the best name. We rode that as the public were arriving and we then agreed to go our own separate ways allowing those that needed to ride everything to run and around and do so.

It's a little bit early to be celebrating that? No?

The park has a large tower ride and usually when I visit I leave this until last, giving the priority to the rides. Having ridden the only new ride already I thought I'd spend a bit more time up there.

This does look quite something!

The Backlot stunt coaster which is a fun little ride but a shadow of what it used to be when the park belonged to Paramount and it was themed to The Italian Job. Stripped of all the nods to that film, going so far as to blow the bloody doors off the cars, and cutting the budget significantly, the ride is just an odd launch through incomplete effects now. 

The Windseeker stealing the photo from Twisted Timbers

This is Dominator, which at one time held the record for the largest loop on a rollercoaster record (which you can't see from this tower angle, typical). It's located near the entrance and is another good one to hit early during the early opening as the public very quickly build a long queue on this one. Even when we got to it later in the day the queue was a good 30-minutes or so and a lot of it out in the sun. 

Some people must have tried this for the signs to be in place. I wonder what flavour of squash they were trying to get?

Gift shop merch was varied.

Despite the long queues on a few rides the group had made good progress with riding them so we met up and agreed it was worthwhile driving the 90 minute round trip back to the other park. 

Central Park Funland is an FEC or Family Entertainment Centre. These are very common in the US and usually contain a minimum of a go-kart track, crazy golf, and a baseball game thing. Those with a bit more budget will often add a small rollercoaster to their line-up...and that's exactly what this place did.

The coaster is a small spinning ride made by SBF Visa, an Italian ride maker who appear to have hit the jackpot with this model of ride. They're popping up everywhere and becoming a staple in the big multi-park tours the enthusiasts are doing. I'm quite sure we'd be riding many more of these on this trip. In fact the boys had ridden one the previous day.

The rest of the centre looked pretty good with little touches of theming and a good selection of attractions. I quite liked this little NASCAR track.

As well as the coaster they've added a Hologate system, a 4-player Virtual Reality gaming system.

I should have added a banana for scale but these games were huge.

As was this modern take on Space Invaders. I'd see quite a few of these during the holiday.

After a quick visit to the FEC we ended our stay with lunch, figuring it better to spend the money with the little guys than the big corporates, where the value for money isn't so good. We then headed back to Kings Dominion to resume the riding.

I'm glad we didn't eat here, I hear it's very competitive and all they serve is white balls.

Charlie Brown topiary.

This is just rude! (British humour)

The singing mushrooms are quite famous apparently, I could barely hear them.

In an attempt to justify a marketing and innovation department the Cedar chain has introduced Augmented Reality to some of their parks and being a tech-nerd I thought I'd give it a go. At this park the software wouldn't download so not a good start. 

We liked the bobsled ride.

Yes! Shade! It was very hot outside and with a shortage of indoor attractions (there's one coaster and one theatre I think) this is always a welcome attraction.

We returned back to Twisted Timbers later in the day and it was running even better than in the morning although I did start to feel the bruised thighs thing that some people complain about when they ride these. It's a symptom of having a ride designed to launch you out of the seat and you, the rider, having big legs with nowhere to go when it does so. 

Thomas bearing up well with the slightly longer queue this time around. 

I quite liked this new ride operations console which we saw on a few rides. You can see here that the back rows, and for some reason row 2s were not in operation. The train is despatched when all the white seats are green (locked) and the countdown is supposed to motivate the operators to load up quickly. At this ride they often failed to get the train out in time.

We went back to Stunt Lot, apparently it had been down for some of the day, so it was nice to see it reopen.

As night fell they replaced the bubble gun karts with light toys. There was some fireworks at the end of the day and a chance to wave the light toys around. We chose to leave at that point to get down to our hotel.

Nice sunset.

Our hotel was quite nice, although this fish tank was fake.

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