Day 6

Day 6 would see us saying goodbye to Columbus before driving up to Sandusky, home to Cedar Point. We would visit two parks today, both of which I'd been to before: Columbus Zoo and Cedar Point. Included in the day we'd have a little city sightseeing and the first of the film locations I'd squeezed into the trip.

There are some nice old buildings in the down town area. This is a rather posh looking Renaissance building belonging to a law firm.

The State Capitol building is located in a single block so lacks the grand entrance we'd seen elsewhere. It also lacks the dome roof going with an odd tower instead.

A short drive north is the Columbus Convention Centre, famous for being home to The Arnold Classic, a major body building competition created by Mr Schwarzenegger whose statue is situated outside.

The first park was the city zoo which is located in the northern suburbs of the city. On my last trip here the park was called Wyandot Lake, it was bought by the zoo and incorporated into the zoo a few years later. A new central plaza joins the two with the zoo off to the right and the park off to the left.

The park has a fairly standard selection of rides and there's still quite a lot of development going. The old entrance was right beside their only rollercoaster, now it's a bit of a walk to reach.

Sea Dragon is the ride in question, a great little family wooden coaster that is just as good as I remember it being last time.

Having gotten the rides out of the way we thought we might as well spend some time in the zoo, which was new for all of us.

Again it was stupidly humid, so any opportunity we had to escape for the shade was happily taken. Does this make us enjoy aquariums more?

I'm not quite sure where the "fantasy" bit comes from.

We found a nice old carousel within the zoo. I'm not sure if is a new addition.

We had heard that the zoo may have a dragon, and being the coaster nerds we are we thought we'd check it out. It turns out they do have one, albeit the komodo type.

Whatcha looking at!

With any trip we do try to find fairs to check out, and in previous US trips we'd found absolutely loads. We struggled with confirmed ones for this trip so we agreed to stop by some to check to see what they had. The Marion County Fairgrounds was one such site, where a cursory search around the exterior revealed no rollercoasters for us to ride. Thomas was a bit more thorough and agreed to pay his entrance to check from within (this is something we do rather than all paying the entrance for nothing). 10 minutes later he came back into sight waving for us to enter, so we all paid our entrance and went on in.

The initial ride area was just a small part of the fair, it appeared that there was a lot more in the centre of the grounds, which is built around a race course.

I guess this saves on printing menus.

This was the coaster he'd found...yes, it counts. It's a very unique ride called G-Force, a winged shuttle coaster. It was new to the others but I had ridden this before at a large indoor fair in Cincinnati in 2013. I was happy to ride it again. It's very bizarre but a great find by Thomas. Bonus rollercoaster in the bag it was time to move on.

The next stop was for me, and is the Mansfield Reformatory. An old prison complex that closed many years ago and now serves as a film location, the most popular one being The Shawshank Redemption. We took photos of the exterior before I saw a sign saying it was open to tourists, which I genuinely was not aware of before visiting. I knew that any time spent here would take away from our evening at Cedar Point and I had only planned for this to be a 5 minute stop, but the rest of the team were happy to wait outside allowing me to run in and do the fastest tour of the interiors they've probably ever seen.

No time for guided tours Dr Jones!

The governors room looks just like it did in the film although Tim Robbins was replaced with a cardboard cut out.

Most of the building has been left to deteriorate, adding to the doomed feel of the place.

The prison wings are vast multi-storey halls and there are two, the west wing and the east wing (this is the latter)

The cells could do with a clean!

The prison library

Solitary confinement

I ran this :)

The reformatory was a great add to the trip, and I took way more photos than I've posted here.

On the way to Sandusky we stopped off for a quick bite at Wendy's and bought lunch, then the heavens opened so we stayed inside and consumed more. Weather-driven capitalism! It was a brief passing storm and we were soon on our way to Sandusky.

Cedar Point is well known to rollercoaster enthusiasts but probably isn't on the radar of travellers to the US otherwise. The ride selection is one of the best and the park prides itself on it's record breaking ride selection. Some fans refer to this as their Mecca. I had 4 new rides to experience here out of the 19 or so they're currently running. The first of those was welcoming us running over the main southern entrance gate.

Gatekeeper is an absolutely ridiculously huge winged rollercoaster but the ride experience wasn't exactly on par with how it looked; too calculated and too safe but the flight through the keyholes was done really well highlighting that the trick with this ride is to make it feel like you're running close to scenery and structure and that's not something you're going to get 200ft up.

The coaster on the right is Valravn, their dive coaster. This had a noticeably longer queue caused in part by it breaking down. This did help thin out the queue and as they reopened we were one of the first to board. This ride suffers from the same problem as Gatekeeper being too big and too calculated to offer any thrill other than it being big. 

After this ride we decided to split up as Tal in particular had a lot to ride. I think I hung around with Christof for the evening as we needed the same things.

Raptor is a large inverted rollercoaster, not as large as Alpengeist ridden earlier in the trip and tiny compared to Banshee. It was ok the last time I rode this, but with a bit of a queue tonight I skipped it. 

The latest rollercoaster for the park, opening a couple of months before our trip, was Steel Vengeance a Rocky Mountain reworking of the old Mean Streak rollercoaster. According to the park's PR this ride holds 10 records covering things like height, speed, drop, first this, first that etc. None of that matters if the overall ride experience wasn't fun.

I needn't have worried, the ride is an incredible piece of engineering and amplifies the adrenalin rush I'd got from other RMC rides but...and there is a but...with that increase there's also an increase in the discomfort that I experienced on Storm Chaser. There are some parts of the ride where I had to ride defensively, keeping my feet pressed to the floor in an attempt to counter the ridiculous, and cited as record breaking, airtime. There are definite spots where the airtime sending you up into the lap bar is particularly strong to the point I think someone may break their thigh bone on this. Expect to see "calcium deficiency" added to the medical criteria for not riding to be added soon.

The ride is also facing into throughput issues, currently having recently added a second train to the operations following a minor crash when it first opened. They're aiming to get to 3 trains running at the same time which will help keep the queue lines down.

Tal was due to hit 2000 coasters on this trip and it fell into one of the ones at this park. Of all the rides to choose he went for the kiddy coaster Wilderness Express, a lovely piece of coaster enthusiast trolling. This was a tough one to get the last time I visited, I had to basically get the permission of a child to ride with him, but I got it. Since then the park have a process where you can get a ticket from guest services that gives you permission to ride alone, as long as you can fit in the ride; and that's where Tal's silly plan broke down. They couldn't get the restraint to click and no amount of pleading from him was going to get him on this ride, so he had to give it up and choose something else.

Lesson learnt. Just don't plan your landmark coasters. They're bound to fail.

Instead he chose Top Thrill Dragster, which still looks formidable, and still offers a great adrenalin rush that's lacking from some of the rides that have followed it.

As the skies darkened myself and Christof headed over to Millennium Force which was also running incredibly well, but also had a great atmosphere in the station. I think a couple of coaster groups were having a repeat riding session at this ride with lots of cheering and clapping, and some great music being played in the station. It also helped that the exit has a little gate that brings you straight into the station for another ride rather than having to walk all the way around. So we stayed here for a few rides.

Steel Vengeance does look good, the park was due to close and we had one coaster to get, their launched coaster Maverick. This had been down earlier in the evening but as were riding Millennium Force we'd heard they'd reopened it, so like two teenagers who had drunk too much sugary drinks the two of us tried to reach it before it closed. It was clear that we're not as fit as teenagers and we realised the park is quite big when running is involved (it's over 1.5km from the main entrance to the back of the park), however we made it just in the nick of time getting the penultimate ride of the day.

The lack of photos perhaps a sign of how serious we took the sprint I'm pleased to say that Maverick was my favourite ride of the night. Steel Vengeance is incredible but not a ride I could see myself riding over and over, unlike this one. You can have all the records in the world for being biggest, fastest, or whatever but at the end of the day it's the fun rides that draw people back around for another go. Millennium Force has it, Maverick has it. Steel Vengeance doesn't. People come off that with a sense of achievement for having survived. With Maverick people came off instantly wanting to ride it again. Unfortunately, there was just not enough time to do so tonight...but we'd be back tomorrow. 

Christof celebrating in a rather desolate park. We'd ridden all the new coasters leaving tomorrow to being a very easy day for us revisitors. 

and it was goodnight Cedar Point, we'll see you again in the morning.

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