Theme Parks

Today was a day that I had been looking forward to for well over a year. It had been rumored for quite some time that Worlds of Fun was going to be getting a new wooden roller coaster for the 2009 operating season. Clues gradually started showing up last year with survey flags, construction materials, and labels indicating the manufacturer. On Labor Day last year the press announcement was made confirming that Worlds of Fun was going to be getting a new world-class wooden coaster. I lieu of doing a full on report of the event, I would rather show you everything that was going on. Click on through to see my photo report.

Since we knew the weather was going to be nasty in the morning, but nice in the afternoon Valerie and I decided to sleep in and planned on going to the park later in the day. We weren't planning on making a full day out of our visit. Mainly we just wanted to ride some of the coasters, see some of the off-season improvements, and get as good of a look at Prowler as we could without treading in to forbidden areas. We ended up arriving at the park around 3:30 pm, and our first stop was Patriot The wait for the front row was about 20 minutes, and the rest of the rows seemed to be no more than 10 minutes. One thing that always bugs me is when they don't have the front line open. When they don't open up that line it usually ends up blocking the turnstile for the entrance to the rest of rows. Because it was blocking the view of rows 2-4 more folks were getting in line for rows 5-7, and as a result we saw several trains leave with a much lower capacity than it could have handled causing longer than necessary waits for rows 2-7. As to the coaster itself, it is still just as fun as the first time I rode it. It was running really well, and I heard very little of the clanking that I noticed during some of my rides last season. I have always tried to compare Patriot to Silver Bullet because my first rides on both occurred within a week of each other. I used to think I liked Silver Bullet a little more, but after my most recent ride on Silver Bullet a few weeks ago I can safely say I think we have the better coaster.