vovat | The Knoebel Thing to Dorney (Reply)

This weekend, Beth and I visited two different Pennsylvania amusement parks, Knoebels north of Harrisburg, and Dorney Park near Allentown. Neither of us had been to the former before, and the last time I went to Dorney was around thirty years ago. Knoebels is a small, rather quaint family-owned park with a lot of older rides, which started in 1926. Their mascot is a chipmunk named Kosmo, and other cartoon animals could be seen around the place.

Admission to the park itself is free, and you can pay either a flat rate for unlimited rides all day (which is what we did) or buy individual ride tickets. One particular ride, a dark one called the Haunted Mansion, requires separate admission, and I'm not sure why. We did go on it, though. A few rides were closed, including the other dark ride, the wooden bobsled roller coaster, and a water ride called Sklooosh!, the latter of which I didn't particularly want to ride anyway, but the name is fun to say. It looks to have a Viking theme.

We did ride the newest steel coaster, Impulse, and two wooden ones.

Twister, from 1999, lived up to the name, and was rather rough. We weren't chillin' with that Twister. The Phoenix was built in 1947, and moved to Knoebels from Texas in 1985. I can't even imagine how you'd go about transporting a roller coaster, but it happens much more often than I would have thought. The Grand Carousel was the first one I remember riding that still had brass rings, although they were only accessible from the outer row, where the horses didn't move. We went on the Motor Boats without really knowing how they worked, and it turned out that you had to steer them yourself. I'm not sure if we got a bad one or I just couldn't figure it out, but it responded very slowly and I kept running into the sides. The Pioneer Train was for all ages, but the seats were small, so I felt like Ian Maxtone-Graham in his tiny car while riding it.

I suspect some people would be too tall for it, especially as it goes through some low tunnels. The Cosmotron is an indoor Music Express kind of ride with a laser show on the ceiling. The building it's in looks like a shack with a satellite dish on top. Is it supposed to be some UFO enthusiast's cabin in the woods?

The Scenic Skyway is a chairlift that runs up and down a nearby mountain. I'll admit it made me a little nervous, not because I thought there was a chance of a person falling off, but because I was afraid of dropping something and then never finding it. I have a fear of heights, but generally only when I can really process how far up I am, so it's not like tall roller coasters or airplanes bother me that way. We had dinner that night at an affiliated restaurant called the Nickle Plate, which unfortunately was not affiliated with the Tin Woodman, then drove on to Allentown. We tried to buy tickets to Dorney online, but apparently they sell out, and then you have to pay an extra twenty dollars per ticket at the park itself.

I can't remember exactly the first time I went to Dorney, but I know Hercules, at the time the tallest wooden roller coaster in the world, was new then, so it might have been 1989. That one lasted until 2003, when it was deemed too costly to maintain, so it was replaced with one called Hydra the Revenge. I appreciate the mythological reference there, as it was the Hydra coming back to get revenge on his killer. The traditional account of Hercules' death is that he put on a coat soaked in Hydra venom from his own arrows, so it's even somewhat accurate.

They had stuffed Hydras at the gift shop, but they only had one head.

I also went to Dorney on a class trip in junior high, and maybe one other time? In addition to Hercules, I remember a small, fast coaster called the Laser, and I understand it's now touring around Germany. I tended to think Dorney was somewhat less enjoyable than the other parks I visited as a kid, with fewer good rides and no real themes to anything. Beth was interested in it as she has an interest in classic rides, and among other things they still have a Whip from 1920 in operation.

By the way, the one at Knoebels was called the Whipper, so is there a Whippest anywhere? I believe I'd ridden the other wooden coaster from 1924 back in my youth, when they'd first named it Thunderhawk. It's still there, and we rode it.

Dorney was also where the scenes of Sonny Bono's segregated amusement park in Hairspray were filmed, so even then it must have been considered old-fashioned. They've added a lot more stuff since my last visit, but there are still a fair number of classic rides, or at least newer versions of classic rides. My tastes have changed since then anyway, partially as I've reached the age where some of the rides make me queasy or hurt my head, which pretty much never happened in my childhood. I'll still ride pretty much anything, but the good rides are now not the thrilling ones so much as the ones that don't cause pain. I was worried that the park would be really crowded, since it was a Saturday and all, but it really wasn't. Beth figured most of the people were at Wildwater Kingdom, which makes sense as more people showed up once the water park closed. Dorney itself closed at 7 PM, their explanation being that they couldn't get enough people to work there, which often translates to their not paying very well. But anyway, we got to ride most of what we wanted to. Steel Force and Talon are pretty cool coasters, and the Demon Drop is basically the same as the now-defunct Stunt Man's Free Fall at Great Adventure.

There are two train rides, one of them, the Zephyr, reviewing some park history. There was another blast from the past after we left, because we ate at Perkins, and I haven't been to one of them in years either. Now I can't help associating them with Tiger Woods having an affair. I had pancakes and an omelette, and I brought home some apple pie for later. We got back home late last night, and I'm still pretty worn out.