VIP Squared
Every year, my husband and I are very lucky to get a week-long break from being busy parents of 4 kids when Grandma takes the kids to her house for a week. For the past two years during this vacation, we traveled downstate to King’s Island, an amusement park near Cincinnati. King’s Island offers a VIP Tour, which means that for 9 hours, you get your own personal park employee to lead you around the park and to the front of all the park rides of your choosing, even holding your stuff if you really want him to! In case you’re interested, a VIP Tour at King’s Island also includes an all-you-can-eat lunch buffet, unlimited fountain drinks all day, a ride photo, an ice cream cone, a behind-the-scenes tour of The Beast, and $25 in park souvenir money – which can be spent on carnival style games, buying more food (if you need it after the buffet!), or in the park’s gift shops. While it may seem expensive up front, if you do the math, the VIP Tour ends up being a great deal all things considered, and we highly recommend it; especially if you’re a coaster enthusiast!
Being able to walk to the front of any ride line of one’s choosing is really cool – it’s hard to imagine, until you ride coaster after coaster without pause!
We began our day on The Beast (only because the Diamondback was not functioning, but luckily our fears of it being broken for the entire day were dispelled and they were able to fix it before long). The Beast is an almost 5-minute long journey into the desolate forests of southern Ohio on a wooden roller coaster! As we learned from our behind the scenes tour (included with the VIP Tour as I said), prior to its unveiling in 1979, The Beast was built on-site and follows closely the terrain upon which it is built. It was not pre-ordered and shipped to the park in segments like many modern roller coasters.
After riding The Beast twice in a row (almost 10 minutes worth of roller coasters right there!!), we moved on to the Vortex, an old-school steel roller coaster with more than a few high speed inversions. I had printed out my blog post I had written about the VIP Tour a year before, and it served as a helpful guide for this year. And I have to say, everything was much more enjoyable this year – last year I had written in my blog that I didn’t like the Vortex much and that the Backlot Stunt Coaster was lame, but this year both rides were much more fun than I had remembered – perhaps because I knew what to expect from the park, and so the element of surprise was minimized. I’m a person who likes to know what to expect rather than to be completely taken by surprise – I have 4 little kids, so I have enough surprises throughout my average day, thank you 😉
But whatever the case, whichever the reason, this year’s VIP Tour was even more fun than last year’s! All of the rides we rode were better than I had remembered they were, and the Whitewater Canyon water ride was even more fun when riding with friends! Of course, I think it helped that this year’s temperature was almost 90º instead of the unseasonal 70º we had during last year’s tour – getting soaked last year left us near frozen! And I learned a little bit from last year’s tour – no blisters from walking around in wet shoes for me! I brought a little bag and put a change of shoes in it. As much as it may have annoyed my co-VIPs (but then again, I was the only gal in a group of men), I changed into my flip-flops every time we got on a water ride. Not only did I save my feet from blistering, but I got to order our guide to carry my shoes around the park! Ok, so I actually felt pretty badly making the poor guy carry my shoes around, but it was kind of like being a queen for a day, and – carrying our stuff was his job after all…
Being led around the park by a guide all day, slipping in front of the ‘regular guests’ to get to the front of the lines (and picking whatever spot you choose on all the rides! Note to self for next year: front car on The Beast rocks, back row on the Diamondback is sweet, and the back is ideal and technically the front for Firehawk…) gave us plenty of time for ‘extras’ in the park: things we don’t normally do in theme parks, usually for lack of time like souvenir shopping, playing games and seeing shows. The show we chose to see this year – and it’s strange, I know, that I keep promising myself a theater break but still I continue to find myself in a theater audience – was called ‘Too Much TV’, and it was actually pretty fun! It began with a ‘host’ who went around the audience asking for them to ‘name that tune’ as different tv show theme songs were played. I thought I would be good at this kind of thing, but apparently my brain had been scrambled upon one (ok, a dozen) too many roller coasters earlier in the day because I couldn’t get any of the answers correct. But it’s ok, I didn’t raise my hand too high- unlike a fellow VIP who was called upon, but he answered correctly and won himself a Too Much TV button – way to go! Despite a fleeting regret in the beginning of the show (am I really watching yet another stage show?!?), I did enjoy myself. I recognized 100% of the show titles and about 80% of the lyrics since I used to be a huge tv fan and had watched many of the shows when I was a kid (many in reruns; I’m not THAT old!) The show included 6 dancer-singers, and it began with TV shows from the 50’s – 60’s (a few of these I watched like Patty Duke and Mary Tyler Moore – um, in reruns of course 😉 while the rest I just knew the themes since they were very famous like the Andy Griffith Show) and continued to shows from the 70s (3’s Company, Brady Bunch, Partridge Family, etc), 80’s-90’s (Full House, Perfect Strangers, Growing Pains, Friends, etc). LOTS of fun, especially for a former TV junkie like myself. The singers / dancers were pretty good, and I have to say that one of the highlights of the show was that during the Brady Bunch theme, they showed clips from the episode where the Brady’s actually visit King’s Island!! I had totally forgotten that episode (I used to be a huge Brady Bunch fan; I watched it every day in syndication after school, and I had the book / episode guide written by Mr. Greg Brady (Barry Williams) himself – I used to check off the episodes I had seen – ahem, NERD!!), but anyway, I will have to dig it up on youtube.com or somewhere and watch it again now!!
Miraculously, the rain held off until minutes after our guide was dismissed for the day – we had been watching the storms move in all day the day before our tour, hoping it wouldn’t affect our trip. We had promised our guide an email depicting our thoughts on what riding The Beast was like in the dark, but as I said, it began to rain, and we were forced to take a break. That’s when we realized just how tired we really were – too tired to wait for the rain to stop and the rides to re-open, so we’ll have to experience The Beast at night next year. And I could not be looking forward to it more!!
On the way home, we found a White Castle (don’t have them way up here in the bufu northwestern corner of Ohio), or at least that’s what the sign said. But the White Castle location was connected to a gas station, and the sliders did not taste quite the same… I thought they were just old until I brought some home and re-heated them, and they STILL were a bit off… hmmm…. Normally these things reheat really well, and I’m sorry to tell the White Castle newbie in our group that he still hasn’t really tried an authentic slider. They hit the spot at the time and had we taken the time to stop anywhere else, we would have gotten home even later than the 1 am-ish that we did and would have been even more exhausted. My bodily soreness from being beat up by various coasters all day was less than last year, but it also lasted a day or two longer than I remember. Oh well, more to tweak for next year! Maybe I will bring TWO pairs of shoes for Mr. Guide to carry around for me, haha!
And one final note… We have a running joke with a member of our group – we went to Disney World with him almost two years ago, and it seemed that every ride which he rode stalled; including rides that didn’t usually stall. At King’s Island, only one ride stalled while we were on it, but we got stuck in what I am sure is the most precarious position in which a person can get stuck at that park – flat on our backs, under the great blue sky on the Firehawk. Here is a picture of how we were stuck; note that these people are in the station, which would have been better since there were people around to help. We were stuck flat on our backs outside of the station for about 10-15 minutes, and I couldn’t help but notice how sympathetic the ride operator seemed during her announcements directing us to stay calm.
Also noticeable were the extremely red faces and disoriented nature of our fellow riders who were finally returned to an upright position and allowed to leave the ride with us. For the record, our park guide happened to be on the Firehawk with us (on the VIP Tour, you can also make your guide go on rides!) and said that he had never seen it stuck like that before. So yeah, while we were only stuck on a ride once during our day, what a place to be stuck!!!
And surely I don’t want to leave you with a bad impression of the Firehawk, nor of King’s Island, so here are some fun youtube videos from other riders:
Firehawk (you lie on your back and then are flipped after the lift onto your stomach. Like Superman, you fly thru a series of loops, inversions, and open track):
Next, not one of my favorite rides at King’s Island, though still fun, the joy in Invertigo is watching the person’s face who is sitting across from you. Ride with a friend sitting across from you, and experience the g-forces backwards first. Then watch your friend’s face as they experience the same thing backwards you just did – It’s priceless!!
And now for my favorites, The Beast (start watching at a minute and ten seconds into the video for the real action):
And the Diamondback:
All this watching the POV cams on the coasters makes me want to do it all over again… But unfortunately I have to wait…
So until next year…