February 21st, 2015 - Winter Chill Out

Today me and Shawn Meyer went up to WCO. First, I'll just say it was absolute hell driving up there from the Akron area. Traffic on major highways was reduced to nearly a crawl. I saw a few cars in the ditch and/or the median. We were supposed to be there at 9:15 but the roads were so bad, we didn't arrive until right before the 10:45 session started. What's normally a 1.5 hour drive took almost 3. I'm glad they let us into a different session than what we signed up for.

Now about the event. First we gathered in Midway Market before the tour started. They held up the tour for a few minutes for other stragglers out there. In there, I met Adam, TTD 120 MPH. Joel was our tour guide. As we walked down the midway, we noticed some construction near Pagoda, lots of construction around the park but more on that later. Then we saw the GTT demolition and Dodgems were gone. But more on that later.

Next we went out to Rougarou. I was hoping we would get to walk up to the station and see what conversions are being done in there. We didn't get an answer to if the trim brake was staying or not. Then we proceeded to walk down Frontier Trail.

Since most of that part was just walking, I'll skip ahead to the presentation at P&D. Jason McClure and Tony led the presentations here. Here we found that Dodgems are going over by Maxair, and Sir Rub a Dubs Tubs and Turnpike Cars are being removed. Calypso will be moved to the WT Midway and be renamed Tiki Twirl. The construction over by Pagoda will be a new sweets shop called Sweet Spot. And I really liked the new season passholder preview event which will be held on May 8th, my birthday. During this I asked Jason about what is going on with Bon Air demolition. He said they stopped due to the construction schedule and will finish during the next scheduled demolition. After this we got to see the new Rougarou train.

From there we went to C&P's for lunch, where me and Shawn ate with Dave, known here as RideMan. For lunch they had salads, bacon mac & cheese, chips, chili and a drink. I think that lunch was really good. And there is now a functioning bathroom in C&P's.

After the tour we got to see the progress of Breakers. The clean cut of Bon Air was highly visible and we could see construction crews working on the renovations. From the renderings, this will be a great hotel when done.

From there we went to the maintenance shop. It was really cool seeing the trains on their chassis all torn apart. I didn't know TTD was such a complex ride with alot of moving parts. I can now see why there is so much downtime on it. I also learned that a cable costs $70,000 and the motor is tens of thousands of dollars. Then that wrapped up the day where we got our calendars, and a cool glass.

I think this is a great thing the park does. We raised $27,000 for GKTW! I respect the park greatly for putting this event on, but it would never have started if it weren't for this site. And that the park paid alot out of pocket for catering, souvenirs and all the staff that volunteered their time today makes me respect the park and the staff even more. This is one of my most memorable visits to the park, even though I didn't go on any rides. I feel great now that I helped a good cause and some terminally ill kids will be very happy. It was great meeting you today Adam and Dave. I wish I could've gotten to know some more of you. It was definitely worth the nightmare drive. I would definitely do this again. I'm looking into doing CFK now.