Geauga Lake and WWK, 7/4/06

My family and I went to Geauga Lake (two year old daughter and four year old son) for the 4th of July, we all had a pretty good time! I’ve been to SFWOA in the past, so I was interested to see the changes since the switch in ownership.

We started in the WWK section of the park, and I gotta say: wow! There is truly something for everyone in this section of the park …the Thunder Falls slides were great fun for me, and my son loved playing around in the kids section, including 400 trips for him on the small kids’ slides. The pizza was even pretty good, and a nice cold beer didn’t hurt either. We all did Riptide Run (lazy river), and spent quite a bit of time by the giant bucket. Everything was well supervised and clean - I was pretty impressed already, especially considering the low price for admission for the four of us, and the day was only half over.

We headed over to the rides half, and I immediately got two laps in on Dominator. Still a GREAT ride, but is it just me, or is this the “bumpiest” B&M on the planet? It still tracked accurately as a B&M should do (the overused word ROUGH is definitely not correct here), but it felt like some of the track welds were sticking up or the wheels were unevenly worn, so I got kind of a “rough pavement” sensation. Hmmmm….

We spent some time in the kids section of the (ride) park, and I’ll say again, wow, MORE stuff for the little ones. Small flat rides, climbing structures, small trains, etc were enjoyed by my whole family. The highlight is when my four year old rode his first roller coaster ever – The Beaver Land Mine Ride. Since he had never been on any kind of a ride like that, much less a coaster, I thought he’d completely wig out – but he LOVED it and wanted to go twice!

Went by X-Flight….closed all day. What the? Oh well…

I rode Steel Venom, it’s still running solid; then went over to Raging Wolf Bobs for my first ride ever on this thing. I was apprehensive after reading horror stories over the years about this beast. However, I was very pleasantly surprised to find out that it’s a pretty fine coaster! I had no basis for comparison from the neglected coaster to now, but with the G-trains and obvious retracking, it was actually was quite fun, and not painful at all. The G-trains still cannot track a turn accurately, and there was some shuffling around some of the corners, but I was impressed! Definitely a re-ride.

As you’d expect, I was overjoyed at the ride operations under CF – completely atrocious several years ago, but pretty good now. Despite the lack of crowds, they had as many trains running as they could, and actually looked like they were interested in what they were doing.

Overall, I came to realize that Geauga Lake now is superior to both the Geauga Lake of yesteryear and the SF version. In my opinion, GL was a little too much “small-time” before SF and I don’t even wanna comment about it under SF. As of now, though, you absolutely cannot beat the range of big and small attractions – water and not – for that price.

I’ll definitely be back.

Thats odd about X-Flight. I completely agree with you about Dominator. I thought it was just me, but it seems pretty bumpy for a B&M. Nice TR!

When I was there about a week and a half ago, I rode Dominator four times in a row, in the front row, and thought it was the smoothest B&M I'd ever been on. It gave an amazing ride from the front row.

Raging Wolf Bobs has been a completely different ride since the rehab. I'm not suprised you enjoyed it so much. It's very underrated...a condition which is okay with me, as it means less waiting, more rides.

Definitely. Raging Wolf Bobs and Dominator are two rides that are definitely worth riding... (or they are in my opinion... but I also had very smooth rides on Dominator.) I am, however, definitely staying away from Villian and Double Loop... atleast for the time being. I got my fair share of bruises from the both of them.

Villiam seems a little bit better this year, but not much (so maybe it was just that one time). I usually get my bumpiest rides in the front of Dominator. I don't even ride up there anymore. Odd... Scream! at SFMM seems 10x as smooth as Dominator to me, but it is still a nice ride. Raging Wolf Bobs is great after the rehab. I agree that it is underrated.

If they could get Villain even half as smooth as Raging Wolf Bobs is now, that would significantly improve GL in my book. Dominator is definitely running a tad rougher than in its first few years. I don't even touch Double Loop anymore, other than the obligatory once-a-year ride just to say I did it.