My Best Cedar Point Trip Ever

This was without a doubt the greatest weekend I’ve ever spent at Cedar Point. Better yet, at any park. I’ll start from the beginning.

Friday morning at work, I looked at the weather forecast for the weekend… 70% chance of rain Friday, Isolated thunderstorms all day Saturday, and rainshowers all day Sunday. Crap. At that point I was seriously considering not even going, as I live in Chicago and it’s a 4.5-5 hour drive. But seeing as I would be paying a fine if I canceled my hotel reservation, I decided to just brave it out. One of the best decisions I’ve made to date.

I arrived at the park right at 6:00, and went straight to Coral Courtyard for the evening social hour. I met up with my friends in a MASSIVE line for the food. As it turns out there were close to 1,500 enthusiasts at CP this year. Yikes. Nonetheless the food was very enjoyable again (can’t go wrong with unlimited boneless wings!).

Then came the keynote with Walter Bolliger and the film fest. Mr. Bolliger was nice, though his accent was very thick. Then came the film festival, which was very enjoyable for me since I was spending my weekend with Adam (TTD 120mph), whose video ended up winning. If you haven’t seen the video, it should be up on YouTube at some point. Very funny video.

The first night went without a hitch.. The rain held off the entire evening, and during the ERT we got 3 quick rides on Magnum (first one was trimless and delicious), and one each on Mantis and Raptor. Alan (Kyurthich) and I tried to get on Dragster, and we made it to the point at which we were next to get on… but then it went down mechanical. After about 10 minutes we decided to move on and come back later. So we got back to Dragster at about 12:15 to try to dead-weight it, but alas we didn’t get any rides.

Saturday morning, we arrived at Millennium Force at about 6:25 to find it already operating. I decided to just power-ride MF through the majority of that ERT. I ended up getting 9 rides on MF, 3 on Skyhawk, and 2 on Maverick during the morning ERT. Fantastic! We went to Dragster after that and just waited for it to open. A one-train wait for the front seat was very nice :P And to my surprise, it was sunny! Still no rain…

After dragster we hit a few rides before deciding to go up to the front of the park.. This is where the day got really interesting. Rock Band Live premiered yesterday, and we decided to check it out. We walked up to the table to find an employee that Adam knew telling us to sign up quickly for the auditions, so we said “sure, why not.” Our band name was The Chucks. That’s another tale. Basically the contest was set up in a tournament format, with “American Idol”-style judging after each performance. Since we were the last band to sign up, we saw all the other acts perform before us in the first round. We ended up getting lucky right away, as our first-round opponent didn’t even show up. So on to the 2nd round we went.

Our opponents in the 2nd round were doing okay.. It was very apparent that the judges were wanting a lot of personality while you were playing the game. The difficult part was that during the first 2 rounds, the song you played was random. In our case, I didn’t know either of the first 2 songs, so I was just doing my best to rock like a true guitarist. We were fortunate again in the 2nd round, however, because one of the band members on our opposing team failed out of the song. Nonetheless we received rave reviews for our performance, and we moved onto the finals.

Now things were getting hairy.. the other team in the finals was VERY good.. the guitarist was really doing some great showmanship, and after their performance they laid their guitar to the ground and acted like they set it on fire. Great idea. The good part about the finals, though, was that we got to pick our own song. In our case, we selected “Any Way You Want It” by Journey. When I went out there, I put everything on the floor. I was just trying to constantly move around and even sing the song while trying to just not fail the song. At the end of the performance, I knew we had done well. But it was up to the judges. The other band came out, and after some deliberation, the judges were ready. Tony gave a long talk, and right at the end, he announced that the first winner of Rock Band Live was…. The Chucks!

As our reward, we won the following: Single-day passes to the park (we ended up giving these to the runners-up as we all had platinum passes); A $25 gift card to Hard Rock Café; A copy of Rock Band (in my case, the XBOX 360 Beatles edition); and most importantly, a 4-hour VIP tour of Cedar Point to be used any time this summer. This includes front-of-line access to all rides for each band member and one guest. When I found out we had one all of this, I was simply ecstatic. Not to mention, we would get to play on stage as part of the show!

So at 1:45 we showed up for the show, and were told we would sit near the front and be brought on stage by one of the cast members. The show started, and sure enough, they came down and brought us onto the stage as the “new band” for the manager in the show. He instantly started to dress us as one of the Rock Band characters.. in my case it was the really tall “goth” character, so I had to wear this absurd long black trechcoat. I was trying to stay in character, but it was so funny I couldn’t help but laugh. After that, they put us on a mobile “platform” and we got to play 3 songs as the new band. Then at the end of the “battle of the bands” we played one last song as a joint band, and we just got to really ham it up for the audience.

Overall, Rock Band Live was simply a fantastic experience from my standpoint. I didn’t really get to see too much of the show as we were being given instructions through a lot of it. But the stuff I did see was really enjoyable. The “leader” of the other band was hilarious and the dancers/singers did a great job as well.

The rest of the day was a pretty quiet day at the park, with a lot of people leaving because of the rain forecast.. but it didn’t really rain at all until the literal last ride of the night for us. A few spotty patches of drizzling were enough to shut the rides down a few times, but nothing major.

I went into the weekend wanting to get 12 rides on Millennium Force; I ended up getting 18. So in the end, I can’t say enough about this trip. To think.. I almost didn’t go….

It was indeed, the best CP trip I have ever had! I cant think of anything really one uping it. Oh, and if anyone wants to know (who see's this), my movie is now on Youtube (type Dark Ride obviously) and will be on CP's site soon. I'll post some pics of the Rock Band live performance once I get all the pics from a friend.