my first family trip :)

I recently took my first trip to Cedar Point with my family (2 kids, ages 14 and 17, my husband and myself) on june 14th. We stayed at breakers express hotel, which is right down the road from the park. The hotel was nice, and it included a discount on the tickets for the park, which was great.

We arrived at the park at 9am to get a good parking spot, and we were allowed early entry because we were staying at a cedar point hotel, which was very nice. With this extra hour we were able to knock out the Raptor, and Millenium Force. Both are which are excellent coasters, and the staff that is working the rides really gets you pumped up and excited when you get up on the platform to get on the trains. Throughout the day we knocked out every coaster except for Wildcat and the two childrens ones. I was surprised to see that the park was not very busy, the longest we had to wait was 45 minutes and that was for Millenium, maverick and Dragster. I got slightly annoyed because it was dreadfully hot outside, and they didn't have the misting fans turned on that were set up at these rides queue lines.

Before going to the park, and i had visited this website and read up on forums, so i knew that food there was not going to be cheap, so i set aside extra money (that i thought would be enough). Our first meal of the day was around 1 and we went to a recommended place for fresh cut fries called Happy Friar. My sons both got cheese on a stick while my husband and myself got chili cheese fries. The cost of all of our food, with 4 drinks was about 40$, which is very overpriced in my opinion, but expected so i wasn't to surprised. The food was delicious, but way to greasy. The service was decent, but you could tell the cashiers were just saying rehearsed lines and really didn't care how your day was going when they asked. I hardly blame them though, it was probably awfully hot in that stand with all those fryers. For our dinner around 6:30ish, we wanted to go to coasters or johnny rockets, but we found ourselves in the back of the park again, so we decided to eat at a stand called The Stockade because we wanted to watch the 3 point shootout game. We bought 4 chicken finger baskets (9.85 a piece) and got free cups of water, which they didn't give us ice in. The chicken was fresh and hot, but it hadn't been cooked through all the way, so we took it up and complained and the girl that was in charge was very nice and gave us 4 new baskets and apologized for the problem. She also came out to our table a few minutes later and asked us if everything was okay, and she even brought us some sauce for our chicken. Afterwords, we went to the Last Chance Saloon for my husband and I to get ourselves a beer, and they only had coors and labbatt, which sucked a little, but hey beer is beer.

At the end of the night we walked through frontier town to see the lights, and they looked amazing. After we walked through that we went and saw the hot summer lights show, which was fantastic. We picked up an elephant ear up by the main gate to munch on before we got back to the hotel.

I definatley want to go back to the park one more time this summer, i would have liked to see some of the shows that they had at the park, but we were all so focused on riding all the rides we didn't really get around too it.

sorry for the long post!

Glad you enjoyed your time at the park and dont worry, its not just your opinion that the food is overpriced but more of a well-known fact.

BTW, did you get to see Shoot The Rapids running, if so what was your impression?

sorry, just noticed you guys went on the 14th when it was still closed.

Yes, we did see shoot the rapids. It looked like a really fun ride and the theming was very cool. We saw it from the entrance and also while we rode the train. It wasn't running at all, and we noticed that it didn't even have any water in it. I wasn't all that disappointed thought, im not a big fan of water rides.