Family Vacation Fun, Savings and Ideas
I told you, even though we like roller coasters we do enjoy other vacations as well. So here are some tips for the Oregon Beach.
Even though we are very close to the Oregon coast we don’t get there much. I guess I am not much of a beach lover. Not sure if it’s the wind or the sand. But the opportunity arose for us to go to the beach for a weekend, so we took advantage of it. [Read more…]
KINGS ISLAND FEATURES BEST KIDS’ AREA IN THE WORLD!
Being No. 1 is hard work! For the seventh year in a row, Amusement Today readers awarded Kings Island with the prestigious Golden Ticket for Best Kids’ Area in the World in 2007.
Kings Island’s Best Kids’ Area, Nickelodeon Universe™, features two outstanding neighborhoods spotlighting SpongeBob SquarePants™ and Dora the Explorer™. Between the two areas, Nickelodeon Universe™ brings to life Nickelodeon’s most popular characters with a total of 18 attractions including more kid’s coasters than any other theme park in the world!
Don’t miss Dora’s Sing-Along Adventure at Nickelodeon Theatre. Explore with Dora and Boots on a musical adventure for the entire family. Four shows daily.
And, while sharing the dreams of your child’s imagination in Nickelodeon Universe™,, be sure to try our famous Blue ice cream.
The Golden Ticket Awards are the result of a survey conducted by Amusement Today, a respected amusement park trade publication. Every year, hundreds of well-traveled theme park enthusiasts are chosen to share their expertise to determine a winner in each category.
You can’t conquer the thrills and family fun at Cedar Point in just one day…so why not come back for a second day of fun? Here’s how this special ticket works: pay one price of only $52.95 online through June 15, 2008 and visit on the operating day of your choice. Then come back for another visit on any other operating day of the 2008 season. That includes HalloWeekends! Two-visit tickets must be used by the same person and are non-transferable. Purchase your ticket now!
Great America ’05
We have been to this park a ton. My husband grew up going there on vacation. It was my first Roller Coaster park and I was in college when I first went. It was also our kids’ first Roller Coaster Park. So we have fond memories here….BUT we have also been to Cedar Point, Ohio, the Roller Coaster Capital of the World, so coming back to this park this year has mixed reviews for us.
First and foremost this park is clean. I mean Disneyland clean, which is more than I can say for all the Six Flag Parks I have been too. I really appreciate that. It gives it a great family feel as opposed to the others that just seem dirty and crazy.
Great America is not a big park. I never thought that until this year. You can make it around in no time. Which is both positive and negative. The rides are not far from each other, which I really like. There are lots of shops and cafes between rides too which is nice when you need water or things to eat.
They do have some great rides that I consider big. Although again, after having been to Cedar Point, none of the rides are BIG anymore. But nonetheless we enjoyed many rides here.
The new ride was not yet open. I was disappointed until I saw what it was, then I realized we had actually done it at another park. It’s a fun ride, but it’s not a roller coaster. So we didn’t mind that we missed it.
The food selection was ok. I would really like to see parks go with healthier food. They are slowly coming around. They did offer salads and fruit salad. But the one time we went to purchase the fruit salad it was gone. That was at 12:00. Either they didn’ t have many or it’s not just us that are trying to eat healthier and they were all eaten up. I was glad that we found the sushi, it was a filling yet non greasy selection that left us all feeling great.
The bathrooms were always clean. The cafes were always being picked up by someone and rarely did you seen any garbage on the ground. I know there were not a lot of people attending the park that day, but the workers were all there nonetheless, sweeping.
Most of the staff at the rides were nice and social. I got grease on my arm from one of the rides. I asked for a paper towel to clean up and she must have apologized 4 times. It wasn’t her fault, but she felt bad and made sure I got cleaned up and was happy. Thank you Jessica!!!
Overall we love this park, but we have outgrown it. None of these rides scare us at all anymore and give us that thrill we are looking for. I doubt we will make it back. We will probably venture out to others. But I highly suggest going if you have never been. It will probably always be a family favorite because of all the memories. The best part of all was our timing. We really did have the park pretty much to ourselves.
We started the day again with our GREAT breakfast at The Plaza Suites. The weather was so nice we decided to eat outside.
We actually found yesterday that with the Premium parking you can park really close to the front gate. There are a few parking spots then TONS of handicapped, but just beyond the handicapped there are a lot more regular parking spots. We ended up parking 50 yards from the front gate. Wish we would have seen that sooner.
Today was busier, but still we had the park to ourselves. We ran to the back of the park again. The park opened at 10am and by 10:30 we had done 7 rides.
We snacked, and filled our water bottle multiple times and left the park at 2:00 
to go eat. The kids wanted In-N-Out Burgers but we wanted to go to Tomatina. I have not tried any pasta, but we have had their Piadines(warm-from-the-oven flatbread topped with cool salads – fold and eat like a sandwich) and Pizza and my mom did have a salad the week before. Today I ordered the Caprese Piadine. It was amazing. Great flavor and very filling. Ryan had had the pizza earlier in a visit and had really liked it, but thought he would try a Piadine as well. He ordered the Chicken Piadine. It was good, but not nearly as flavorful as mine was. The lady next to us ordered the steak Piadine and it was huge and filled with a lot of steak. She couldn’t finish hers.
We didn’t have a motel to go to so we took our time eating and just had some down time, then we went back to the park for one final hoorah…oh and funnel cake. 🙂
By the end of the trip we had riden nearly 75 rides. All because there were no lines.
We got to the airport early in hopes of being bumped, but it was just full not over booked. So we got home at 7:30, had some down time before everyone was off to bed.
It was another great rollercoaster weekend.
I am going to have my kids give a review of the park from their perspective. Those should be up soon.
Front row every time if we wanted.
We started off the morning with a great cooked to order breakfast at The Plaza Suites. I love this hotel. It’s beautiful and it’s clean and the breakfast is amazing. They have these really good Vanilla Frappucino’s that I had this morning with my breakfast too. Look a
t all this food for the 4 of us and our kids did not choose anything off the cooked to order, they just pulled from the buffet. I had a vegetable omlet and Ryan had to eggs over easy with toast and bacon.
Now that we actually had our Platinum Passes in hand we got our free parking (yesterday ours was reimbursed after we proccessed our tickets) in the Premium Parking. Which basically means, MUCH CLOSER. Again we got in and ran towards the back and did all the rides before many people got to the back. Any times that there were lines we would wait maybe 10 minutes and that was only because we wanted to wait for the front row. Often times our kids would take any row and go and they would come back and get in line again and then go with us or just stay in there seats and go with again.
We began playing this game of “let’s see how many times we can go before they kick us off.” Once we made it 4 times without leaving our seats before someone finally got in line and we had to get out. Today we brought snacks again and kept filling up a water bottle.
GREAT TIP: Outback Shack had water spouts on the Coke machines, so we filled up our bottles there and the water was ice cold.
We left the park again by 2pm and went and got something good to eat. Today we went to Sonoma Chicken Coop. I had discovered this place last week when I was here visiting with my mom. The kids loved it and so did Ryan. We sat outside in the beautiful weather. Ryan’s Carne Asada Verde was amazing, Jenna’s Chicken Fettucine was great, Cody really enjoyed his pizza, and I was satisfied with my Walnut chicken salad. I would not order it again, but it was their most popular salad. I guess I am not sure why. Really nothing special about it.
We went back to our motel and laid out by the pool. We had a bit more free time as the park was open later tonight.
We did make it back to the park and got in a few more rides, even some in the sunset light. It was so fun.
By the end of the day we figured we had done just over 20 rides.
We got up at 4am to get ready and be at the airport by 5:15 for our 6:15 flight. Since my husband used to travel a lot we have a board room pass. So we just ate breakfast at the board room once we were at the aiport. They have a great seclection of pastries, yogurt, juices, teas and coffees. We landed in San Jose at 8:00. We went and picked up our rental car and drove towards Great America and stopped by a Starbucks and got some drinks and snacks. The kids each got a Jamba Juice. We also took the time to pack some of the snacks that we had brought with us and put them in little baggies. NEXT TIME we would stop and eat a good breakfast at a restaurant so we had good energy and good food on our stomachs. It affects you when you ride roller coasters if you haven’t eaten well. We got to the park right at 9:30, bought our Platium Pass tickets and waited patiently for the park to open.
While we were waiting some workers came through doing a survery and we began asking them how many people would be in the park today. They said that last Friday there were 1100 people. During the summer they run about 10,000+. So we basically had the park to ourselves, because everyone around us had little kids, they weren’t doing the rides we would be doing.
Once it opened we ran and started on Flight Deck (formally Top Gun). We did any and every ride we wanted as many times as we wanted. The park was empty. [Read more…]
I am almost finished finalizing the details for our Cedar Point trip that we are taking in August. I spent the day on the web checking out hotels, rates, certain rooms and most importantly rental car hours.
Let me start with Rental Cars. My husband has an account with Avis and prefers them. I prefer Enterprise because they take you back to the airport instead of making you ride the shuttle bus and they give you bottled water to take with you. But the problem came when we had a very late arrival into Cleveland. We won’t be picking up our car until midnight. Turns out [Read more…]
We have always stayed at The Plaza Suites in Santa Clara. The Plaza Suites is about 3 miles from the San Jose Airport and it’s about 2 miles from Great America, our family’s first and favorite park. Plaza Suites weekday rates are about $200 a night and up and on Friday nights the hotel discounts kick in and they go down to $109 a night. Sometimes you can check and the hotel discounts go down by Thursday. The best thing is they have a cook to order breakfast and in the evenings they have a happy hour in which you get 3 free drinks from the bar per room. As much as we love that, we are never usually back from the park in time to enjoy it. [Read more…]
Years after we started the Rollercoaster Vacations our kids still looked forward to them.
We live in Portland, Oregon. So for starters we try to hit all the parks that are on the West Coast. Airfare money saver tip: Airfare is the more affordable traveling the west coast for us, than flying across country. And because of the short flights we get the most out of our days. If we leave in the morning, there is a great chance we will hit the park that afternoon or evening, adding one more visit to our trip. Let me back up a few years and let you know how we have done this, and mostly why, we continue to do this.
When we really started as a family to seek thrill rides our kids were 7 and 9. That put me at [Read more…]
We just did a 5 day hiking trip to Southern Utah and Northern Arizona. We aren’t hard core hikers, so covering over 30 miles in just a few days, was a big deal to us. But we did see some beautiful country. For us, the easiest way to get there is to fly through Las […]
We just got home from a fabulous vacation. We landed in Rome, then did a road trip up to Florence. From there we flew to Barcelona then onto some charming small towns of Catalan, Spain. The whole trip took 3 weeks and it was spectacular. After our 4 days in Rome we grabbed a car […]
We just did a trip in Italy and Spain in which we discovered and enjoyed some beautiful small charming towns. From Instagram to Facebook all my friends were asking me, “How did you even find these little towns?” Well I wish I could say I have this great method, but instead it’s just happy accidents. […]
We did a driving vacation from Glasgow, Scotland to London, England. We made a few stops along the way, but our most favorite stop was in the Cotswolds. Before we actually drove into the Cotswolds we stopped at Cheltenham. We stopped to get coffee and maybe ask for some suggestions. We didn’t have a place […]
