Yesterday our trip to the Great American Ball Park to watch the Reds play ended up in disappointment. It rained before the game to cool everyone off, but we got caught in the downpour on the way to meet my friends at a local sports bar. We met up with some of the people that we had seen earlier in the week, and two more people I knew through friends. We all headed to the park together, bought the cheapest seats possible, and sat out for a game of baseball. Three hours later, the game was over, our team had lost, and everyone had to say goodbye. The stadium is great for baseball, and was short enough that any line drive was a quick home run. We even saw a grand slam. Too bad baseball is so damn boring.
Today was our visit to the city’s largest amusement park, Paramount’s Kings Island. We couldn’t have asked for a more perfect visit. It was fantastic. A week ago, there was a safety problem with one of the premiere rides in the park, the Son of Beast. Cincinnati is also gripped in the middle of a nasty heat wave. Today was also a weekday. Combining all three of these means the smallest lines ever.
I grew up riding a lot of roller coasters. There was an amusement park literally a quarter mile from my house in the middle of a corn field, and I worked on coasters and in the park during the summers of high school. We would visit Kings Island once a year and wait in terrible lines, get really sunburned, sick on sugar, and come home having purchasing items of suspect quality at extremely high park prices. That being said, I memorized roller coaster statistics like other people would track the statistics of their favorite baseball players. We would even take trips to Cedar Point to ride new rides occasionally. It’s a rare treat in Ohio, we are spoiled by quality roller coasters.
Today we walked onto most rides, and we never waited more than fifteen minutes for anything in the entire park. It was wonderful. I got my wife on the longest, best wooden roller coaster ever, The Beast, and rode the rest with my father. My mom can’t even sit in the back seat of a car due to motion sickness, so she was given "bag" duty while we breezed through lines. My wife kept her company. We also enjoyed the water park at the end of the day to cool off. My experience with large Americans in tiny bathing suits leads me to ask: Where is your shame?
We had a good time in the Scooby Doo haunted house as we were leaving the park. They give you light guns on the ride which let you set off targets for points. These activate the "ghosts" in the haunted house. I crushed my family’s high scores, and my father, hunter that he is, challenged me for a rematch. I increased my score on my second ride while missing many more of the targets. I don’t know how it worked, but I was the undefeated champion of ghost shooting.
Coming home, we didn’t see any traffic, and got a seat at a restaurant in under five minutes. You couldn’t ask for a more perfect day out with the family.
