Park Review
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Allentown, Pennsylvania October 6, 2001
Weather: A bit chilly, with rain as we arrived, though that cleared up
in a short time, becoming a beautiful day. Dorney is a beautiful park. It's not huge, but for its size it has a lot in it. It has a great set of flat rides, a good mix of coasters, and looking at the brochure, it looks like the shows might have been interesting, too, if we had time to see them. The front gates are not in the middle of the park here. They are actually on the far right side, so the park stretches out to your left as you enter. Except for one thing, that is - Dorney's newest coaster, and the one that so many have raved about - Talon. And of course, that's exactly where we headed first.
Talon - B&M inverted From Talon we began to make our way around the park, past the Top Spin at Talon's exit. The Mouse wasn't open yet, so we headed down the hill to Hercules.
Hercules - Dinn and Summers wood Now it was off in search of our next big thrill. Instead, we settled for a small one and took a couple of circuits on the Woodstock Express, a Zamperla junior coaster. Since it was just us, they gave us four go-rounds on the coaster (nice!), and I couldn't help but think how much my daughter would love it. From there, we made our way over to Dominator, an S&S tower with both a turbo drop and space shot side, and of course we had to do both directions. I'll say this - Dominator makes Power Tower at Cedar Point blow. The shot's sudden stopping pushes you all the way up into your restraints and gives you massive amounts of airtime. And the drop is also a tremendous ride. I loved this tower. Before we headed off to our next coaster, I also made the guys do one other ride with me - the Whip. I had never been on one before, since we don't have these out in CA either. It was a lot of fun. If you've never been on one, you've got to try them out when you get the chance. Again, my only complaint with it was how much my daughter would have loved being on it with me, but she wasn't there. :-( Oh well. Then it was back to coasters. I may have these out of order a little bit, but the guys will forgive me. As I recall, our next stop was: Laser - Schwarzkopf steel double looper Man, does this ride pack a punch. After one of the slowest lifts known to mankind (naptime anyone?), it's probably one of the most intense coasters out there, with two power-packed loops, a quick turn that will throw you into your neighbor's lap (Hi, Nate!), and some more turns that just keep on packing on the G's. After our first ride I had it marked about equal with Revolution at Six Flags Magic Mountain. But a second ride later on when it had dried out kicked my tail and left my head spinning for a while. Fantastic ride, but I don't know how some of these guys can manage repeated rides on it. We then took a quick spin on the Dragon kiddie coaster (for those of us who count them), another one my daughter, and even my chicken son, would love. Then made our way over towards the big guy in the park - Steel Force.
Steel Force - Morgan hyper
Then it was off to Thunderhawk - Schmeck woodie Our last coaster for the day was the Wild Mouse, a near duplicate of the Mack mouse at DCA (known as Mulholland's Madness), which I had just ridden as my first mouse a couple of weeks previously. So throughout it was being compared to that. Dorney's, however, is made by Maurer Sohne, and the differences were obvious. While a typical mouse layout, this one seemed to crawl through the course, and even had trims grabbing on the top switchbacks. There wasn't much tossing to the side, and the drops seemed weak. There were also several cars they weren't running, though with the slow loading, I don't know that they could have since with only four or five cars running we still got stacked at the end. Overall, very disappointing. They could take some lessons from Disney on how to run a mouse all out. (Sorry guys, I know some of you don't like hearing that, but, well....) After that we grabbed some lunch, took some pictures, and grabbed a few re-rides on Steel Force, Talon, and a couple of the other rides around the park, before we packed up and headed out to Knoebels for that evening's activities. Overall, Dorney was a fun park, and one that I would have liked to have had more time at so that I could have ridden more of the flat rides and taken in a bit more of the park as a whole. The skyscraper looked awesome, but I didn't go due to tight funds, and most of the other guys didn't seem all that interested. Maybe next time. But Dorney is definitely a park that I hope to come back to again in the future.
Keep on ridin'
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