Idlewild

Some roller coaster and amusement park enthusiasts are only after the thrills.  Though I enjoy a good thrill ride as much as anybody, I like a more well rounded amusement park experience.  Fortunately I have friends who feel the same way.  Thus it was natural that the same weekend my local park, Kennywood, had a roller coaster event planned (which I'll write about later), some of my out of town friends also wanted to visit Idlewild, a much lower key park, the day before.  One of our travel companions was my friend Tim, who had worked at the park when he was younger and clearly still has great lingering fondness for it.  Though the weather started out drizzly and ended up a bit too warm for comfort, we had a relaxing, pleasant day.  The big thrills were reserved for the visit to Kennywood.

We took Route 30 from the Pittsburgh area out east to Ligonier, where the park is.  The bulk of this drive is through ugly strip development.  I suspect that much of this development has sprouted up over the last few years, and that the drive used to be more rural.  Now, only the last segment is scenic, a divided road with many trees in the median, winding through the hills.  The scenery foreshadows Idlewild's great wooded setting.

Idlewild has an unusual payment system: Customers pay admission at booths before entering the parking lots.  Unlike other parks, you're not paying for parking, at least not directly.  Each person in the car actually pays their admission price, for which they receive a wrist band.  I think this system is due to the park having no actual gates.  Instead, you just walk from one of the several unpaved parking lots directly through the picnicking areas to the park proper.  Park where you wish and just walk right in.  To my surprise, we were accosted by an employee who wanted to take our photo.  This is common in many amusement parks these days, but a first in my experience at Idlewild.

Idlewild is a very spread-out park, but is organized into several smaller sections.  We started with the least thrill-seeker-friendly section, Storybook Forest.  Here we'd meet the first of our out-of-town friends, Mark and Amanda.  It turned out they were already inside, so we passed through the book-shaped portal, greeted the employee playing Mother Goose, and walked into the Storybook Forest.

Storybook Forest celebrated its 50th anniversary last year.  It's remarkable that such an old-fashioned attraction can survive today, but clearly children are still enjoying it.  There's a strong chance that the parents who are bringing their children today are from the previous generation of children who enjoyed it.  Since all of my group were childless, we couldn't appreciate it in quite the same way.  For us it was more about a sense of nostalgia than anything else.

We had about a half hour to walk through the Forest.  All along the winding paths are recreations of various stories and nursery rhymes.  Some of the most popular were things kids could climb in or on, such as the Little Engine that Could (children could climb in the cars of the train) or a pirate ship.  Displays that kids could just look at were less popular.  Some petting zoo-like attractions like "Billy Goat Gruff" didn't yet have their animals out; once they did I'd bet they'd be the most popular of all.  Toward the end is a jack-in-the-box.  It's visible from all over, and looks strangely scary.

The exit to Storybook Forest goes through a gift shop.  Amusement parks commonly route the exits of rides through shops to encourage sales, but somehow it doesn't seem quite as tacky for Idlewild to do it.

At 11, when the rest of the park opened, we met up with our other friends, Adam and Ellen.  We found them near the log flume, the park's latest addition installed in 2005.  It came from a closed park called Old Indiana, which I'd managed to visit once many years ago.  I remember seeing the flume ride there, where it looked positively tiny.  It is certainly not a very large log flume compared to most, but it seems to look more substantial at Idlewild.  The location among the trees suits it much better than the empty field it sat in before.  Idlewild is geared toward kids anyway, so a pint-sized ride is appropriate.  Unfortunately it wasn't running yet.  We decided to skip it in order to hit other rides that we knew would develop long lines if we didn't get to them right away.  Unfortunately by the time we got back to the flume, it too had a long line so we had to skip it entirely.  To this day I still haven't ridden it.

Our first proper ride was an experience completely unique to Idlewild, a life-size recreation of Mr. Rogers' trolley.  Once again, it has nothing to do with thrills and everything to do with nostalgia, though my memories of Mr. Rogers' Neighborhood are a bit too far distant for this ride to refresh them much.  Still, it's a terrific attraction for the park, so I make it a point to ride on every visit.

We arrived early enough not to have to wait at all.  Later in the day I'm sure the line was very long.  For the sake of kids and tired parents, there is at least a long bench to sit on while they wait.  We had our trolley almost to ourselves except for a couple and their young child.  She'd been throwing a tantrum before the ride, and did so again at the end, but fortunately she was silent during the ride itself.

The trolley proceeds through the woods, stopping every so often at a diorama depicting some of the characters from the Mr. Rogers show.  There was a small plot about inviting everybody to a "hug and song party" at King Friday XIII's castle, but the ride was mostly a chance to see large animated versions of the puppets.  It's odd at the end the animated characters can't actually hug each other (though they do sing).  The hugging is left up to the riders.

 Though Idlewild as a whole is geared towards families with young children, the trolley is the centerpiece of an area specifically aimed for kids.  Another of the interesting attractions there are the hand cars.  These cars run along a circular track, hand-powered by a crank.  A friend of mine who grew up in the area said she always gave up trying to push halfway around the track and had to be helped the rest of the way.  We couldn't ride the kiddie hand cars, but the Adult Hand Cars were nearby.  Fortunately all of those who rode them made it all the way around with no need for help!

Leaving the kids section, we went to another area that's somewhat uncharacteristic for me, the water park area called Soak Zone.  I only rarely visit water parks at all, and in fact had never been in Idlewild's, but our friends wanted to at least have a look, though we didn't wind up riding anything.  The path there is quite wooded, one example of the charm and beauty of this park.

There was a very old fashioned raft ride at the end of the path.  It could be ridden in street clothes rather than bathing suits.  I was kind of interested in it for historical reasons, since it predates most modern water park rides, but when we saw the wet butts of people getting off the ride, we decided to give it a miss.  We just stuck around the area for a few minutes more, as much to get pictures of the roller coaster from a different viewpoint as anything else.

After this we went to ride the coaster itself.  Idlewild's wood coaster is charmingly named Rollo Coatser.  Its size and thrills are scaled down to the level of the rest of the park, but it is very fun and worth a few spins.  The trains are very comfortable, and extremely rare in that they have no restraints besides a fixed metal bar.  The ride even smells good!  It has a small-sized "out and back" style of layout, set atop a hillside, never more than a few feet above the ground.  Some of the humps have a nice zippy hop to them.  At the far end there is a surprisingly potent turn that leads to a lower level of track for the return run.  In a lot of ways, the ride reminds me of a scaled down version of Lake Compounce's Boulder Dash, which I wrote about in one of my previous reports.  Rollo Coaster is a lot of fun, and we would have ridden frequently except that they only ran one train on it all day, which kept the line a bit longer than we liked.

Idlewild also has a steel coaster, the Wild Mouse.  Wild Mice are a classic form of ride that have seen a resurgence in about the past ten years.  The spinning variation has become very popular, but standard Mice have also cropped up all over.  Idlewild seems to have led the trend, installing their own Wild Mouse in 1993.  It was actually an import, having come from a park called Alton Towers in England--and before then from Austria--but it may have ushered in an era of Mice in US parks.

Idlewild's Mouse is rather unique.  It is taller than most, and has a very unusual tilting lift hill.  Apparently at one time this was set in a rotating tunnel, which must have been quite disorienting.  Without the tunnel it's just a bit odd.  Though they send a lot of cars at a time, the Mouse can't push through a lot of people, so we had to endure a pretty long wait.  The ride was enjoyable though.  Early on it offered strong lateral forces as we went around the upper turns, then later there were some very nice drops.  Throughout the ride is very smooth, almost unnaturally so for a ride with such sharp turns.

The Olde Idlewild section of the park has a smattering of classic rides, once common but now rarities.  One of these is the Caterpillar.  It's a small circular ride with a few undulating hills, very mild by today's standards.  But it's still unique and fun, with a couple of features that would never be seen in a modern ride.  A canvas cover comes over the cars during the ride, and even more oddly, there's a fan blowing from under one of the hills.  It makes a certain amount of sense when you realize that the idea of the ride was to squish young couples together through the centrifugal forces.  The cover lets them get a little frisky with each other in private if they wish.  The fan is a bit more of a mystery, perhaps to blow up a young woman's skirt?

By this time it was about 1 PM and the park was suddenly beginning to feel crowded.  We decided to take a break from the rides for a meal.  There is a sort of mine camp-themed food court in one area of the park, which was our best bet for finding someplace everybody could find something they liked.  I got a taco dinner, not exactly traditional park food but something I always enjoy.  My friend Adam went for something perhaps even more unconventional for an amusement park, gyros.  Unfortunately he found it unsatisfyingly small, so apparently my choice was the best.  Later I got a dish of cookies and cream ice cream, which was a perfect end to the meal.

Near the food court is a nifty attraction named Confusion Hill.  It's another old-style attraction generically known as a "tilt house".  It's very similar to many "mystery spots" that have sprouted up as roadside attractions, but it's rare to see such a thing in an amusement park any more.  Cleverly constructed tilted floors lead to such optical illusions such as water appearing to flow uphill.  The employees who operate the attraction obviously relish their chance to act like moonshining hillbillies as part of the theming of the attraction.  All in all it's a fun diversion, the only drawback being that even a short line takes a long time because they only put small groups through at a time.

Passing by the flume, we saw the line was simply too long to make it worth waiting for, so we returned to the Olde Idlewild area to sample some of the other classic rides there.  The Whip is a very old-style ride, with tubs that travel around an oval course, swinging out as they round the corners.  Idlewild's Whip does lack one classic aspect; the cars appear to be Fiberglas instead of wood.  This gives them a somewhat artificial feel.

Right in the middle of Olde Idlewild is another classic rice, a carousel dating to the 1930's.  Oddly enough it was built by the same company, Philadelphia Toboggan Company, that built the Rollo Coaster.  I am not a carousel buff, but can certainly recognize what a piece of art this one is.

Next to Rollo Coaster is a much more modern ride, which Idlewild calls the Trinado.  It has the generic name of Tri-Star, so in theory there might be similar rides at other parks, but I've only ever seen this one.  It lived one year in Kennywood before they chose to move it to Idlewild, where it's been since, though apparently it will close down this year.  I wasn't aware 2006 would be its last year, but in retrospect I'm glad we took a last ride.  The ride has an interesting combination of motions, three small circles spinning around a larger one, then the entire assemblage tilting.  The ultimate result is not particularly thrilling, but I have fun on it.

The park continued to be crowded and the weather continued to be hot.  Our group had arranged to see a Pittsburgh Pirates game that night, so we had to leave anyway.  In fact, I don't think I've ever seen Idlewild in the evening.  Sometime I'd like to get a chance to; I bet it looks nice.  But by day, Idlewild is beautiful enough.  The wooded setting and laid back atmosphere invites a family picnic outing.  Idlewild is not a destination for pure thrill-seekers, but it proves that there's more to amusement parks than just that.