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allykat4416 · 5 years

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Trip Report: Canada’s Wonderland

Dates: August 14-15, 2019

ocean man take me by the hand lead me to the land that you understand

Let’s set the scene here:

It is August 18, 2011. It is about 2:30 in the afternoon. Your mother is back at work, but you aren’t back to school. You’ve had massive surgery on your jaw 17 days earlier, and you’re staying with your aunt during the days because your mouth is wired shut and you’re a choking hazard to yourself. You’re finding out a lot of things you like, and one of those are roller coasters. Yes, you really like those. You check your trusty website, Screamscape, and see that a park you’ve only vaguely heard of before has announced something very big and very fast.

Color yourself interested. In your ever-growing quest to know more about these steel (and wooden!) beauties, you click the link to the video. The music begins, the green-tinted footage begins to play, and you are horrified at the thought of being 306 feet above ground. This looks amazing, but you’ll never get to go to Canada anyway and you’re terrified of heights.

This is my park now! It proclaims.

Congratulations, friend! You think. I don’t think our paths will ever cross.

It is July 17, 2013. You have just been 310 feet in the air. It scares you shitless. For the first time, you understand “Roller coaster hype.” It is this day you fall hopelessly and unchangeably in love with Intamin’s finest creation, Millennium Force. You swear that you will meet all the other gigas and you will protect them with your life. (But you won’t love them quite as much as you do Force. She’s special to you.)

It is May 9, 2015, and you remember about halfway up a 325-foot-tall lift hill that 306 used to scare you shitless. It still scares you shitless. It will be many years, but eventually, you will not be scared shitless of being 300+ feet in the air. But regardless of how much shit has been scared out of you, it is this day you fall madly in love with B&M’s finest creation, Fury 325. It is this day, really, when your thirst for Leviathan begins to go into overdrive.

It is August 14, 2019, and you’re riding out of Toronto with a tray of poutine in your lap when you see teal steel on the horizon. You know Kings Island is about to drop a giga that you don’t think you could love unconditionally. You are going to make the absolute most out of your time in Canada and milk every last hour of calling yourself “giga trash” without an asterisk while you still can. You can only choke out two words: Ocean Daddy.

Disclaimer time, I’m going to say it. Canada’s Wonderland is straight up my favorite Cedar Fair park. I am so enamored with this place that it isn’t funny. Everybody is so nice, and while the wait times are hot garbage, I think the park is worth it. I want to try more food there, but the treat we had was delicious! My only complaint with this park is the waits. Even the operations are really good, it’s just mobbed with people constantly.

My first international credit was Mighty Canadian Mine Buster. I was interested in trying this because it’s a clone of Shooting Star at the old Coney Island in Cincinnati. Shooting Star is originally what Beast at KI was meant to be before it became the icon it is today. I personally liked this ride more than I had expected to, and it makes me wish I had a chance to ride the OG Shooting Star. It can be a little bumpy at times, but it had some pretty good air since it had a chance to warm up through the day. Refurb and retrack it, but don’t RMC it. Please.

Behemoth is my second-favorite B&M hyper now, still behind SFOG’s fantastic Goliath. It has a lot of great, sustained floater, and it wasn’t trimmed to death. It’s very smooth and it does everything I like about Diamondback even better. The weird double-helix at the end was a unique finale, and I always like to award individuality in B&M hypers. I had heard that it was running kind of poorly this year, and if this is “poor,” I’d probably die from how good it is at the top of its game. I lost my shit when I saw the CN Tower on the lift as well. We liked it enough to ride it again on our second day back, despite the crappy wait. It’s my second favorite in the park.

From there, we went to Time Warp. This ride sucks, plain and simple. It both looks and feels like a Medieval torture device. I don’t know why this exists, but I’m pretty sure it violates the Geneva Convention by existing. Vortex is probably my favorite suspended coaster that’s still in operation (RIP to the Wolf!!) I enjoyed the part at the top of the lift behind Wonder Mountain. The rest of the ride is a little uncomfortable, but makes up for that with amazing scenery and cool interactions with the new neighbor. I would definitely ride this one again.

Wilde Beast is okay. It’s much rougher than MCMB, I think. The layout was pretty good, but not crazy memorable. If any wooden coaster here gets Schilke’d, I would vote for this one. It still isn’t awful, I just want to keep MCMB as is because of Shooting Star. Dragon Fyre is an inoffensive Arrow looper. Not the worst, not my favorite. My real main drive for this was to pad my count for Leviathan to be a quasi-milestone and to get good views of the ride I’ve been salivating over for the past 4 years.

Let’s flash back to last year, when I rode Cedar Point’s lackluster Valravn. The vest restraints killed my enjoyment of an otherwise-passable ride. Griffon had spoiled me. When Canada’s Wonderland announced their own dive coaster at the end of the 2018 season, we all collectively shrugged, said “lol okay and?”, and went on with our lives. Because Valravn was garbage, and this really couldn’t have been much better. My expectations for Yukon Striker were incredibly low, and we even put off this ride until the next day because we didn’t feel like waiting in line that long for a vested dive coaster.

I underestimated this ride. While I still prefer Griffon because of the old restraints, the vests aren’t nearly as bad on this. If it had the old restraints, Yukon easily would be my favorite dive coaster. The layout is very good---I didn’t think that Son of Beast looking ass loop would work, but it did, surprisingly well---and the ride has an amazing amount of speed that you can feel even when you aren’t in the front. It also feels like you’re hung up at the top longer than Valravn or Griffon.

I still really don’t like the name, but it’s more like a TwiTim or Mystic situation where it’s an ugly name for an otherwise very good ride. So fuck off, Yukon. I really didn’t want to like you as much as I did. You smug little shit. You Tesla-driving prick. You smarmy bastard with your popped collar and sweater vest. I really, really like you. Ugh.

But now it’s time to address the fish in the sea, isn’t it? The driving factor for me getting this damn passport? The most beautiful man in the RailChasers world (aside from maybe SFGAM Goliath)?

I incredibly like Leviathan. I knew I was going to like it a lot because up until the 15th I had a blindingly-strong giga bias, but I really didn’t think I was going to like it this much. While yes, on technicality, it still is my least favorite of the four, it’s better than the majority of coasters that I’ve ridden.

I still can’t tell if I prefer the back or the front with this one. I assumed I would prefer the front because that’s what I like on Fury, and you really do feel the speed so much more up there, but the back has more kick to it. Where Leviathan can’t really fall back on its length, I think I do prefer the kick to make the most of my short time.

And being short truly is Leviathan’s only flaw; while it actually is a few hundred feet longer than 305, Intimidator makes up for that with sheer aggression. You feel like you’ve been on it longer because the ride tousles you around. Leviathan is more like Force and Fury where he’s a very graceful, speedy boy, so it seems like it’s over much faster because the ride focuses on the feeling of “we are going really quickly as we finesse down Weston Road and go down as G-O-D.”

But honestly, aside from that one thing, this ride is fucking amazing and it was everything I hoped it would be and then some. I anticipated it to be my new second favorite B&M over Goliath but under Fury, and I was right. It’s a little closer to Fury than I honestly thought it would be. I’ve always been a little anxious about meeting rides that I’ve been stoked for ever since I was let down so severely by the shitshow that is Steel Vengeance. Thankfully, Leviathan didn’t break my heart like that. There was only happiness, Tim Horton’s coffee, and listening to a lot of Drake while we talked about our feelings.

Yes, I sobbed like a fucking bitch on the brake run. I love him so much. Dammit. Leviathan is so good. It almost (almost) makes me have hopes that Orion won’t be as bad as the layout suggests. And hey, at least all the North American gigas still have awesome names.

It is August 15, 2019. As you leave the park, watching that ride fade out of the rearview, you feel some really weird sense of peace. You realize there’s only two “bucket list” rides you have left in North America: any RMC Raptor you can get your paws on, and Outlaw Run. But you’re not worried about blazing rails or lassoing villains or being the sane Herschend RMC right now. Your only concern is when you get to see the most lovable sea monster you’ve ever met again.

#I love my canadian fish boyfriend and you can all eat shit #update I really don't even mind orion at this point thanks to the GTAs lol #trip reports

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