Coaster Community

In my my Silver Dollar City trip report I mentioned that I also went to Celebration City while I was in Branson, MO. For those of you not familiar with the park, it is themed around a 50's city. In some ways it is similar to the city that was in Back to the Future. 1950's era music is piped all throughout the park giving you the feeling that you stepped in to the city during some sort of Summer festival. The park is clean and well landscaped. While SDC is daytime and early evening theme park, Celebration City is exclusively a weekend evening theme park. Their hours are 3PM-10PM Friday and Saturday through October. I assume that there are several reasons for these limited hours. One of which is that it prevents Celebration City from competing directly with SDC. On the busier Friday's and Saturdays at SDC the afternoon opening may actually help alleviate the problem of increased afternoon crowds. Also, these limited operating hours help reduce operating costs. Branson is a weekend destination and a visit doesn't usually warrant a full week. As such, it makes sense for this smaller park to only be open during the peak days of the week.

 

When I first walked in through the entrance in to the park my first thought was, "They ripped of Magic Kingdom's Main Street USA." However, as I explored the park further that thought subsided and I realized they did have a unique theme. Since we didn't arrive at the park until 7PM the first thing I did was go from attraction to attraction taking as many photos as I could while I still had some daylight left. I took my time doing this since the crowds were light and I knew there wouldn't be any long lines. While I was taking photos Valerie explored the shops toward the front of the park and looked around at some of the flower gardens. Once I was done with my dash around the park I met back up with Valerie and we headed toward our first ride of the night, Thunderbolt.

 

Thunderbolt was my 65th coaster and it was a lot more fun than I had expected. It had some nice speed and some unexpectedly quick turns. Unlike a lot of coasters those quick turns didn't make you feel like a bobble-head and were easily tolerated. I probably would have rode it more than once if the next coaster we rode hadn't been so fun. One of the things I noticed about this, and most of the rides at the park that not many adults were riding. For this particular coaster I only saw one other set of adults ride during time I was taking pictures. When Valerie and I were in the queue we were the only adults as well. I'm not sure if most of the adults were tired, or if there was a bit of fear keeping them away. In regards to later I wil say that the appearance of this coaster is similar to one that you might see at State Fairs and the like. For some reason those scare me more that other coasters. I guess I just have more faith in the maintenance crews that deal with the bigger coasters.

 

With Thunderbolt under our belt, we headed toward Ozark Wildcat. Valerie and I both had some high expectations out of this coaster since it was built by Great Coasters International. Every GCI woodie that we have ridden had been great thus far. However, on our first ride in the back I was a little disappointed. It was a nice fast ride, but it didn't seem like it had much air-time. Valerie thought it was great even the first run through. I wanted to give it a second chance and I was glad I did. We ended up riding it another 6 times and everyone of those rides was great. I don't know why I didn't think so the first time around, but there are some fun pops of air on the coaster. Most of them come at unexpected times. Like most GCI's the speed never really lets up until you are back at the station. We also took a ride in the front car, and while there is definitely less air-time, the breeze on you face during a summer night more than made up for it. Overall, I didn't like it quite as much as Evel Knievel, but it will be worth another trip to the park to ride it again.

 

In between one of our rides on Ozark Wildcat we hopped over to Jack Rabbit. While we were in line a couple of kids informed us that this was a really jerky coaster, but it was still fun. On the lift hill we had a very sudden jerk, almost like the anti-rollback mechanism had stopped us. Valerie and I looked at each other and said something along the lines of with all the coasters we have been on why is it going to be this one that will kill us? Although we did survive after all, the kids warnings weren't unfounded. It was indeed a jerk ride. Valerie didn't seem to mind it as much as I did. However, she did concede that with Ozark Wildcat in the park there is no reason to ride it more than once.

 

Anyone who reads my reports regularly should know by now that Valerie and I aren't really all that enthusiastic about most non-coaster rides at parks. With such a limited amount of time Valerie and I didn't feel like riding anything but the coasters at Celebration City. However, I will say that I wish we would have had time to do so. The park has both a go-cart track and a mini-golf course. Unlike a lot of other parks both of these attractions are included in your admission. Had we gotten to the park just an hour or two earlier we both agreed we would have liked to have done both of the aforementioned attractions. I wanted to point this out because it seems like a lot of families have a tradition of playing at least a round of mini-golf while in Branson. If you are already going to go to Silver Dollar City and you plan on doing mini-golf, ride go-carts, or just want to ride more coasters the multi-day, multi-park passes Silver Dollar City offers seemed to be pretty good deals. For $76 a person Valerie and I got to make two trips to Silver Dollar City, and one trip to Celebration City. Even with a family of four it it isn't a bad price if you need to just get out of town for the weekend. Tonight I am headed off to Iowa to make a visit to Adventureland. Look for my report on that in the next few days. Until then take a look at more of my pictures from Celebration City in either my Gallery or on Facebook.

 

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