An Evening at Valley Fair!
- May 26
- 4 min read
Hey all!
Today, we're visiting one of the last legacy Cedar Fair parks on our list! Recently acquired by Enchanted Parks, Valley Fair was the first park purchased by Cedar Point's parent company in 1978. Upon arrival, we had about four hours to explore the park before it closed for the day, so we opted for their Fastlane to ensure we could experience everything.
We started our visit with Steel Venom, their inverted impulse roller coaster, which is the last of its kind with a working holding brake. Even with the fast pass, boarding took some time due to slow loading. Overall, the ride is thrilling and reminds me of Wicked Twister at Cedar Point. The holding brake was somewhat uncomfortable, especially for males, as the ride pauses briefly on its vertical spike, causing a jarring effect.
Our next ride was Wild Thing, as we were walking around the park in a loop. This is their 200-foot hyper coaster that dominates the park's skyline and runs along the side and front of the park. This ride was surprisingly impressive, and I felt it had better airtime and a superior layout compared to Mamba and Steel Force at its sister parks. The tunnel at the end was a fantastic finale.
In the distance, we saw Excalibur testing and knew that due to its sporadic operations, we needed to get a ride on this coaster. The path to Excalibur is a bit tricky; you need to pass by the water park, keep walking past Renegade until you see a tunnel, which brings you to the station of Excalibur. This ride was my biggest surprise of the visit. While short and being one of the older coasters at the park, you can see that the ride took some elements of what makes Gemini at Cedar Point great and has a unique curved turnaround after the first drop that feels like it may have inspired the one on Millennium Force. Overall, this was my favorite ride in the park, and I wish it was open more often.
We then made our way to ride Renegade, their most talked-about roller coaster. This is a GCI wooden roller coaster that has a unique twisty drop, multiple airtime moments, and many banked turns with a pass-through by the ride's station. To be honest, I wasn't too impressed with this ride. It was pretty rough, and while it had a nice layout, it was too rough to enjoy.
We were then running low on time due to a storm rolling in, so we got our ride on Mad Mouse, which is the same wild mouse roller coaster at Michigan's Adventure. This ride is fun for what it is with its hairpin turns and sudden drops, but it's not worth waiting in a long line for. After, we got a ride on their oldest roller coaster in the park, The High Roller, which is an out-and-back wooden roller coaster. This ride really crawled through its layout and had no airtime and was very rough, which made this ride feel not worth it if there is a long wait.
Last but not least, we saved the worst for last. Corkscrew is a classic looping steel roller coaster that is the only roller coaster with inversions at Valley Fair. While the ride looks nice over the pond it's over, the ride really did a number on your ears and is one of the worst steel roller coasters I have been on. So... not recommended if you value your ears.
Overall, Valley Fair is a very nice park, and we ended up liking this park a lot more than Worlds of Fun. (Mostly because Worlds of Fun only had 4 roller coasters open with only running one train on most of their headlining rides). So if you are in the Minneapolis area or are visiting Mall of America, this park is worth a stop!
Thanks for reading!
As Always, Keep On Coast'N'
Comments