My parents never let me ride on roller coasters when I was growing up. My formative roller coaster experiences all came in my 20's after I moved to Northern Virginia. My buddy worked for Booz Allen Hamilton and every September after Labor Day Booz Allen would rent out King's Dominion and open it up only for Booz Allen employees and their guests. I was lucky enough to be invited as his guest several years in a row from 2011 - 2013. Since the park was only Booz Allen employees, there were no lines for anything. There was a glorious day in the fall of 2011 where I walked into King's Dominion as somebody who had never been on a roller coaster before and I walked out having done multiple rides on the Dominator and one ride on the Intimidator 305. I was a roller coaster pro after that, none of the rides affected me in the slightest.
But years passed, my Booz Allen buddy went off to grad school after becoming bored of his job doing network graph analysis of Taliban tweets, I met and married a girl who hated roller coasters, etc. Before I knew it, I was middle aged and now sometimes got motion sickness from reading my phone in the car. Could I still do roller coasters? I don't know.
We arrived at Hersheypark right when it opened at 11:00 AM. My second grader (who, for reference, has never been on anything more extreme than what they have at the Arlington County Fair) immediately proposed that we go on Candymonium, the biggest and baddest coaster at Hersheypark with an 85 degree drop. I proposed a more methodical approach, building up from kiddie rides. Ostensibly it was to build up my kid's tolerance for roller coaster sensations. Secretly, it was because I was afraid I no longer had it.
We did the kiddy coaster Trailblazer three times. On the third time, we got stuck at the top of the hill and maintenance staff had to come climb the track and fix things, which ultimately was the scariest part of my day. Then we did the biggest drop tower the park had so that I could experience free-fall for the first time. We did that twice and frankly it was really fun, I learned that I enjoy free fall, which will be important for me come my big July trip. Hersheypark has three drop towers right next to each other and my favorite part was being able to see the very top of the two smaller towers from the very top of the one we did.
My wife sat at ground level for all of these rides holding our stuff and was obviously becoming bored and annoyed. Here's where the real genius of Hersheypark shone through. The park has a zoo. Like an actual, straight-up zoo. We took a break from the coasters and saw some animals, talked to some zookeepers, and got to meet a European Glass Lizard, a Harris Hawk, and a 78 year old tortoise who was the biological father of every other tortoise the zoo had. This seemed like an odd combination but odds are that everyone in your group either enjoys coasters or zoos or both. A zoo break was refreshing for my kid and I between coasters and my wife's day would have been miserable without it.
After the zoo we did Comet, which ChatGPT recommended we do as the next step up. This is their big wooden coaster, the oldest surviving coaster at the park. The wooden coasters at King's Dominion always left me a bit bruised and battered and that was when I was young and healthy. I feared what a wooden coaster would do to my middle aged version. But as part of their 2006 refresh of Comet, Hersheypark put big padded seats on the Comet cars. So when the wooden coaster jerked me around, I fell back into plush comfort. Comet wasn't scary for either of us and we both loved it. I hadn't lost it after all. I walked out of there ready to ride some of the hypercoasters but surprisingly my kid put the kibosh on it: Comet satisfied their need for speed and now they wanted to go to the gift shop and buy huge bags of candy.
We return tomorrow to do the water rides. It should be the warmest and sunniest day of the trip.
