Rick’s Rants and Raves

We went to King’s Island this weekend. Here’s what we paid, and some lessons learned.

• $47 for 4 tickets and 2 parking passes (one for Friday and one for Saturday). This dicounted rate was provided by my employer. Normally this would have cost (according to their website) $140 + $20 parking.
• 115$ for the hotel room Friday night (including taxes) at the Microtel next to The Beach.
• $30 for dinner Friday night at Larosas at KI.
• $35 for breakfast Saturday morning at Perkins on Kings Island Blvd.
• Free lunch Saturday (provided by my employer).
• $6 for locker rental in Boomerang Bay
• $40 for dinner at Wings in KI.
• $20 for souvenirs
• $15 for Gaeters Ice Cream.

So, thanks to my employer, we spent 15.5 hours at KI for just over $300, including a hotel room. It would have been longer, but Nathan felt ill Friday night so we went to the hotel room 2 hours earlier than anticipated. Fortunately, he was much better the next day.

Food:

Although La Rosas and Wings were a bit on the expensive side relative to other possibilities on the park grounds, we got a good bit of food for the money. Therefore we didn’t need any mid-meal snacks. So even if we had scrimped and saved $10, it probably would have been consumed in snacks. We also might have saved money by eating at McDonalds rather than Perkins, but I think we would have spent that savings on a morning snack or something. As it was, we didn’t feel hungry until 1:30PM, just in time to catch the free lunch.

Lessons Learned

We spent a lot of time walking to and from Boomerang Bay, which unfortunately has more limited hours than the rest of the park, making it difficult to spend “half” of the day there. When we got there at 6PM Friday, we learned they would close in just one hour. Bummer. And after I paid for the locker at 11AM Saturday, I learned I would have to clean it out by 7PM, rather than leaving our stuff in it until we left at 10PM.

Almost everything on the list of expenses above would have taken credit. The only exceptions are locker rental and souvenirs (they were the vendors pushing a card in the middle of the park). As such, I had way more cash than was really neccessary, and therefore made me uncomfortable worrying about my wallet getting stollen. Next time, no more than $50 in cash.

Radio or cell phones: a couple of times Anne and I got separated for 30 minutes or more as we tried to figure out where/when we were supposed to meet. The ideal solution here is waterproof two way radios. Had we thought to get her cell phone from the car, that would have been almost as good.

Water rides look fun, but getting soaked on a 90% humidity day just makes it worse. It is no fun walking around drenched. We ended up changing into our previous day’s clothes so that we weren’t miserable.

The old-school adult rides had much shorter lines than the kid’s rides and the new rides. The Beast and the Vortex had 30 minute lines. We walked right on the Racers. In contrast, Italian Job Stunt Track had a 75 minute wait. The kids rides in Nickelodeon universe (at least in the morning) were incredibly packed. My guess is that they probably weren’t so busy after about 4PM.

The kid pass through works pretty well. Nathan didn’t want to ride the Beast. So Anne and Emily went first. I got in line with Nathan and let people pass until Anne’s coaster came back. I climbed in, and Nathan climbed through. He then waited with Anne and Emily while I got to ride.
All in all, it was a good experience.