In post-World War II America, one didn’t have to drive far to visit an amusement park. Around here, you had Summit Lake Park, Chippewa Lake Park, Meyer’s Lake Park and Mother Gooseland in Canton, Idora Park in Youngstown. You had, more recently, Conneaut Lake Park in Crawford County, PA, and Geauga Lake and Sea World in Aurora and Bainbridge, Ohio.
What do all these amusement parks have in common ?
By spring 2008, the only thing left of any of these parks will be a water park at Geauga Lake.
On their website, Geauga Lake announced that they would be a water park only starting in 2008, thereby closing up the amusement ride and midway part of the park.
That is a sad state of affairs, in my opinion. The charm of these parks of the past were the rides…in some cases, they were old and rickety, but there were memories. The Double Loop was the first roller coaster I ever rode on. Deb and I went up there in ‘05, in fact, right after Six Flags was bought out and Geauga Lake returned. I still have the pictures from that on a CD somewhere around here…
Now to go to a TRUE amusement park, we have to travel to either Sandusky to go to Cedar Point (Geauga Lake’s owner…and reason why I think they may have bought it, just to put a Cedar Point competitor down), to Cincinnati and King’s Island, to Pittsburgh and Kennywood, or to the other side of Buffalo and Darien Lake. A water park is not an amusement park, in my mind. An amusement park is rides, midway carney games, and a buttload of junk food, not sliding boards and water, water, water.
Goodbye, Geauga Lake. You will be missed.
Ack. Geauga Lake has kind of sucked for a very long time. Personally, we prefer to amusement park hop, and not to Cedar Point. The Point, being lovely, has majorly l-o-n-g lines and is way too expensive. Try Kennywood. It’s a nice park with lines that aren’t overly long. The ride to get there isn’t long either. We just went to Idlewild (which is owned by Kennywood) about a month ago and it was wonderful! The lines were very short. They had older rides and tons for kids to do. Storybook Forest and the Neighborhood of Make Believe were K’s favorites! They had a lot of rides that you could comfortably ride with your child. Signs to get there were rather scarce, though. You don’t know that you are there until you are right up on it. It was about 25.00/person.
Wasn’t King’s Island just sold? Have you checked the update on that one? I believe that Cedar Fair purchased them, and we suspect nullifying that whole Paramount Pictures connection that they had. Too bad. It was a great theme to their park.
Yes, King’s Island has been under the ownership of Cedar Fair since June ‘06. I noticed when we went in ‘05 that Geauga Lake had indeed lost a step, even though in some regards that’s what made it quaint.