This week we’re taking you deep into the mountains of Central Pennsylvania to a retro park that offers a nostalgic past for adults and new and exciting discoveries for kids. Knoebel’s is a classic amusement park that is home to some truly incredible old-school rides and attractions and is by far one of the coolest experiences you could ever have at a theme park. It is the largest operating free-admission park in the United States and has enough coasters, thrill rides, and family rides to keep you entertained throughout the day. As if the rides weren’t enough to keep you occupied, Knoebel’s also has free entertainment, multiple activities, and award-winning food. That’s right, AWARD-WINNING. This park has received the Golden Ticket award for best food almost every year since 1999. In all honesty, Knoebel’s is one of the biggest reasons we decided to start a theme park food blog, because it is the perfect example of how great park food really can be. While many parks across the country suffer from lack of consistency and variation of food, Knoebel’s excels in creating quality and delicious options throughout their ENTIRE park. From pizza to pierogies to their famous fresh-cut french fries, no matter where you decide to dine in this park we guarantee you’ll love it and you’ll want to try it all! Before we get into some of our favorite food options, we want to take some time to tell you about some of the most iconic attractions in the world! Now, keep in mind, the park is full of unique rides and attractions so to cover everything that this park has to offer will take time. But, believe us, we’ll get to it all eventually. For now, we’ll focus on the two attractions that we enjoyed the most and where we spent the most amount of time on our past visit. First up: The Grand Carousel. I’m sure many people who are unfamiliar with Knoebel’s Amusement park are probably thinking that a carousel surely can’t be special enough to be included in a review of best park attractions. But trust us, it is! The Grand Carousel is a one-of-a-kind experience that offers two attractions in one! With the ride’s authentic German organ playing while you sit atop your hand-carved horse, it’s hard not to take in the vast amount of history that this ride carries. The carousel is over 100 years old and is one of the largest in the world. But, the best part, without a doubt, is that it is one of the few carousels left where you can still catch the brass ring! For anyone unfamiliar with classic carousels, many used to have an on-ride game, which encouraged riders to reach out from their horses (those sitting on the outter row) and stretch for an illusive brass ring. Every time your horse passes the claw arm dispensing rings, you try to reach out and grab one. It’s easy to grab a ring, but only one per ride is the special brass one! If you grab a brass ring you win a free ride (and bragging rights)! Some of this may be hard to understand in words, so check out this video below of Brittany grabbing her first ring ever! Also, not far from the Grand Carousel is the Knoebel’s Carousel Museum. This free-exhibit features original carousel horses, painted panels, and other memorabilia from carousels dating all the way back to the 1800’s! It’s a unique experience and it is certainly worth your time! Another experience in the park you don’t want to miss is Fascination! If you’re even the least bit competitive (which we are), you’ll love this skill challenge that is a cross between skee ball and bingo! It is so easy to spend hours in this building, spending quarter after quarter to play this unique game. Each person sits at their own machine and plays one synchronized game hosted by the Fascination announcer. Much like bingo, you are looking to get 5 in a row. It’s up to you to roll one ball at a time down a ramp and land in certain holes to make your board light up. It’s exciting, it’s a race, and it’s super fun! Alright! Well, now that we’ve told you about some of our favorite attractions in the park, we want to share with you some of our favorite foods! Like we mentioned before, Knoebel’s is known for having the best theme-park food in the country, so narrowing down our favorites is tough. But, we’ll start with a Pennsylvania classic and fan-favorite: Pierogies. The park offers two varieties of pierogies at separate stands and, of course, we tried them both. Fans of the park seem to have a clear favorite when it comes to these two snacks, so we needed to taste each of them to see if we agreed. The first location is called The Roast Beef Stand. The pierogies at this stand are sautéed in butter and onions and more closely resemble the classic pierogies that many are familiar with. Park fans tend to favor these over the others, and we would definitely agree with them. We loved them so much that we considered ordering a second helping, but decided to try the other stand just in case. And, we’re glad we did. Even though we both favored the first batch, the second order found at The Round Stand were good as well. While the second order were not sautéed in butter, they did come with a side of sour cream, and we thoroughly enjoyed them. Just further proving that you can’t really order anything bad at Knoebel’s. Another fan favorite at this park is the freshly made Kettle Korn. While this treat is more of a classic amusement park option, no one beats Knoebel’s when it comes to this salty-sweet snack. Sold in large bags for $6, Kettle Korn is the perfect snack to grab and share with your group while walking through the park. Or, heading out of the park for the ride home! However you choose to enjoy this snack, we’re sure that once you get to the bottom of the bag, you’ll be wishing you bought just one more! By only covering two attractions and food options, we’ve only just begun to scratch the surface on all that this park has to offer. Knoebel’s is a fun and totally different experience than many park-goers are probably used to, but it is so worth it to check out. The park has so much heart and nostalgia that it’s impossible not to fall in love as soon as you walk in. We look forward to returning and to covering more of our favorites soon!
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Happy National Roller Coaster Day! At least to everyone reading this on Wednesday night. If you're not reading this until Thursday, which will probably be most people, then you may have heard that several of the biggest parks in the country made their announcements for their 2018 additions! This week we wanted our blog post to recap all of the announcements as well as share our thoughts and opinions on them. So, let's get started!
The first major announcement of the day came from King's Dominion in Richmond, Virginia. Unsurprisingly, information about this park's new coaster leaked a bit early, and the majority of theme park enthusiasts were left feeling underwhelmed with a reveal that they already knew by name. However, don't let that take away from the fact that KD's new addition will definitely be a wild ride. Twisted Timbers, a Rocky Mountain Construction revamp of Hurler, a previously existing wooden coaster, will feature the coaster's original wooden structure with an all new steel track. It will feature 3 inversions and travel along over 3,000 ft of track.
We're also very excited to see the addition of WinterFest, the park's new holiday event! This festival is something that we've seen being added to many of the Cedar Fair parks over the years, and King's Dominion was next in line. The event will allow guests to experience some of the most popular attractions, holiday shows, and everyone's favorite man: Santa Claus! Overall, these were some great choices for King's Dominion. Cedar Fair has done a great job of improving not only King's Dominion's Roller Coaster line-up, but also the entire atmosphere of the park.
Next up today was Silver Dollar City in Branson, Missouri. While every single park had their own unique live-stream announcement videos, this park's was HANDS DOWN the best. They did a great job with theming, and had a fun and engaging video to publicize their new roller coaster: Time Traveler. This coaster is an epic addition to this park, breaking a ridiculous amount of records. Time Traveler will be the fastest, steepest, and tallest spinning roller coaster ever created! A Product of MACK, this coaster will cost a whopping $26 million to build. But, from the looks of it, it will be worth it. This ride is definitely not for the faint of heart, but also may just be impossible to pass up. Make sure not to eat too much park food before getting on this one! :p
Time Traveler will be Silver Dollar City's 4th major roller coaster, and just like King's Dominion, this park has made strides towards being one of the top coaster parks in the country.
At the same time as SDC's announcement, the roller coaster capitol of the world, Cedar Point, was making their record-breaking coaster announcement!
Over a year ago, we saw Mean Streak (once the tallest wooden roller coaster in the world) close and rumors began swirling of Cedar Fair finally working with Rocky Mountain Construction Co. Today, all of the speculation was finally answered with the announcement of Steel Vengeance. This coaster is RMC's largest project ever attempted and it is only fitting that it will be part of Cedar Point's already epic line-up of record-breaking roller coasters. Steel Vengeance will be the world's first hyper hybrid coaster meaning this bad boy will reach 205 ft and feature both wooden supports and steel tracks. This ride will also take the record for most air-time on any coaster, which will add to the thrill of weaving through the wooden structure. As always, Cedar Point continues its streak of world-class, record-breaking rides and we can't wait to ride Steel Vengeance!
The last two park announcements for the day were on the West Coast. First was California's Great America, an up-and-coming park located right outside of San Francisco. This park has seen many additions over the last few years and is quickly becoming one of Cedar Fair's most well-funded locations. CGA faces the struggle of not having as much space as some of their sister parks, so Cedar Fair has had to get creative in keeping the park innovative in their coaster line-up. The company has transferred rides to other parks, revamped a roller coaster, added a GCI wooden coaster, and announced Rail Blazer as their newest addition. Rail Blazer is a product of RMC. It is a single-rail style track as opposed to the hybrid coasters that we previously mentioned. It may look familiar, especially to all the San Antonio natives out there, because it is a clone coaster of the recently announced Wonder Woman roller coaster at Six Flags Fiesta Texas. This is not necessarily a bad thing for California's Great America, considering how far away from each other these coasters are, and that Rail Blazer appears to have better theming. Its compact design will feature 3 inversions and be perfect for a park looking to save some space.
The last announcement of the night came from Knott's Berry Farm in California just 2 hours ago. Not unlike its fellow Cedar Fair parks, Knott's made the announcement of a new roller coaster that ultimately replaced an existing coaster in the park. Hang Time, the park's new dive coaster, will stand at a staggering 150-feet and feature 5 gravity-defying inversions. The coaster train will stop just after the lift hill at the highest point on the track and hold riders for a few seconds before releasing them down the beyond-vertical drop.
Hang Time will be located in the newest section of Knott's Berry Farm: The Boardwalk. It will be a welcomed addition next to some of the park's other newer attractions, and will feature colorful nighttime track chase lighting to really help bring that cool boardwalk feel to the area.
Overall, this may have been the biggest roller coaster announcement day that we have ever seen. Today, we saw the additions of 5 new coasters for 2018, and these are only SOME of the parks that have made announcements this year. It's definitely looking like 2018 will be a great year for theme parks, and we couldn't be more thrilled.
Over the last few weeks we have covered the most well known theme park chains in the world. And, although they are undoubtedly some of the best parks imaginable, this week we are very excited to be sharing with you a park that may not be as well known as the others, but has just as much heart. We’re taking you to Santa Claus, Indiana to tell you all about one of the greatest and most uniquely themed parks we have ever been to: Holiday World! Family man and father of 9, Louis Koch, founded Holiday World after he and his children visited Santa Claus, Indiana in the 1940’s. Upon arriving in Santa Claus, the family was quickly let down when they realized that the town was not as well-themed as they’d hoped based on its name and that Santa was nowhere to be found. Thus, an idea was born. Fast-forward to present times and you’ve got a fun, family-friendly park themed to four major U.S. holidays! Holiday world features distinctive sections of the park themed to Halloween, Thanksgiving, Christmas, and 4th of July, all of which offer food, drinks, and rides themed to their particular holiday. There are so many great things to write about each section, and we will review all of it eventually, but for the sake of not writing a novel here we want to focus on one particular holiday this week. Considering we are a theme park food blog, it seems only fitting that we start with the holiday whose main activity involves eating until you can’t breathe, and literally stuffing foods into other foods. We are of course talking about Thanksgiving! The Thanksgiving section of the park offers a few different options for hungry guests. There is a stand called The Smokehouse with a wide variety of paninis, loaded fries, and hand-dipped ice cream waffle cones. The Smokehouse is more of a refreshment stop rather than a restaurant, but it’s still a great option if you’re looking for something delicious but quick. However, the main star of this section of the park has to be Plymouth Rock Café! This restaurant is one of the larger dining options in the park and features classic Thanksgiving meals. You can choose from fried chicken, pulled pork, chicken and dumplings, and of course TURKEY. An adult meal comes with your choice of two sides, or you can opt for the Pilgrim’s Feast which comes with three sides! We, of course, went with the feast and chose turkey, mashed potatoes, stuffing, and mac and cheese (we really loves carbs!) Overall the meal was really good, and was the perfect amount of nostalgia to get you missing the holidays. The only concern here is maybe that heavy, starchy food like this isn’t exactly ideal when you’re planning on riding rollercoasters and walking through a park in the heat. But, for us, we ended our day with this meal, so it all worked out. If you save room, don’t forget to add on a piece of pumpkin or pecan pie for dessert! The coolest thing about the Thanksgiving area is that not only can you get what feels like a home-cooked meal; it is also the newest section of the park and features the two largest roller coasters! The skyline is shared by The Voyage, a long wooden roller coaster, and Thunderbird, a first-of-its-kind launched wing coaster. The Voyage was built in 2006 and was one of the first coasters ever created by The Gravity Group. Until this ride was built, the largest roller coasters the park had to offer were Raven and The Legend, which pale in comparison to the size of this beast. Although those two coasters pack a punch, building Voyage definitely put Holiday World on the map as a contender in the coaster game. Holding the record for most airtime on a wooden coaster, this epic ride keeps you out of your seat for a whopping 24.3 seconds! It also features 5 underground tunnels, and a 154-ft drop making this roller coaster one of the most intense wooden coasters in the world. If you’re a die-hard fan of wooden coasters, you will definitely appreciate this 2 minute and 45 second thrill ride; just be prepared to collect a few bruises along the way! For those looking for a smoother ride, not far away is the park’s newest roller coaster: Thunderbird. Holiday World is mostly known for building amazing wooden coasters, so when the park announced that they would be adding a major steel coaster, enthusiasts everywhere were extremely excited to see what they would come up with. Thunderbird is a wing coaster, meaning that riders sit along the side of the coaster track, rather than on top of it. The thing that makes this wing coaster so unique, is that it includes a launch, making it the first of its kind. It also features the largest loop on a wing coaster in the world! This roller coaster is definitely one of our favorites and we can’t wait to see what Holiday World will come up with next. All in all, Holiday World is one of the best parks in the country, and we hope that this post has given you just a small sample of all the park has to offer. We will definitely cover the other park sections and world-class water park in a future post, but until then, Happy Holidays!
Last week’s post was about our favorite sit-down dining option in Disneyland. So, it seems fitting that this week we take you across the country and tell you all about our favorite quick-service option in Disneyworld’s Magic Kingdom! When it comes to getting the overall magical Disney experience, there’s no greater place than Magic Kingdom to give you all the warm and fuzzy feels. With classic attractions like Pirates of the Caribbean, Haunted Mansion, and Space Mountain bringing you back to your childhood (whether you visited Disney as a child or not), you’re guaranteed to end your MK day with all the feels. Because of this, Magic Kingdom is easily one of our favorite places on the planet. There’s only one problem with this so-called “Most Magical Place on Earth”: the food sucks! Granted, with additions like Be Our Guest and The Skipper Canteen, Disney is definitely moving in the right direction with their dining options in this park. But, overall, we are still mostly unimpressed with their selections, especially when it comes to quick-service. That’s why we’re very excited to share our favorite hidden gem in the Magic Kingdom: Sleepy Hollow Refreshments. Sleepy Hollow, (or as I like to call it Sleepy Hollow-lujah), is located in Liberty Square right next to the Hall of Presidents. It’s a bit easy to miss considering most people rush by it after crossing the bridge from the central hub. Not to mention many are probably still looking down at their phones admiring the great photos they just got in front of Cinderella’s Castle. The stand offers a few unique snack and meal options and although they focus mainly on the sweet rather than the savory, you still have choices if you choose to make this a lunch or dinner stop. The stand-out item here on the savory side would have to be the Sweet and Spicy Chicken Waffle Sandwich, which we highly recommend. But, if that doesn’t sound appealing to you, you can also order pretzel hot dogs, corn dogs, or baked potatoes! The waffle sandwich has recently undergone a price cut (almost $2, heck yeah) and it is just as delicious as ever. It’s a large, fluffy Belgian waffle folded in half with a breaded chicken filet, sweet and spicy Asian sauce, and slaw packed nicely inside. The taste of the sauce on this bad boy is perfect with the chicken and slaw, our only complaint is that it’s a bit runny, so be careful when eating! The sandwich is also quite large, so it’s perfect for sharing (especially since you’ll also want to order a sweet from this shop FOR SURE). And speaking of sweets, there are so many stand-outs from this stop that it’s hard to decide a winner. The shop offers funnel cakes, ice cream sandwiches, and, you guessed it, Belgian waffles! You can order a waffle with powdered sugar, strawberries and whipped cream, or our personal favorite The Fresh Fruit Waffle Sandwich (yeah, it’s so good I had to capitalize it). Same style as the Chicken Waffle, but this time packed with fresh strawberries, blueberries, bananas, and NUTELLA! If you are a fan of the popular chocolate-hazelnut spread, (and let’s be honest, who isn’t?) then make sure to ask for extra when you order this masterpiece. Not that they don’t give you enough to begin with, but when is there ever really enough Nutella? The limit does not exist! This sandwich is a bit hard to eat and is more of a fork and knife food than a true handheld sandwich, but if you don’t mind a face covered in chocolately goodness then go for it! While the Waffle sandwich is amazing, we don’t want to take away from the ice cream sandwiches or funnel cakes here. We often stop to get the freshly baked chocolate chip cookie ice cream sandwiches from Sleepy Hollow, especially when we’re in a rush to get to a fastpass on time or catch a good spot for fireworks since they are much easier to eat than the other options. Overall, we definitely recommend trying out this unique and perfectly tucked-away little refreshment shop! We realize that your day at Magic Kingdom will be a busy one, considering how much there is to do and see, but stopping by Sleepy Hollow is a great way to take a breather, enjoy some delicious food, and get a unique one-of-a-kind view of that castle that we all know and love. Not to mention your taste buds will thank us! |
AuthorsParker and Brittany Ruhmel- Lovers of all things food and theme park related! Categories
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