Kennywood - June 9, 2023

After spending four days in Ohio's best amusement parks, we turned around and began our journey back to Long Island. Of course, we were not going to just drive straight through from Cincinnati. There's too many good parks on the way home! Our first stop after getting back to Pennsylvania was Kennywood. A small, unique park just outside Pittsburgh, home to three century-old woodies and some new modern coasters as well.

I'll start with the coasters and rides, and address park quality, crowds, food, lodging, etc afterwards. Embedded photos may not be mine.

Some really cool old-school flats here as well:

So we started the trip with two small, quirky regional parks: Knoebels and Waldameer. We moved on to larger corporate-owned parks, Cedar Point and Kings Island. Kennywood brought us right back to the beginning of the trip with its enjoyable idiosyncracies and unique ride lineup.

The park's setting is pretty unique as well. You get a great view of the Monongahela River from some of the taller rides, as well as the US Steel factory on the opposite bank of the river.

Kennywood's ability to maintain these three woodies to still be smooth, fun rides is a remarkable feat. They must put a lot of love into those rides. I felt the three steel coasters were very comfortable as well, with only Steel Curtain being the slightest bit rough at times.

With such a small park, it's easy to navigate, and not difficult to find any given ride. The hardest rides to locate were the Whip and Exterminator as they're tucked behind the fountain and shoot-the-chute.

A couple of days before we got to Kennywood, the park announced extended hours, so they were actually open until 10pm that night. We only stayed until about 7 or so, but it's cool that the park can do that on such short notice. It's a good treat for the fans.

Speaking of the fans, the crowds here were just a little bit rowdy compared to other parks, and a bit denser and younger than what we had experienced elsewhere. More packs of teenagers, fewer families. Sadly this gave the park a little bit of a "peak summer Six Flags" feel that we had managed to avoid up to this point. I don't really consider this a negative on the park itself, but it didn't help the overall experience.

Hotels in the area are hard to come by, and quite frankly, I would not recommend staying in or around West Mifflin. The surrounding area can be very sketchy. We ended up staying about 15 minutes away in a town called Monroeville. We got breakfast on the way to the park at Drew's Family Restaurant in Pittsburgh, a solid breakfast for a decent price.

We got dinner on the way out of town at a nearby Primanti Bros, which always goes hard. With two days left in the trip, we'd be spending the next day at the park I'm most familiar with, my spiritual home park: the sweetest place on Earth.

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