My boyfriend and I spent our second day in our Pennsylvania Road Trip at Kennywood Park in West Mifflin, PA. We had completed some preliminary research and knew some things about the park, but we did learn some things after we arrived!
Costs and Tickets
Prior to coming to the park, we had bought the following:
Ticket Entry ($39.99 each on sale on Kennywood Website)
Speedy Passes ($49.99 each online)
All- Day Drinking Souvenir Cup ($29.99)
Bite Passes for the Bites and Pints Festival ($39.99 for 8 bites and 44.99 for 12 bites ONLINE only)
We spent approximately $300 for our visit prior to coming with some deals thrown in there, and we really wanted to participate in the Bites and Pints festival at the park during the June/July month weekends. If you take out the festival cards, it was around $210 prior to entering. Also, the all-day drinking is our preference to get the collectible cups and for the free refills (we drink a lot), but bringing in a smaller cooler is allowed if you wanted to cut down on that cost as well. TIP: At the beginning of most amusement park seasons, you can find cheaper deals. We took advantage of this!
Speedy Passes: Worth It?
The first thing I want to mention is that we strongly felt that the Standard Speedy Passes were highly worth it for our trip! At first we were unsure how it would work since you have to make reservations via your cellphone, but we found it to be great for us. Here are some quick pros and cons:
Pros: 1) We never spent more than 5-10 minutes standing in line. 2) We rode all the rides that were opened plus the major rides 2-3x each. 3) We finished the entire park in about 4 hours and rode all the bigger rides 3 times each.
Cons: 1) You will need to make sure you have good cell service and battery all day. 2) It could be tricky if you aren't technological advanced as wait times increase around mid-day. 3) You can only reserve for ONE ride at a time with the standard pass.
The list originally said that we wouldn't have access to the Phantom's Revenge, but as the day went on it became avaliable on the list. We ended up skipping major lines every time on Phantom's Revenge and Steel Curtain.
Our Top 5 Rides
Michael (my boyfriend) and I came up with our top 3 rides that we rode at the park. I should mention that two of the rides were closed during our visit including: The Black Widow and The Racers.
#1 Steel Curtain: Great theme being a Steeler's fan. It did only have one cart loading people on and off with about a 2.5 minute wait between each ride, but with the Speedy Passes this didn't affect us. It's a great steel coaster with tons of twists, turns, and inversions.
#2 Phantom's Revenge: This ride made you feel like you were literally flying. We enjoyed the couple of major drops. It also has one cart, and took time to load/unload per ride.
#3 The Exterminator: We loved this one. It is similar to a wild mouse ride, but in the dark. The ride is full of twists, turns, spins, and sudden drops while in (almost) complete darkness. This is a continuous moving line, and the line didn't seem to stop for long.
We couldn't agree between the next two:
•Sky Rocket: The ride takes off 0-50 mph in under 3 seconds. We both found this to be a fun, but short ride.
•Thunderbolt: This is a traditional wooden rollercoaster. Michael is a huge fan of the wooden coasters, and thought it was a great ride. I really enjoyed it as well, but (as with any wooden coaster) it was a little rough.
The New Ride- Spinvasion
I did feel as though this was a good addition to the park and the thematic "alien invasion" area. However, it was just a "good" ride. There was nothing spectacular (in my opinion) about the ride, and we ultimately did enjoy riding it. We only rode it once eventhough we could have done it more with the speedy passes. Being an adrenaline junkie, this was more of a milder ride for families.
Bites and Pints Festival (June and July months)
We had an amazing time visiting the Bites and Pints festival. This festival is specifically only for the June and July weekends. We got two cards the 12 and 8 bite cards to get a total of 20 samples. They didn't ask that you keep the sample cards per person or anyone specifically, so you could share a card with someone if you were willing. They were $10 cheaper online each, and we ordered them from there.
There were countries represented by booths around the park including the following:
With the sample cards, you could get samples of food or 5 ounces of a certain pint. Here are some examples of the items we got and the menus:
The experience at the festival was totally worth it! I would highly recommend participating in this if you are planning to visit on a summer weekend. The only negative I have about the festival was that at 7:50 they started closing down the booths (even though it was supposed to end at 8) and we didn't get to use two of our samples that we planned to use.
Overall Review
We thoroughly enjoyed this park, and if we are ever in the area we will definitely visit again. The Steel Curtain and Phantom Revenge are enough to bring us back for more visits in the future. The festival was a major perk for us while visiting as we love drinks + good food! An additional perk of the park that I liked was that they didn't require you to buy lockers as most theme parks do. They had bins for your things on every ride, and didn't require you to pay more to place your stuff in. The biggest downside of Kennywood was finding entrances for Speedy Passes was difficult to find for some of the rides and not in similar places as the main line (especially if you aren't familiar with it).
Our Overall Rating: 7/10
Travel Tandem Ratings Scale:
1-4/10: Below Average Park (Could Skip)
5-6/10: Average Park (Recommend)
7-8/10: Great Park (Highly Recommend)
9-10/10: LOVED IT! (Must Go)
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