Funtown Splashtown USA, Saco, Maine
Aug. 26th, 2024 09:15 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mmcirvinFuntown Splashtown up near Portland, Maine is the most major amusement park in New England that I hadn't yet been to (I have also not had the pleasure of visiting Santa's Village or Quassy), but my sister-in-law gave us tickets to there for my birthday. Sam and I finally used them last weekend, with the end of the season looming. We had a great time.
Coincidentally, the illustrious YouTuber Canobie Coaster just got back there and got some fresh POVs, so I can do my usual lazy thing of illustrating with other people's video.
Funtown Splashtown is, as the name implies, a dry amusement park joined to a waterpark; I'd say it's about the size of Canobie Lake Park except that relative to Canobie, it has less Funtown and more Splashtown. For today's amusement market, that's a sensible balance--you want a lot of waterpark. Crowds were very light on the dry side today but there was still a substantial wait for some of the waterslides, which always have pretty low capacity and relatively high demand.
Sam is more of a waterpark person so she spent most of her time on that side, whereas I mostly sampled the non-waterpark rides. But the one ride we did together, at the beginning and end of the day, was Funtown's spectacular new addition, a shooting dark ride called either Haunted Hotel (according to signs and promos) or Whispering Pines Hotel (on park maps and the ride itself). At any rate, the Whispering Pines Hotel is definitely haunted:
There's some lore about a witch's curse and an otherworldly realm with the hilarious name of "Dimension Dark X", delivered by a well-done animatronic in the queue. Your job is to shoot at clusters of purple LEDs representing the curse, or something, while all sorts of spooky manifestations appear. It's not a long ride, but everything looks really impressive for a ride at a park like this--it's easily the best dark ride in the region. I did find that scoring high required enough concentration that I ended up missing some of the effects, but that just encouraged re-rides. Later in the afternoon, the ride was an absolute walk-on (it seems to have good capacity), so this was pretty easy.
The horror in this ride is pitched at about the "Goosebumps" level, nothing too disturbing or gory, so it's pretty family-friendly but still scary enough that older kids will find it worth doing. A good call by the park all around.
But, of course, the ride I was itching to ride was the park's signature coaster, Excalibur:
This is an impressively big CCI wooden coaster from 1998 with a twister layout that mixes good drops and strong laterals, tucked away in the back next to the parking lot. You get there via the lightly themed "Camelot Bridge" that passes through a beautiful wooded area and over a stream--it feels like you're leaving the park entirely, a great touch. The station is themed like a castle and the train cars are labeled with the names of the Knights of the Round Table. It's not, you know, Disney, but it's some really great presentation for a small amusement park.
There are separate lines for the front row, back row (for the connoisseurs), and for all other rows. It's one-train operations and not particularly fast ones, but on the day I visited, this was not a big problem--the ride had more than enough capacity to keep the lines short. The ops were letting people get back on for re-rides, which is something I hardly ever see these days.
And this thing is running like a dream--honestly I was surprised and impressed; it's not so smooth that it doesn't feel like a wooden coaster, but there is no real rattle or buffeting. Apparently, this ride has been blessed with Gravity Group's pre-cut replacement track, which explains why it's tracking so well. This may be the best wooden coaster in New England at the present time, and in a field that includes Boulder Dash and Roar-O-Saurus, this is saying something.
(The park has a second coaster, a Wild Mouse that I actually could not ride, at least not without dragooning some random passerby into riding with me, because they were not allowing single riders and Sam definitely wasn't going on it. It didn't look like a big loss.)
After my first ride on Excalibur, I hit the park's flume, Thunder Falls. I don't have a good/legal POV of this, but here's someone's off-ride footage of the big splash:
This is billed as New England's tallest flume, and it probably is, though I don't know exactly how tall it is. I'd guess it's somewhere in the 60-foot range. After the splash, there are some coin-operated water cannons that people can use to shoot water at you when you're returning to the station, but nobody did that to me.
The other big must-ride I hit, and apparently one of Funtown's most famous rides, was the Astrosphere. Canobie Coaster just posted his POV of this one a couple of hours ago, which spurred me to write this article now. A content warning: this video does have a lot of flashing strobe lights:
Yeah, it's a Scrambler, running pretty fast in a dark dome with projected images, lasers, fog, disco lights and the sound system blasting ELO's "Fire On High." This is a great phantasmagoric experience but the ride is basically "Very Strong Laterals: The Ride" and it ultimately gave me a headache.
Canobie Lake Park has a ride along these lines called the Psychodrome, and in all my years going to Canobie I've actually never ridden it, but I ought to just to say I did it once. I think the show/music is different. These rides aren't really my cup of tea, though my sister loves them and always has. Anyway, Funtown's Astrosphere is reputed to be one of the best, so I couldn't pass it up.
It is quite a low-capacity ride, so it had one of the longer waits in Funtown. There were also quite elaborate safety spiels on the way in, some of the most involved ones I've heard for a ride. I suspect these are the result of some accidents that have happened in the past with these rides, most often involving the ride starting up when someone is standing in the way in the dark enclosure. They were being very very careful, it seemed to me.
All in all, a great day out. Even though Funtown Splashtown is a small park, there's quite a bit there I didn't get to that I'd like to do on a later visit: some of the waterslides (particularly the family raft slide), the bumper cars and bumper boats, maybe the go-karts which are actually included with park admission. There's also a truly enormous drop tower; I have not gotten into drop towers but who knows, I might someday.
Coincidentally, the illustrious YouTuber Canobie Coaster just got back there and got some fresh POVs, so I can do my usual lazy thing of illustrating with other people's video.
Funtown Splashtown is, as the name implies, a dry amusement park joined to a waterpark; I'd say it's about the size of Canobie Lake Park except that relative to Canobie, it has less Funtown and more Splashtown. For today's amusement market, that's a sensible balance--you want a lot of waterpark. Crowds were very light on the dry side today but there was still a substantial wait for some of the waterslides, which always have pretty low capacity and relatively high demand.
Sam is more of a waterpark person so she spent most of her time on that side, whereas I mostly sampled the non-waterpark rides. But the one ride we did together, at the beginning and end of the day, was Funtown's spectacular new addition, a shooting dark ride called either Haunted Hotel (according to signs and promos) or Whispering Pines Hotel (on park maps and the ride itself). At any rate, the Whispering Pines Hotel is definitely haunted:
There's some lore about a witch's curse and an otherworldly realm with the hilarious name of "Dimension Dark X", delivered by a well-done animatronic in the queue. Your job is to shoot at clusters of purple LEDs representing the curse, or something, while all sorts of spooky manifestations appear. It's not a long ride, but everything looks really impressive for a ride at a park like this--it's easily the best dark ride in the region. I did find that scoring high required enough concentration that I ended up missing some of the effects, but that just encouraged re-rides. Later in the afternoon, the ride was an absolute walk-on (it seems to have good capacity), so this was pretty easy.
The horror in this ride is pitched at about the "Goosebumps" level, nothing too disturbing or gory, so it's pretty family-friendly but still scary enough that older kids will find it worth doing. A good call by the park all around.
But, of course, the ride I was itching to ride was the park's signature coaster, Excalibur:
This is an impressively big CCI wooden coaster from 1998 with a twister layout that mixes good drops and strong laterals, tucked away in the back next to the parking lot. You get there via the lightly themed "Camelot Bridge" that passes through a beautiful wooded area and over a stream--it feels like you're leaving the park entirely, a great touch. The station is themed like a castle and the train cars are labeled with the names of the Knights of the Round Table. It's not, you know, Disney, but it's some really great presentation for a small amusement park.
There are separate lines for the front row, back row (for the connoisseurs), and for all other rows. It's one-train operations and not particularly fast ones, but on the day I visited, this was not a big problem--the ride had more than enough capacity to keep the lines short. The ops were letting people get back on for re-rides, which is something I hardly ever see these days.
And this thing is running like a dream--honestly I was surprised and impressed; it's not so smooth that it doesn't feel like a wooden coaster, but there is no real rattle or buffeting. Apparently, this ride has been blessed with Gravity Group's pre-cut replacement track, which explains why it's tracking so well. This may be the best wooden coaster in New England at the present time, and in a field that includes Boulder Dash and Roar-O-Saurus, this is saying something.
(The park has a second coaster, a Wild Mouse that I actually could not ride, at least not without dragooning some random passerby into riding with me, because they were not allowing single riders and Sam definitely wasn't going on it. It didn't look like a big loss.)
After my first ride on Excalibur, I hit the park's flume, Thunder Falls. I don't have a good/legal POV of this, but here's someone's off-ride footage of the big splash:
This is billed as New England's tallest flume, and it probably is, though I don't know exactly how tall it is. I'd guess it's somewhere in the 60-foot range. After the splash, there are some coin-operated water cannons that people can use to shoot water at you when you're returning to the station, but nobody did that to me.
The other big must-ride I hit, and apparently one of Funtown's most famous rides, was the Astrosphere. Canobie Coaster just posted his POV of this one a couple of hours ago, which spurred me to write this article now. A content warning: this video does have a lot of flashing strobe lights:
Yeah, it's a Scrambler, running pretty fast in a dark dome with projected images, lasers, fog, disco lights and the sound system blasting ELO's "Fire On High." This is a great phantasmagoric experience but the ride is basically "Very Strong Laterals: The Ride" and it ultimately gave me a headache.
Canobie Lake Park has a ride along these lines called the Psychodrome, and in all my years going to Canobie I've actually never ridden it, but I ought to just to say I did it once. I think the show/music is different. These rides aren't really my cup of tea, though my sister loves them and always has. Anyway, Funtown's Astrosphere is reputed to be one of the best, so I couldn't pass it up.
It is quite a low-capacity ride, so it had one of the longer waits in Funtown. There were also quite elaborate safety spiels on the way in, some of the most involved ones I've heard for a ride. I suspect these are the result of some accidents that have happened in the past with these rides, most often involving the ride starting up when someone is standing in the way in the dark enclosure. They were being very very careful, it seemed to me.
All in all, a great day out. Even though Funtown Splashtown is a small park, there's quite a bit there I didn't get to that I'd like to do on a later visit: some of the waterslides (particularly the family raft slide), the bumper cars and bumper boats, maybe the go-karts which are actually included with park admission. There's also a truly enormous drop tower; I have not gotten into drop towers but who knows, I might someday.