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I knew I wasn't going to be able to sustain a pace like the one I'd maintained for my first full day at Hersheypark. That was why I scheduled two days. Hersheypark is really two parks for me: It's one of the wildest coaster parks in the United States, but it's also the park I probably loved most as a kid in the 1970s and 1980s. My family's most common summer vacation was a yearly road trip from northern Virginia up into the Poconos, to visit my mother's family who lived there. Hersheypark was along the way and on some, though not all, of these trips, we'd stop there. I think once we even did two days, like I was doing on this trip.

In those days, Hersheypark had a lot that wasn't super intense: many transportation and observation rides, some of which are gone now. They had two very different skyrides: a Von Roll bucket ride that went from what is now Founder's Way to what was then the back of the park, now Kissing Tower Hill; and a little chairlift-style ride over Spring Creek that the other one passed directly over. There was a spectacular Waagner-Biro double Ferris wheel called the Giant Wheel, in the former Carrousel Circle around where Balloon Flite and Starship America are now. This had two wheels on the ends of a seesaw-like beam, so that one could be going high in the air while the other was loading and unloading on the ground. Those three were easily my favorite childhood rides in the park, but they're all gone. I think they auctioned off the cars from the little skyride on eBay, in case you want one in your garden. My sister remembers losing a sandal on it.

Other big, mild rides are still there, and I wanted to revisit some of them. But my first order of business was to ride Skyrush, the last tick mark on my Hersheypark cred-crawl agenda. Refreshed by a night's sleep, I was game for it, and the park seemed to be filling up with school field-trip groups so I needed to hurry. Here's XtremeCoasters Network's POV, which is recent enough to show the current look of the ride, and shows the whole of the insanely fast cable lift:



Skyrush does not mess around. It's an Intamin hypercoaster with a layout similar to Intimidator 305/Pantherian at Kings Dominion, though not as large or as notorious for making riders black out. Still, it's probably too intense for a lot of the general public who are generally OK with big coasters. The whole point of the layout, with a gigantic first drop leading into a tangle of relatively low hills (and no inversions), is to absolutely hurl you with the most intense ejector airtime you will ever feel. There's also a famous "kink" in the first drop where the radius of curvature seems to tighten a bit, just to start with the negative-G hurling before you're even all the way through that drop.

So that people do not die from this process, the ride's lap restraints have to be pretty secure and a bit tight. This has made Skyrush a polarizing ride. For the first decade and change of its existence, it had restraints that were reported to be quite painful and got it the nickname "Thighcrush". Now it has new ones that are not so painful... but some people complain that the ride was somehow made less intense by them. You can't win. Anyway, I only know the new ones.

Hilariously, before they gave Skyrush the new restraints, they modified it to give you a little break from the lap bar tightness: when you're on the brake run waiting to return to the station (the two trains often stack), all the lap restraints suddenly loosen a click, with an audible bang. They kept that with the new trains and I think it's because it's frickin' terrifying, one last little jump scare.

It also has an unusual seating arrangement: the seats are four across, wider than Pantherian, and the outside seats are floorless, mounted in a wing arrangement lower down than the middle ones. I've heard complaints about excessive vibration in these wing seats. I rode in a right-side wing seat, and to me this shake was barely detectable and silly to complain about. This ride absolutely wowed me and at most other parks, even big packed ones, it would be far and away the 800-pound gorilla of the park. But Skyrush is at Hersheypark, and this level of intensity only makes it the third craziest ride in the park, behind Wildcat's Revenge and Storm Runner. Still, I think it's great and has an oddball quality to it that makes it worth seeking out.

Low-energy day

Having done that, for the rest of my day, I didn't really have a detailed agenda. I wanted some free time to just bum around and explore, and get to the parts of the park I remembered from childhood that I hadn't gotten to on my 2011 visit. One of these was Kissing Tower Hill (formerly Tower Plaza), the former back of the park and maybe the most unchanged corner of it since the 1970s. QuietPlaces has a Kissing Tower POV that shows the vibe:



This is an observation tower, with a cylindrical deck that slowly rises and descends while rotating, with Hershey's Kiss-shaped windows. Regrettably the only person I'd do any kissing with was not with me on this trip, but the views were good. I rode this when it was pretty new, and it's the same a half-century later, though there are more rides down there to gawk at. This area is also where the Twin Turnpikes cars depart from, another classic ride that I didn't do on this day but did see running.

Not far away is Coal Cracker, Hersheypark's flume, which has the distinction of being the first ride with any kind of thrill aspect at all that I ever rode. Hersheypark's official POV for once doesn't cover the audio with music:



This is an Arrow flume, with most of the course high up in the air. The main drop of about 50 feet doesn't actually get you all that wet, and instead concentrates on thrills: there's a little airtime hump at the bottom of the drop, so you sort of ride high in the water when you hit the bottom.

For some reason, I loved Coal Cracker when I was a kid even though I was terrified to go on anything else with comparable intensity. Riding it now, I think that part of it is the psychological lulling effect of its peculiar loading station. It's a giant, very slow-moving turntable, similar to the one used by the dark ride over at Chocolate World; you descend into the middle of it via staircase and get in the boats as they creep around the edges. The design of it hides any thrilling element of the ride and makes Coal Cracker seem like the slowest boat ride in the world.

Annoyingly, it also makes it impossible for there to be any kind of bag drop in the station, so for me, riding this involved a long trek to stash my stuff in the locker I'd rented way back by the waterpark--though, honestly, with the chin strap on my hat I'd have been fine at least wearing it with my sunglasses.

Loose items

Which reminds me that Hersheypark merits an aside on loose-article policies. Coal Cracker is unusual for a major ride: for the most part, they're really good about this. All the roller coasters I rode have bag drops on the platform, and, for several of them, there are *free* single-use lockers near the entrance that you can use for the duration of your ride. These work by having you enter a PIN and remember your locker number. They'll give you 2 hours of use for free, which end immediately when you open the locker, so the point is for you to use this for the duration of a ride.

There's a bank of these ride lockers near the entrances for Skyrush and sooperdooperLooper, so those coasters are listed as having ride lockers--but, really, you could use this same bank easily for Comet and even for Coal Cracker if you can climb the hill fast enough. I only realized this belatedly, but it could have saved me some time. It seemed like a lot of people were just leaving their bags in a big pile near the entrance for Coal Cracker, but I wasn't willing to do that.

There's another bank at the entrance to Candymonium, which I did use, and a third apparently near Reese's Cupfusion, the shooting dark ride, which I think you could feasibly use for Fahrenheit (I didn't ride Reese's or Fahrenheit on this trip; I did get Fahrenheit back in 2011).

Wildcat's Revenge takes it to the next level: it has free double-sided ride lockers in the queue itself, just before you get to the station. These are a great innovation. You define a PIN and put your loose items in before getting on the ride, and then after getting off, you open the other side of the locker from the exit lanes. It helps a lot with crowd flow.

If you're only interested in the big coasters, and aren't doing the waterpark, you could probably get away with not renting an all-day locker. I did, just for convenience, but the for-pay rentals are not moveable and the one I rented was back by the waterpark, where most of them are. So it was some distance from a lot of the rides I rode.

There's a small bank of all-day rental lockers right by the park entrance, but I don't recommend bothering with that one. The all-day rentals work by dispensing a wristband from a special kiosk, with a bar code that you scan to open the locker. At that front bank, there's only one wristband-dispensing kiosk and it gets mobbed at opening with people who are all trying to figure out the system. The lockers back by the waterpark are far more numerous and there are several kiosks you can use.

ZooAmerica

Hersheypark has a little zoo connected to it, called ZooAmerica, which I made a point of checking out on this second day. If you want, you can actually just buy admission to the zoo for a much lower fee, but Hersheypark admission also gets you in via a connecting bridge. They stamp your hand on the way in so you can get back into Hersheypark.

It's devoted to animals of North America, and, frankly, is not a very impressive zoo. There are some nice displays of antelopes and birds particularly, and the guides are enthusiastic. Not many people were in there. I remembered going in there and liking it as a kid, and I think a valuable purpose of it is that it provides a quiet, uncrowded place to bring little kids or people who are overstimulated, for a break from the crowds and cacophony of Hersheypark.

Last ride

I couldn't leave Hersheypark without giving Wildcat's Revenge another go. On my first ride I wasn't even at the point of being able to put my hands in the air. Here's XtremeCoasters Network's POV, which includes a bit of off-ride footage:



Yeah, this is the best ride at the park. This time I was able to commit to enjoying its wildness. It just tosses you around every which way, mixing up extreme airtime with snappy whippy inversions, for a more varied menu of thrills than Skyrush. One thing it does have that my beloved Wicked Cyclone doesn't is a pre-lift section of little hills before you even hit the chain lift. That's always fun, though it's not something RMC invented.

Wildcat's Revenge is definitely better if you loosen up a bit and let yourself get yanked by the airtime, and by this point, I was warmed up to the point that I could do it. I'd momentarily pay for that attitude days later, but that's foreshadowing.

By this point I'd realized that there was a BBQ joint in the park, the Spring Creek Smokehouse, down in the Pioneer Frontier area across from Trailblazer's helix. So I went there for dinner. It was pricey but really good. I saw a discussion on Reddit noting that this spot is only covered by the highest tier of Hersheypark's meal plan, and among season-pass holders it seems to be the main reason to buy that tier.

So that was Hersheypark. I thoroughly enjoyed my couple of days there. I hope they can resolve their labor issues without too much disruption and that they pay their staff what they deserve, because it's a great place to be.