Wednesday, August 29, 2007

Thinking About Geauga Lake


I stitched together LiveLocal's images of Geauga Lake and did some mapping of what maybe perhaps Cedar Fair has planned for the property. This is just a thought, and one of many possible scenarios that even I can come up with - and I have no idea what the real plan is for the property.

Basically, I see them selling off the ride side of the park. If these rumors of removing Dominator and Thunderhawk are true, this really looks like their intention. There's a lot of land over there with the parking lot and all, it's along a somewhat major road, and borders a lake. I'd think that someone would eventually step in and want to redevelop this land.

That would leave the former Sea World side as Geauga Lake. I'm taking the non-operational Wolf Bobs as the border for the new park. This does leave a somewhat nice area to develop with some of the rides from the former rides side.

Here is that area. I think this side of the park is the one in the governing area that won't let rides go up - so that may be a huge thorn in this plan, but I'm not sure. Anyway, just going off of how small the four or so flat rides that are already in this area are, there's a decent area for moving some stuff if they wanted to.

Plus, if you take into consideration the former Shark building over there and Dino Island as items that could be taken down for space, well there's even more room. Plus I'm not sure that the Happy Harbor net climb thing needs to stick around either.

The water park aspect can continue to expand into the area it was supposed to anyway.

You can see above, even with the wave pool being built, there's still substantial room for more slides and such. A nice flat area in front of the pool and along the water, and plenty of hill area to slap some slides into. They could develop this area for years without even having to be creative with the land use to fit anything.

There are problems with this theory I came up with:

· What about Big Dipper? It's a classic. I hate the thought of it getting trashed.

· What rides would be moved? Head Spin would be somewhat easy, and a space saver, as well as the family coaster. Flats like Twister, Dodgems, and the Carousel could move. A bunch of the children's rides could be grouped together - and hey - even retheme them to the Nick characters. Shipwreck Falls could easily fit into the water park area as well.

I don't know, this is all just an idea. But if more big rides are coming down then I'd think that more drastic changes must be on the way. I hate having to wait to find out what they're up to!


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