It’s been over a dozen years since I last went to a pay-one-price, unlimited rides amusement park. Coney Island, Brooklyn operates on a per-ticket basis after all, allowing visitors to pay as little or as much as they want for a day in the sun.
I grew up attending Worlds of Fun in Kansas City, Missouri and Adventureland near Des Moines, Iowa, both of them rather large parks with truly something for everyone, including live shows, games, diverse restaurants, and rides to please the most and least adventurous! These are parks where you really cannot do everything in them in a single day. This is what I expected all-day inclusive parks to be – as opposed to the carnival style where you buy individual tickets and submit from one to ten tickets per ride, the Coney Island and state fair format I’m also used to.
So when my roommate and I planned on going to nearby Lakemont Park in Altoona, I expected a “Worlds of Fun” experience. Furthering this expectation was several visits to their website. I looked at attractions, prices, you name it! I was completely excited to go to Lakemont.
That is, until I got there. The problems began with the confusing patchwork of park hours on the website which uses color codes and keys instead of giving clear explicit paragraphs to convey park hours. The hours themselves are too varied to be comprehensible. The result: we arrived May 26th at 1030 am not realizing the park did not open until noon.
Arrive at the box office and there is no sign to tell you park hours. The only hint is a street sign near the highway. Nothing near the entrance much less at the box office – though prices are prominently displayed. We waited 95 long minutes in the hot sun to get in!
Pay your admission and no park map is provided to you nor is there one near the entrance to the park, making finding anything very confusing. Throughout the day we had to wander around for food, restrooms, and just paths in the direction we wanted. Nothing is clear at Lakemont. This was not how I wanted to spend my day!
Go to a restaurant and there is no shade for the seating area. The wait for “fast food” is considerable. On top of that, the food vendor did not have half the toppings the menu specifies.
We went to the included water park to discover that this “park” consists of just three attractions: a small conventional swimming pool (no steps into the pool; even the ladder to help you get out forces a 2 foot drop on you), a kiddy pool, and a rather tall, fast waterslide my companion really enjoyed. Even the splash zone for the slides is small; it seemed to me way too small to be completely safe!
There were not even basic floatation devices such as most public pools offer for use around, not even a kick board. To me, this “water park” was more for kids and those who swim really well; not your average visitor. I was very quickly bored.
Many of the attractions are extremely difficult to get into and out of, including and especially their go-karts and their paddle boats, neither of which are particularly clean; a favorite skirt of mine was ruined by trying these rides.
The regular ride section is small and lack simple things like padded seats on spinning rides. I ended up getting my long hair caught in one of them; this has never happened at any park or carnival!
It is probably most telling that on Memorial Day weekend and the season opening Saturday, Lakemont hosted fewer than 30 visitors for the entire day! This is a park very few people go to and with very good reason!
