Tuesday, July 1, 2008

More on The Boardwalk 2


I watched the Podcast that Hershey Park has up about their new Boardwalk expansion and grabbed the above image of the new area.

I missed some details before, and wanted to cover those as well. The new area will also include:

• 27 cabanas for rent only be Hershey Resorts Guests
• Additional rest room and locker facilities
• A New Restaurant and 2 new food stands
• Two new retail locations
• The ability to accommodate 4,000 more guests in the Boardwalk

Also, the above piece of art was on a newspaper's page, and to my eyes at least, it doesn't seem to come from any of the other art released. How curious... looks like a new entrance area from back where the viewing area for the rapids was. Are they removing their Chance Wipeout, Rodeo?

Ok here's the guts of my little presentation.

I used a very similar view of the expansion area via Live Local and compared it to the concept art, and noticed that there are lots of similarities to be seen.

First, you can see Roller Soaker's first turn around in the concept art, so that let's us know where we are off the bat. (red square) Then I noticed that a lot of the buildings in the art already exist (orange, yellow, pink, teal, green squares) There's also a purple square on there that's my estimate of where there will be a new entrance down into the expanded area.

So what does this mean?

- Well it looks like they are using the former river rapids trough for at least some of the lazy river - especially the area that goes around the back of the wave pool and under Roller Soaker. It follows the same path.
- It also means that the part of the area, including lazy river on the left side of the image will be considerably below grade from the midway that goes along there. You can see walls in the drawing, but we're talking about the height of the river rapids lift difference, that's what, 15 ft?
- The base (deepest) part of the wave pool will be built into the retaining pond for the river rapids, which from a money and construction point of view makes perfect sense!
- The only new building that I see in this art will be located roughly where the river rapids' queue is.
- The 'mystery' concept art earlier in this post does show two buildings that are not currently at the park, though.
- The cabanas looks to have Sidewinder behind them, I sure would love to pay big bucks to 'relax' while hearing the Vekoma Boomerang rip at the antirollbacks all day!

Phew, okay that's enough. What do you guys think?


2 comments:

Unknown said...

I wonder what they will be doing with the walkway that currently wraps around the back of the Canyon River Rapids (from Roller Soaker to the Rodeo)? This is one of the few relaxing areas in the park where you can avoid the crowds. Hopefully it will remain somewhat in tact.

NewsPlusNotes said...

Well, the side of that walkway closest to RollerSoaker looks to be the queue and loading area for the lazy river... and I think the rest might connect to the Cabanas - basically I'd say that midway will be much busier next year.

I always loved that one too, especially years ago when that part of the park was less developed.