Adventure…. Plus Fun: Amusement Parks and Other Fun Day Trips for Kids in New Hampshire
The title of this post refers to the Christmas play at my mother’s school. She co-owns a private school in Meredith, on Lake Wicwas, only a couple of miles from the Weirs Beach area. One of her seventh graders wrote a play about a video game designer who invented the best video game ever created: “Adventure, Plus Fun!” Anyway, the plot has to do with an existential crisis he’s experiencing when he realizes that the game itself will not make people love him; while his game is a phenomenon, children remain indifferent to him. Unlike Santa, he will never be beloved by children.
New Hampshire actually has a lot to offer children, which is surprising since the population here, in general, is geriatric. However, families on vacation are a sought-after demographic, so I guess it makes sense that there are nearly half a dozen amusement/adventure parks within a two-hour radius. I have been to all of these places except for Six-Gun City, because my mother disapproved of country-and-western themed places (don’t ask). If you have children, you will probably enjoy all of them. If you don’t, you’ll still like Attitash and Canobie Lake Park, but you may want to skip the others.
Canobie Lake Park
I am generally not an amusement park fan. They are loud, stinky, hot, and generally exhausting. But Canobie Lake Park is not like the others. It’s not near Weirs Beach at all—in fact, it’s about an hour and a half south, but I feel compelled to write about it, because for the first fourteen years of my life it was my favorite place outside of Disney world. I looked forward to going each summer and would even mark off the days until our next visit.
It’s a basic “Colonial Massachusetts” themed amusement park, but with a twist—it’s on a lake, and it’s actually quite old (and has retained some of that old-timey feel, with its pavilion and antique carousel). Frank Sinatra once played here, as did Duke Ellington and Sonny and Cher—the Pavilion had a large ballroom, and people traveling from Boston to NH on the railway line could stop on their way. When I was in junior high they had a roller rink. There is a nice tranquil lake where you can sit on benches and have a picnic if the crowd gets to be too much.
It has all of the staples—a Ferris wheel, a flume ride, antique cars, two roller coasters, a water park, a picnic area, and a haunted mine ride. My brother does a great impression of the one-toothed grizzled prospector at the start of the mine ride (“Go Baaaaack! Go Baaaaack”) Many of the rides there are the exact same ones that were there when I was a child, but repainted, something that should probably give me pause. There are new rides, too, most of which I can’t handle now that I get motion sickness. Still—they have a rating system that tells you how hard-core a ride is: “black diamonds” are the scariest rides, “blue squares” are in the middle, and “green circles” are the rides that don't go any faster than you can walk.
Storyland
This is up north, in Glen, New Hampshire, but in the Glen area there are no less than three children’s amusement parks—a trifecta!
We used to go there with our cousins as kids, and I have a great photo of the four us sitting in a whale’s mouth. Storyland has a “mother goose” theme, and while it retains some of this theme in their rides (a pumpkin coach, a pirate ship, a carousel, Alice’s tea cup ride) it has also succumbed to the trend of water rides and complex, cutesy names, so now you can lunch at “Senor Munchero’s Taco Hut” after taking a trip on “Dr. Geyser’s Remarkable Raft Ride”, or visiting “Professor Biggleshop’s Loopy Laboratory” (none of the characters go by their first names anymore? Sounds elitist to me!) They also, oddly, count among the “play areas,” something called “Mama’s House,” a place where women can nurse their babies. If you are a nursing mother, having a cute building to nurse in rather than a restroom counts as fun, I guess…
Santa’s Village
If you find yourself really missing Christmas in June, then Santa’s Village is for you. The theme gets old pretty fast, but the “Burgermeister Food Court” is still a fun place to eat, and who can resist a Christmas carousel, or real reindeer, or riding in Christmas-themed bumper cars, ”Santa’s Smokers?” (I hardly believe that Santa would endorse vehicular recklessness). You can also get a ring made at the Blacksmith shop; according to the website, “good luck rings are especially made to fit the finger of choice.”
Six-Gun City
I wanted to go here so badly as a child, but we always went to Storyland or Santa’s Village instead. It’s a Western frontier village/waterpark (the waterpark part is called "Fort Splash"), but the real highlight is the miniature horses that perform in a show and do tricks. They even have miniature horses that can count and spell words with their hooves.
Attitash/The Alpine Slide
This is actually a ski area by winter and a mountainside recreation area in the summer. For one, it has waterslides (really good ones, down a mountain), a regular slide called “the Alpine Slide,” and is home to the “Eurobungy,” which they describe as a “multi-station super trampoline system” that allows you to physically jump two stories high. I wonder if this is the same sort of thing David Foster Wallace wrote about in his essay about the State Fair—you know, the yuppie from the Northeast wearing loafers, suspended in the air?
I went on the waterslides as a child but, in my view, no waterslide or multi-station trampoline can beat the Alpine Slide. For one, you can wear regular clothes and shoes (no bathing suits) and you don’t get chlorine in your eyes and hair—and it’s a little scary but not terrifying. There used to be one of these in Gilford, but it is no longer. When I was younger, my brother, cousin, and their friends used to think they were funny and would brake unexpectedly on hills, backing up all the slide traffic and causing a pileup, kind of like in that Simpsons episode where Homer gets stuck in the slide at Mount Splashmore. Stay away from the line with any junior high kids in it, is the moral of the story.
The title of this post refers to the Christmas play at my mother’s school. She co-owns a private school in Meredith, on Lake Wicwas, only a couple of miles from the Weirs Beach area. One of her seventh graders wrote a play about a video game designer who invented the best video game ever created: “Adventure, Plus Fun!” Anyway, the plot has to do with an existential crisis he’s experiencing when he realizes that the game itself will not make people love him; while his game is a phenomenon, children remain indifferent to him. Unlike Santa, he will never be beloved by children.
New Hampshire actually has a lot to offer children, which is surprising since the population here, in general, is geriatric. However, families on vacation are a sought-after demographic, so I guess it makes sense that there are nearly half a dozen amusement/adventure parks within a two-hour radius. I have been to all of these places except for Six-Gun City, because my mother disapproved of country-and-western themed places (don’t ask). If you have children, you will probably enjoy all of them. If you don’t, you’ll still like Attitash and Canobie Lake Park, but you may want to skip the others.
Canobie Lake Park
I am generally not an amusement park fan. They are loud, stinky, hot, and generally exhausting. But Canobie Lake Park is not like the others. It’s not near Weirs Beach at all—in fact, it’s about an hour and a half south, but I feel compelled to write about it, because for the first fourteen years of my life it was my favorite place outside of Disney world. I looked forward to going each summer and would even mark off the days until our next visit.
It’s a basic “Colonial Massachusetts” themed amusement park, but with a twist—it’s on a lake, and it’s actually quite old (and has retained some of that old-timey feel, with its pavilion and antique carousel). Frank Sinatra once played here, as did Duke Ellington and Sonny and Cher—the Pavilion had a large ballroom, and people traveling from Boston to NH on the railway line could stop on their way. When I was in junior high they had a roller rink. There is a nice tranquil lake where you can sit on benches and have a picnic if the crowd gets to be too much.
It has all of the staples—a Ferris wheel, a flume ride, antique cars, two roller coasters, a water park, a picnic area, and a haunted mine ride. My brother does a great impression of the one-toothed grizzled prospector at the start of the mine ride (“Go Baaaaack! Go Baaaaack”) Many of the rides there are the exact same ones that were there when I was a child, but repainted, something that should probably give me pause. There are new rides, too, most of which I can’t handle now that I get motion sickness. Still—they have a rating system that tells you how hard-core a ride is: “black diamonds” are the scariest rides, “blue squares” are in the middle, and “green circles” are the rides that don't go any faster than you can walk.
Storyland
This is up north, in Glen, New Hampshire, but in the Glen area there are no less than three children’s amusement parks—a trifecta!
We used to go there with our cousins as kids, and I have a great photo of the four us sitting in a whale’s mouth. Storyland has a “mother goose” theme, and while it retains some of this theme in their rides (a pumpkin coach, a pirate ship, a carousel, Alice’s tea cup ride) it has also succumbed to the trend of water rides and complex, cutesy names, so now you can lunch at “Senor Munchero’s Taco Hut” after taking a trip on “Dr. Geyser’s Remarkable Raft Ride”, or visiting “Professor Biggleshop’s Loopy Laboratory” (none of the characters go by their first names anymore? Sounds elitist to me!) They also, oddly, count among the “play areas,” something called “Mama’s House,” a place where women can nurse their babies. If you are a nursing mother, having a cute building to nurse in rather than a restroom counts as fun, I guess…
Santa’s Village
If you find yourself really missing Christmas in June, then Santa’s Village is for you. The theme gets old pretty fast, but the “Burgermeister Food Court” is still a fun place to eat, and who can resist a Christmas carousel, or real reindeer, or riding in Christmas-themed bumper cars, ”Santa’s Smokers?” (I hardly believe that Santa would endorse vehicular recklessness). You can also get a ring made at the Blacksmith shop; according to the website, “good luck rings are especially made to fit the finger of choice.”
Six-Gun City
I wanted to go here so badly as a child, but we always went to Storyland or Santa’s Village instead. It’s a Western frontier village/waterpark (the waterpark part is called "Fort Splash"), but the real highlight is the miniature horses that perform in a show and do tricks. They even have miniature horses that can count and spell words with their hooves.
Attitash/The Alpine Slide
This is actually a ski area by winter and a mountainside recreation area in the summer. For one, it has waterslides (really good ones, down a mountain), a regular slide called “the Alpine Slide,” and is home to the “Eurobungy,” which they describe as a “multi-station super trampoline system” that allows you to physically jump two stories high. I wonder if this is the same sort of thing David Foster Wallace wrote about in his essay about the State Fair—you know, the yuppie from the Northeast wearing loafers, suspended in the air?
I went on the waterslides as a child but, in my view, no waterslide or multi-station trampoline can beat the Alpine Slide. For one, you can wear regular clothes and shoes (no bathing suits) and you don’t get chlorine in your eyes and hair—and it’s a little scary but not terrifying. There used to be one of these in Gilford, but it is no longer. When I was younger, my brother, cousin, and their friends used to think they were funny and would brake unexpectedly on hills, backing up all the slide traffic and causing a pileup, kind of like in that Simpsons episode where Homer gets stuck in the slide at Mount Splashmore. Stay away from the line with any junior high kids in it, is the moral of the story.
Generally I am not amused at the amusement park, but I want to ride the Alpine slide. I like that it is a slide. Sounds nice. I would not go if they called it a Alpine Vertical Super G Bitch-Ass Switchback Extreme Slope Experience. Destination.
ReplyDeleteBut an alpine slide? For sure. - Ciara
I believe Gary Gygax (the inventor of Dungeons & Dragons) took his own life due to what a subsequent coroner's inquest called "Adventure, Plus Fun!" Syndrome. Sad.
ReplyDelete"They are loud, stinky, hot, and generally exhausting." An accurate description of a Constant Velocity show.
"...because my mother disapproved of country-and-western themed places (don’t ask)." You simply cannot bait us like that. Now I must know. My guess is her first love was a cowboy who done her wrong.
Gotta say the rides in Storyland sound super-hippie to me. Or euphemisms for weed. Just say the word "maaan" after the titles. See?
There is a Santa's Village in Dundee IL too. I found it mystifying even as a child. How can an event also be a place?
And yesyesyes Ciara definitely the slide. Let's FIND the line with the junior high kids and double down on their prank. With mass and velocity!
Actually, said not to ask beacuse there's not really one discernible my mother doesn't like country and western stuff. She did have a bad experience riding western on a horse when she was a child, and she never took to country music. She is also from Massachusetts, from a suburb of Boston, which could explain everything right there.
ReplyDelete