The Theme Parks gallery has been updated again with another batch of photos from Silver Dollar City. This updated adds some places we’ve never seen before, such as areas around rides we’d never made it to (Giant Barn Swing, for one).
There are also updates to the Other Places gallery with some new images from the Branson area, including first-time visits to two of the Crazy Craig’s restaurants.
2025 marks the fourth season for Lost Island Theme Park in Waterloo, Iowa. It is also the 25th season for their original Lost Island Water Park.
On Saturday, I visited in a group of six, which included four first-time visitors to this new park. Their most recent Iowa amusement park experience was with Adventureland in Altoona. They had gone to Adventureland on a very busy day and said the lines were so long they only got on a few rides. Long lines were certainly not an issue at Lost Island. Crowds still have not arrived, and the four newcomers were able to ride everything they wanted, multiple times, even during the short 10:30am to 6:30pm operating day.
They left pleased, and said they could drive the four hours for Lost Island (two hours there, two hours back) and ride more things than they could have just driving across down and trying to ride things at the much bigger, much older Adventureland.
Folks, cherish these early days. Eventually, either crowds will arrive and these “walk on” days will be gone, or the park won’t make it. Either way, the opportunity to do everything you want without waiting will eventually end.
New shiny…
New this year was the addition of the Fire Runner “single rail” roller coaster. This was the first time I’d ever ridden one of these, and it was quite fun. The seats are single file, and the loading procedure is completely different from any other coaster I have ridden. As the train pulls into the station, it slowly creeps through it, never stopping. One by one, the restraints pop up as that car enters the station. The rider exits to the left, while a new rider is sent to that site. It is a remarkable design, though sitting single file, it does mean each car will have half the capacity of a traditional roller coaster design.
Also new, though originally planned for opening year in 2022, was Nika’s Gift, the carousel. It was neat seeing all the custom paintwork on it. Each panel seemed different, and even the park’s logo was hand painted. Nice.
A few other things where new for 2025:
A few rides now have shade coverings over them.
Trees have been grown and/or transplanted, so the “barren” landscape of the park is becoming a bit less-barren.
Alcohol has appeared at a second location. Formerly, only Thirsty Voyager had adult beverages. This year, a single option of Islandology beer (custom made for the park) can be purchased in the Udara (Air) second of the park at Udaran Delights.
The alcohol thing is interesting, since opening year the park listed alcohol available at the two large food locations, as well as Thursday Voyager, but if this happened, it had stopped happening by the time we visited in August 2022.
There were plenty of other small changes, from menu items to drink selections, but someone else will have to detail those (or you can check photos in my gallery and look at menu pictures and see for yourself).
Photos?
And of course, new photos have been added to the gallery. They are still being processed, but they will appear here shortly:
I am glad you asked. A few weeks ago I learned folks could submit 360 footage to Google Street View. I started doing that for various trails around Des Moines, and added updated footage around new local restaurant (Google was still showing the former restaurant there, from when they came through some years ago). Everybody needs a hobby…
I also found a few of my 2024 VR videos from Lost Island and got them updated, but since none of them were intended for Google Street view, they are just bits and pieces of paths and make for a crazy looking Google Maps overlay…
This trip, I intentionally walked the park with plans to upload that as a more consistent path through the entire park (at least on one path; there are so many back paths and bypasses, and areas of the park I did not cover with this attempt). I expect to start working on that later this week.
I will share more thoughts on Lost Island’s continued evolution when I have some time.
My Adventureland-specifc blog has now been merged into this main Park Hopping blog. All old articles and photos should now be here, though some of the images still need some work.
The Adventureland Iowa sub-section still remains to host the Adventureland Wiki project:
That wiki contains historical information of every ride, shop, show and food location that I could find information on. It is missing much from the 70s and 80s, before I moved to Iowa, but should be fairly complete since I started visiting the park in 1995.
Adventureland photos remain in my Theme Parks gallery:
I have begun the process of merging the Adventureland Iowa content from Adventureland.parkhopping.com over to this main Park Hopping blog. Things will be messed up (especially images) for a bit…
I wondered how many photos I’ve taken with each camera I have owned. I used a script to find out, but unfortunately it does not tell me how many were taken with my original Epson PhotoPC camera. That was before the standard, so the way it worked was different. Still interesting, to me.
(This does not include any of the images taken with an iPhone over the years.)
Photos per camera: • Canon Canon PowerShot G5 X: 132110 • FUJIFILM FinePix F10: 46544 • Panasonic DMC-LX5: 21257 • SONY CYBERSHOT: 20044 • Panasonic DMC-LX3: 18858 • SONY DSC-W1: 9663 • SONY HDR-CX7: 8575 • SONY HDR-HC1: 7358 • SONY HDR-CX12: 6024 • CASIO COMPUTER CO.,LTD EX-Z4: 4358 • SONY HDR-XR500V: 2836 • SANYO Electric Co.,Ltd. X1200: 211 • RICOH RICOH THETA S: 6
These days, none of us expect online “reporting” to be accurate (or at least, we shouldn’t). Sometimes the rumors do end up being true — such as reports last year that Palace Entertainment was preparing to sell off some of their parks.
Here is a quick recap of how rumors became facts:
March 18, 2025 – Herschend to aquire Palace Entertainment attractions
Here is the official announcement on the Herschend Family Entertainment website:
The wording specifically said they were going to “acquire all of Palace Entertainment’s U.S. entertainment properties from Parques Reunidos. ”
After that announcement, many sites reported that the Dollywood / Silver Dollar City company had bought (insert name of local Palace Entertainment park here). However, this was not true yet. I reached out to H.F.E. to get confirmation:
“We do not currently operate any Palace Entertainment properties. Until the sale is final, please direct any questions to the relevant property or a Palace HQ representative.”
Herschend Family Entertainment
May 27, 2025 – The deal is done
Next, there was quite a bit of news surrounding H.F.E. and their $1 billion dollar loan they were taking out to complete this acquisition:
I doubt there are many bloggers / coaster sites / etc. that really understand the details of such a business transaction, so naturally many assumptions were made that were incorrect. A common question was: “Now that Palace Entertainment has sold all their properties, what happens to Palace Entertainment?”
I wondered that too, actually. But, again, going to official sources reveals the answer: Palace Entertainment was purchased, not the properties directly. The official Palace Entertainment website explains:
“Based in Pittsburgh, Palace Entertainment provides world-class fun, entertainment, and learning experiences at more than 20 properties in 10 different states, including amusement and theme parks, water parks, entertainment centers, campgrounds, and hotels.
Palace Entertainment owns and operates several of the country’s most iconic and historic venues including, National Historic Landmark, Kennywood Park, America’s First Amusement Park, Lake Compounce, the world’s first ever Cartoon Network Hotel, Best Family Theme Park Dutch Wonderland and a variety of other family-friendly parks and campgrounds throughout the United States.
Palace Entertainment is owned by Herschend, the world’s largest family-owned themed attractions company, with 12,000+ passionate employees (hosts) collectively entertaining 15 million families each year.”
According to that site, it remains Palace Entertainment (at least as of that page being updated) that owns and operates their attractions, not Herschend Family Entertainment directly.
You can see Iowa’s Adventureland now listed as an HFE property on their map page:
With most acquisitions, there will be consolidation and downsizing. If three companies that all had their own H.R. group get merged together, often just one (maybe increased in size) H.R. group will survive to handle the new larger entity. It is reasonable to expect parks will still maintain their own local management, though higher up the org chart there may be consolidation.
And, with folks already being able to use their Adventureland passes to get discounts at Herschend parks, some merging of benefits has already happened, even if it is not yet reflected on all the property websites.
While none of this may be as big as the Six Flags / Cedar Fair merger, it is still interesting to watch.
The news broke a few days ago … the deal has been done. Herschend Family Entertainment now owns the Palace Entertainment parks, including our own Adventureland amusement park here in Iowa.
When I get around to merging in my separate Adventureland blog into this one, I’ll post some follow-ups with more “unsubstantiated crazy rumors” about what folks believe can/will/might happen next 😉
The fourth season of the Lost Island Themepark here in Iowa began this weekend. For 2025, the Nika’s Gift carousel has opened, and construction on their new coaster, Fire Runner, continues. If all goes well, it could open this season, giving the park two new rides for 2025.
Other rides that have been added since the park opened in 2022 include the water ride Yuta Falls and the Matugani roller coaster.
If you are considering a visit, take a look through the photo galleries here from 2022, 2023 and 2024 (with photos from 2025 to be added later this year).
It is a wonderful park with a very unique theme that is full of plenty of lore, including its own language, and original characters. Check out their official website for more information:
There are so many details at Silver Dollar City — form interesting decorations to “hidden” displays you find by looking through a hole in the wall. Here is a short video of some of them… and after my next visit, I hope to do a longer version and include more.
When I set up this sub-site to host my Adventureland History Wiki, I created this blog to hold Adventureland-specific posts. Since then, the scope of my main blog has increased, so I think I will move all of these Adventureland posts over to the main blog to keep everything in one place.
Hopefully this will go smoothly. I am hoping to work on this some upcoming weekend.
Once done, I will try to start writing some new retro photo essays about Adventureland, similar to the ones I’ve written about Disney and Universal. Adventureland just celebrated its 50th birthday, so it will be fun to look back 30 years ago when I first started taking photos at the park.
