Holiday World & Splashin' Safari
Santa Claus, Indiana
HoliWood Nights
June 4 & 5, 2010
Page Three




Here's Jackson after his first ride on The Legend.  With him is Adam, Corey, David and way in the back Angie.



Down by The Voyage Holiday World and The Gravity Group had wheeled out one of the cars from the Voyage's new Timberliner trains for all of us to try out. 



Will Koch, President oh Holiday World was on hand to geek out about the Timberliners with the rest of us.  

Sadly this is my last photo of Will.  Less than two weeks after the event Will passed away due to complications from diabetes. 

Honestly it has taken me a long to write this trip report because it was just so hard to put to words what I wanted to say about Will.  I met him the first time I visited Holiday World back in the late 1990's.  I had just been on The Raven and it completely shook my world and I had to say "thank you" for such an amazing ride.  Very quickly I saw that he loved the ride as much as I did and was really living the dream of every coaster enthusiast...he was running his own park and building his own rides.

On almost every visit I took from that point on, including after we moved down the block I'd always run into Will or see him there.  He was always fun to talk to and one of my fondest memories was standing in the middle of the Bahari wave pool after a construction tour just talking coasters with him for a couple of hours.  Paula sat there laughing at how big geeks we were.

What he did with his little family park in the middle of nowhere was simply amazing.  If you'd have told me or anyone else 20 years ago that Santa Claus Land would become a regional powerhouse of a park where people travel from all over the region to spend a weekend there year after year (I'm a 6 hour drive from HW and there are many people here who make an annual visit) or that the little family park would become THE park to go to to ride the worlds best wooden coasters we would have thought you were nuts.  Will's dream might have been nuts but he refused to listen to the naysayers.

When they said he'd go broke giving away free drinks he refused to listen.  Several parks now have drinks included and word is a large chain is thinking of following suit.

The conventional wisdom used to be that wood coasters were old, boring. and a thing of the past but Will, with the addition of the Raven brought them back to the limelight and then took them beyond what they were and pushed the envelope of what could be done with them.  The wooden coasters at his park weren't run of the mill, these were aggressive rides that demanded world wide attention.  As a result wood coasters are seeing a renaissance around the world and the final coaster that Will added to his park; which he actually was given a design credit because all of his input; The Voyage has been the #1 wooden coaster in the world since it's creation.

If I sat here and really thought about it I could keep going on and on about how Will transformed the amusement park industry but in the end Will Koch was a good man.  He left a mark on this world that will last and he left three wonderful kids and family who will go on with the dream he began.

He was my friend.



Ok, here's a photo for all you coaster geeks out there to get excited about.



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Paul B. Drabek