Our Trip To Knoebels Amusement Resort in Elysburg, PA | The Adventuring Abbeys Vlog

This past weekend we visited Knoebels Amusement Resort in Elysburg, Pennsylvania – a small, unique amusement park nestled out in the middle of nowhere-Pennsylvania.

Knoebels is a super rare type of park, in that, admission into the park (and parking) is completely free. In order to ride the plethora of flat-rides & the handful of coasters that Knoebels has, you can either purchase an all-day pass in the form of a wristband or purchase books of tickets. It’s a super old-school form of running an amusement park & it works REALLY well for Knoebels!

Since it is still technically the “pre-season”, we were able to get discounted tickets & we were really hoping that the park wouldn’t be overwhelmingly busy.

It’s always super hard to tell exactly how “busy” Knoebels is. Because of that “free entry”, A LOT of people come to Knoebels – families come & host reunions, there are always birthday parties being celebrated – it’s just a perfect place for large groups to come! The kids can run off & ride, while adults who aren’t really interested in the rides, can sit & hang out. Families bring elaborate food & grill setups, planting themselves in a pavilion & hanging out for the entire day.

With that being said: the park seemed absolutely packed, but in reality, not that many people were riding. At max, we waited 15 minutes for all of our rides on Knoebel’s big coasters: Impulse, Twister, and Phoenix (Flying Turns was so sadly not open). There were just TONS of people out in the midways, which made the park feel like it was bursting. The kid’s rides did have long long lines, but thankfully, Knoebels has about 100 kid’s rides (that’s an exaggeration, but they do have more than your average park), so with a little strategy, we were able to jump around & avoid the longest lines.

The best part about our day was that we were able to spend it with Derrick’s brother, his wife, and their kids – which meant our kids had their cousins to ride with! This made our day so much more fun! We highly recommend amusement-park-ing with cousins, it’s a blast.

One more thing I wanted to mention: the very first photo in this post is super special to me – we used this exact spot & this exact train to take our original pregnancy announcement. The train was turned on a little bit of a different angle, but as soon as I saw it, I knew I needed an updated photo with my two sweet babies!!

Enjoy a little peek into our day!!

And, because what’s a post without photos?