Adventureland
Adventureland in Altoona, just outside Des Moines, has been open since 1974 and is Iowa's largest amusement park. Monster is the steel coaster with the beyond-vertical drop, Outlaw and Tornado are the wooden coasters, and Phoenix, Storm Chaser and Draken Falls add more variety, with a large section of family rides. In the autumn it runs Halloween haunts on select dates.
Summer weekends and the weeks around the Fourth of July are the busiest. Weekdays early and late in the season are usually much quieter. Check the live queue times before you go and use the crowd calendar to find a good day.
Adventureland live queue times Sesame Place Langhorne
Sesame Place in Langhorne, Pennsylvania is the original Sesame Street theme park, a short drive north of Philadelphia and aimed squarely at children under ten. It mixes a dry side of family rides such as Oscar's Wacky Taxi Coaster, Vapor Trail Coaster and Elmo's Cloud Chaser with a water park of slides and splash areas, plus daily character parades and shows.
Because the audience is young and the park is small, queues build fast in the middle of the day and thin out again as families leave in the afternoon. Wait times here rarely reach big-park levels, but the crowd calendar will still show you which summer weekends to avoid, and checking live before you arrive helps you decide whether to start on the rides or the water side.
Sesame Place Langhorne live queue times 