In addition to Great Escape, we also went to Hoffman's Playland, a small park about a 45 minutes south-east of Lake George. The weather was very nice for a day (hour) in the park, at about 75 degrees Fahrenheit and sunny.
Hoffman's Playland is a pretty nice, well landscaped park with a good atmosphere to it. It has many fine restaurants and shops, from cotton candy, to water fountains, all the way to the very nice sitdown restaurant Subway which is part of it's park entrance.
After getting our tickets, we decided to ride the Roller Coaster, a 1950s Herschell Little Dipper. This version is the rarer "High Speed Curve" model, with a long, banked swooping curve off the lift into the bunny hills rather than than the small drop and flat turnaround. I don't know of any other of this kind that don't have a maximum height limit.
Leaving the station with a push from the operator and then starting up the lift hill, the train quickly drops off into the fast but somewhat rough swoop curve, an element that I found far more interesting than the standard version. The ride then enters a series of two bunny hills, which I found to be great progression going from a fast, lateral filled turn into 2 straight drops. The ride then quickly enters another high speed banked turn, which is quite the finale to this great ride. I found the progression of going from turn to hills to turn to be outstanding, and overall the ride felt very complete. The ride actually gives you three full laps to give you a sense of how well thought out the layout is. This ride quickly jumped into my top 90 steel, passing some other greats such as the Herschell Little Dipper non-High Speed Curve version.
After riding the great Roller Coaster, we went to the Paratrooper, a spinning flat ride made by Frank Hrubetz & Co., Inc. This is one of the better Paratroopers I have been on, running a relatively fast and long cycle, but I did notice the cars did not have as much whip to them as Indiana Beach's. It did however provide solid positive Gs in the bottom half and a slight feeling of weightlessness at the top, so a solid ride in my opinion.
In addition to those rides, they had many others, including a rare Chance CP Hunnington train, an Eli Scrambler, TWO Eli Ferris Wheels, and a Tilt o Whirl.
Overall it was a great day at Hoffman's, I plan on returning soon. They have a wonderful lineup of rides and I highly recommend going out of your way for this park.