Hershey for Teens

The iconic amusement park has a rep for being little-kid heaven (it still is), but if your teens haven’t been, here’s why you should take them. 

It had been a long time. Eleven years, to be exact. The last time I took my kids to Hersheypark in Hershey, PA, they were 6 and 2. I remember we all really liked it. The layout and size was much easier to navigate than at mega theme parks. It was clean (as much as such a place can be). And—no small consideration in July—it was hot, but unlike Florida parks, not go-to-your-hotel-after-lunch-or-leave-on-a-stretcher hot. Skip ahead to 2016, when my sister-in-law asked if we wanted to go to Hershey with them over Labor Day weekend. Her kids are 15 and 13. “Aren’t the kids too old for Hershey?” I asked her. “Nah, we go every year and they still love it.” So off we went, with two eighth graders, a 10th grader, and a high school senior. I was dubious that they wouldn’t be bored. I was wrong.

 RELATED: Discover the best day trips for families!

The Hershey Fun Factor for Teens

For all you first-timers, Hershey has two parts: the theme park, and Hershey’s Chocolate World. The main draw of the latter is a ride that shows you how Hershey’s products are made. It may surprise you to learn, as it did me, that there hasn’t been a real operating factory in Hershey since 1973. They have several factories in places as far flung as Illinois and Mexico, but here it’s just for show. It’s still a cute ride, modernized recently, so better than the one I remembered. Plus it’s free. Chocolate World also has 4-D movie and make-your-own candy activity (neither of those are free, though), and a vast shopping bazaar. 

But the theme park is where the action is for teens. How much could there be that appeals to the 13–17 set in a place that bills itself as the “sweetest on Earth”? At a bare minimum, I counted 12 activities, and that doesn’t include the water rides or the Wave Rider open only in the summer, or the carnival games and the two arcades. Here—ranked by no greater authority than my kids and their cousins, admittedly—are the top five teen attractions, thrill coasters all, unsurprisingly. Plan to spend a lot of time on the surrounding benches, sipping the lovely old-fashioned lemonades they sell all over (with an entire lemon half floating around!). That is, unless you are unusually strong of stomach for someone old enough to be the parent of teen. 

1)    Fahrenheit: This inverted vertical loop “lift” coaster starts off swooping your baby up 121 feet, to immediately throw him right back down in a 97-degree negative drop—the steepest of any U.S. ride. My 17-year-old son told me that, at the very top, even being in the front (where he insisted on sitting for every ride, even if he had to wait longer), he couldn’t see anything in front of him or beneath him. When I first saw the shape of it, I thought, “No….what is that? It can’t be….” and briefly considered just not letting him go on, but then it would have been a long ride home. This is the one he’s still talking about.

2)    Skyrush: This is the highest coaster in the park—200 feet—and riders zoom along at 75 mph. What got me, and not in a good way, was that the restraints appears to be quite minimal. Is there anything really holding them in? Of course there is, but feeling like there isn’t is what my 13-year-old nephew liked about it. That, and being seated “over the side of the track.”

3)    Storm Runner: Dubbed “the slingshot ride” by my son, and that pretty much sums it up. It shoots riders straight out from 0–72 mph in two (2!) seconds. And in the heartbeat before it does so, an evil-sounding voice croaks, “Here we go!” If you are sitting on the bench right at the entrance to the ride, against the iron fence, on the right, you will hear that voice, oh, I don’t know, 100 billion times. It’s a little unnerving. Seat yourself accordingly.

4)    Sidewinder: Twists. Corkscrews. Upside down for a while. This is the favorite of my 13-year-old daughter, who giddily offered this explanation of her desire to go right back on the line: “Imagine being a boomerang!” This from a girl who complained all the way there about being carsick because she had to sit in the back with her brother.