Phoenix Phall Phunfest 2024: Cottages, Coasters, and a Whole Lot of Fascination

There are a few things that mark the start of fall around our house — pumpkin spice creeping back into the grocery store, the first cool morning that demands a hoodie, and our annual pilgrimage to Phoenix Phall Phunfest at Knoebels. PPP 2024 marked the 33rd edition of the event, that magical Halloween-kickoff weekend tucked into the Covered Bridge Festival, and we wouldn't have missed it for the world.

Memory Lane Cottage: Home for the Weekend

This year we shared the Memory Lane cottage with Dan, Deanna, and Ethan — and if you've never stayed there, here's the pitch in one sentence: it's a privately owned little campground tucked right up against Knoebels, less than a hundred yards from the park entrance, full of vintage charm and wonderful little touches.

The cottage was the perfect home base. Big enough for two families to spread out without tripping over each other, close enough to the park that "let's just walk back for a snack" was always on the table, and quiet enough at night that you actually felt like you'd gotten away from things.

Fascination: A Game That Refuses to Die

If you've never played Fascination, please find a way to fix that. The game dates back to 1918 at Coney Island and once spread coast to coast through American boardwalks and amusement parks — and now there are only a handful of places left in the entire country that still operate it. Knoebels is one of them.

The setup is gloriously simple: you sit at a wooden table, roll rubber balls down a ramp toward a 5x5 grid of holes, and try to be the first player in the room to light up five in a row. Think bingo crossed with skee-ball, with a dash of friendly cutthroat competition mixed in. Games last about a minute, the operator calls out the winner, and then you slide your money back over and play again. And again. And again.

The reason there are so few of these left is a bit melancholy — the original machines run on relays from old telephone systems, parts are nearly impossible to find, and the game requires several attendants to operate. So when you find a working Fascination parlor, you treasure it.

We absolutely treasured it. Probably too much. I lost count of how many games we played across three days, but I can tell you it was easily into the triple digits, and Ethan got good. Like, suspiciously good. There's a rhythm to it — the right amount of force on the ramp, watching how other players' balls are bouncing — and once you find it, walking away is hard.

Eating Our Way Through the Park

I have to give Knoebels its full credit on this one: they won Amusement Today's Golden Ticket Award for "Best Food" an absolutely staggering 22 times (with a couple of ties) between 1998 and the category's retirement in 2025. The award was actually retired in their honor — they handed Knoebels a "Legend" Golden Ticket and called it a day. Twenty-two times. That is the New York Yankees of theme park food.

And it's not fancy stuff. It's done-right comfort food: pierogies (fried or in butter and onions, your call), tiger tails, hand-cut waffle fries, fresh-cut potato chips, pickles on a stick, the chicken and waffles at The Alamo, Cesari's pizza, kettle corn, fresh-pressed lemonade, ice cream the size of your head. We made it our mission to eat at as many spots as humanly possible across the weekend, and somehow nobody hit a wall. Pace yourself, share with the group, and Knoebels will absolutely feed you well.

The Scenic Skyway (a.k.a. the Sky Ride)

If you've ever wanted to feel like you're floating above an entire amusement park valley with the breeze in your face and absolutely no obligations for the next 14 minutes — the Scenic Skyway is the answer. The chairlift runs up the mountain outside the park and back, originally salvaged from Sugarbush ski resort in Vermont (where it was a triple chair called Spring Fling) before being given a second life in central Pennsylvania.

The views from the top are honestly stunning. You can see the whole park spread out below you, the Susquehanna valley rolling out behind it, and on a crisp October day with the leaves just starting to turn? Forget about it. This is one of those rides where the ride is the view, and we ended up taking it more than once just to soak it back in.

Pioneer Train

The Pioneer is a slice of pure 1960. That's the year Knoebels installed it — an Allen Herschell S-16 miniature train, dressed up in Old West style — and it has been hauling families through the woods on a 1.5-mile loop ever since. You chug under the Twister roller coaster, through a tunnel, and deep into the trees on the wooded side of the property.

Most amusement park trains do a quick lap around a parking lot and call it a day. The Pioneer is an actual journey. There's something special about being on a ride that has been operating, basically unchanged, for over 65 years. Generations of families have ridden the same train through the same trees, and that's not nothing.

Campfires and the Quiet Part

The best part of every Knoebels trip is the part that doesn't happen at Knoebels. Each evening we'd roll back to the cottage, get a fire going, and just… sit. The kids would burn through marshmallow after marshmallow, the adults would crack open something cold, and we'd recap the day, debate which food stand had been the best, plan tomorrow, and let the fire do most of the talking.

Those quiet hours around the firepit with Dan, Deanna, Ethan, Catrina, Preston, and me — that's the part that turns a fun weekend into a tradition.

Until Next October

We packed up Sunday morning, a little tired, a little full, and already counting down to PPP 2025. If you've never made it out to Knoebels in October, do yourself a favor and put it on the list. It's the kind of place that reminds you why you fell in love with amusement parks in the first place — small, family-run, unhurried, and bursting with the kind of vintage character that the big chains can't manufacture, no matter how hard they try.

See you next year, Knoebels. Save us a spot at the Fascination tables.