Leaderboard

Well said! I didn't even realize the tilt coaster is that large RE: the Ninja plot of land. Makes perfect sense for that not being sent to us. I guess a new Vekoma model would be a nice replacement for Ninja, but I can't see our park getting budget for that. It does seem Cedar is hellbent on replacing all of the old Vekoma models seeing parks like KI and others bidding goodbye to theirs - and MM having theirs on the chopping block. Regardless, would like to see Ninja be retired. The Boss is such a unique situation. I know (heard) there was contact between the park and RMC for a iron treatment and was scheduled around when Covid hit and it was scrapped. You'd THINK that would be re-let green now, but the CF thing is always a hurdle. I'm hoping the powers that be wipe the slate clean of the "offender" list. I feel it only hurts the parks by not working with industry titans like Intamin and RMC. Good to see SFNE getting an Intamin, as well as SFGa. But you never know. It's just such a glaring point of contention and would love to have it solutioned. RMC seems like the absolute win/win there from an ROI perspective.

We took a spontaneous visit up to La Ronde yesterday. It is actually the closest park to me as I live pretty near the NY-Quebec border, but I had never taken my coaster buddy, my 14 year old son, up there because... well... La Ronde. This was my first time in nearly 15 years too since no coasters had been built. The last time I went in was the year the SLC was moved there. This means that this was also my first time with Google Maps to lead the way. I remember being somewhat stressed out driving through the city and trying to navigate routes in French on a paper map, but this time it was a breeze. The only thing I found even a little confusing on the day was parking, but we figured that out fairly quickly and were in for rope drop on Sunday forecasted to be dry and in the mid 60s. Vampire - One of my strongest memories of La Ronde was how fast their Batman clone was running the last time we were there. I figured this wouldn't be the case when we hit it cold. We should have had the front seat, but as we went to kick off our crocs on the other side, a few others filtered in behind us and stole our spots. No one's fault, really. The station was empty other than us and we were on the other side of the train. They didn't come up until we had crossed over to kick our loose shoes off and couldn't have had any idea what row we had taken. Oh well. We moved to the back and HOLY BATMAN it was already hauling. I've ridden a bunch of these and never experienced one that moves like this one. We hadn't experienced anything yet, either. The very last thing we did before leaving at the end of the day was circling back to get our front row ride now that the thing was warmed up. After just waiting for a couple trains thanks to the light crowds and four wide, two train ops on this one, we did just that. Wow. Wow, wow, wow. That was one of the most aggressive rides on anything I have ever experienced. It was an absolute blast, but it was also incredibly painful! I have never had blood run to my feet with that intensity. I kept having to rub them together and move them around because they felt like they were going to straight up explode. Incredibly forceful. I do not know what La Ronde does or, maybe more likely given the rest of the place, doesn't do to their common Batman, but that thing is nuts. I couldn't have possibly gotten back on immediately. Just crazy. Toboggan Nordique - This Zamperla wild mouse had a pretty short line that we end up waiting 50 minutes in due to its horrendous capacity made a thousand times worse by the sleepwalking, low effort operations. It is a bad ride too. We had just ridden the same model earlier this summer at Morey's Piers and I am almost falling asleep trying to even write about it. I should have just waited on a bench and let my son go get the credit. These aren't painful or anything, just incredibly... nothing. Boring, I guess. Monstre - Oh boy. I actually had fond memories of this one. It was just so darn weird that I thought it was funny. Kind of like how a bad movie can be so bad that it becomes good, Monstre does so little with its enormous, two track frame that I remembered being entertained by the weirdness. That was a long time ago now, though, so I was curious to say the least. I let my son just the "parcours" (side), and he chose Parcours 2 while I got to make terrible dad jokes about how the line being a parkour course seemed a little unnecessary. A word that I would equally attach to my ride. It isn't that this thing is consistently rough, and yes the bizarre layout is still kind of amusing and still very dumb, but there are now a few serious lateral jolts that are hard to predict and don't agree with my back to say the least. We got off the ride and as I was about to send him to ride the other side by himself (both were operating with one train, but the lines were short), he announced it wasn't worth the credit and that he didn't want anything to do with it. Okay then. Goliath - This is why I finally came back. For all the faults of La Ronde, I have extremely great memories of this B&M not quite hyper. I truly loved this thing. It holds up too. After a marathon walk through the long, empty queue, we got a station wait accompanied by the "entertainment" of watching a trio of young, teenage boys keep trying to sneak back onto empty seats of each train while we waited. Two of them succeeded twice, but the third grabbed the seat of someone who was just off putting their stuff in the bin on accident, caused a scene, and got tossed. His buddies bailed with him when he couldn't try anymore after their last ride. Anyway, Goliath lived up to my memory. We ended up dubbing this thing "The Phoenix of Floater". It is a simple layout. Airtime hill, airtime hill, airtime hill, airtime hill, etc, with a turnaround in there in the middle. They all hit too. From our backseat, with me on the outside, I floated up and over every single hill, often for extended sequences too. Really great. If you like floater, you will love this B&M. If you want something more to your layout, you might be bored. I love floater and in fact really only ride for airtime at all, so this is in my sweetspot. Great ride. After our first ride, we grabbed some poutine next door, which was better than I would expect from Six Flags, and jumped right back into the backseat after. I was in the middle this time and did notice I got a little less sustained floater, while my son said the ride was much better on the outside too, but I still thought it was great. I could marathon Goliath forever. Dragon - I got a little lucky here, navigationally speaking. While my son was still eating, before we got back on Goliath, I decided to go check some nearby signs to see where Dragon was. It wasn't on the sign, so I figured somewhere else, but I did see a sign for some restrooms which I needed. I went back to my son, told him I would be a few minutes in the bathroom, and went to use them. I quickly found them attached to Dragon. Okay then. As for Dragon, my first takeway is maybe take a broom to all the immense cobwebs in the queue. Jeez. Second. after maybe a twenty minute wait, we lucked into the front seat by being the last ones held out of the station from the previous train. I didn't really remember this one and now I know why, but it is kind of cute, I guess. It is a powered coaster that drives you through a few indoor helixes and turns around a couple light up dragon statues, through a dragon's mouth, and back to the station accompanied by loud audio of dragons roaring and shooting fire. It is dated, but I often find that charming. I wouldn't wait very long for this, but with a short queue and my son needing the credit, I am glad we did. Also worth noting, the roaring is very loud even out in the queue. My two youngest, at least until my wife gives birth, are two year old twins. Not that they are tall enough anyway, but I could never get them on this thing as they stand now because they would be scared of the noise. It is a pretty aggressive sound for what ultimately is a kiddie coaster, which is interesting. Le Boomerang - I told my son I would not be riding the SLC after Monstre bothered my back a bit and tried to get him to just go get the credit, but he hates those things and refused without me. We weren't going to bother with the kiddie coaster and had already written off Monstre side one, so the Boomerang was all that remained. After another short wait that wasn't as short as it should have been due to slow operations, we boarded. This is one of the weirder ones for me. First, it barely even has a station. What is that thing? Second, I was scared of headbanging due to it still having the old, original, and terrible Vekoma boomerang trains. Put the vests on all of them, please. I am happy to report my fears were unfounded and I did not bang my head once. Unfortunately, they put on the goold old triangle wheels on this thing. It tracked terribly and was downright rough. I'll take that over the headbanging anyday and the ride wasn't absolutely awful or anything, but it was definitely the roughest Boomerang I have ridden from a wheels bouncing on the track perspective. Still fun though and as intense as always. After Le Boomerang, we circled back for our aforementioned front row Vampire ride and then exited the park for the slightly under two hour ride home. All in all, La Ronde wasn't too bad and we only needed about five hours to do what we wanted. Goliath and Vampire are great. Nothing else is really remarkable, but the crowds were light and the food we had was good. I don't speak French, but I generally find it easy now to navigate places not in a language I understand as I have done it a lot over the years many times now. Plus, even though they often seem to lack confidence and try to avoid using English, most everyone in the Montreal does speak it well enough if you need to address someone in English. I did have some issues staying connected to the GPS satellites on the way home for some reason, but we were lucky in the sense that it kept happening in long stretches of staying on the same road. Plus, once we crossed back into NY, we were literally on the road we live on anyway. 45 minutes down it through a few towns with a bunch of turns, but you can just follow the road number signs at that point. I recommend a visit to La Ronde if you have never been, but you probably won't want to go back just to go back. I'll be back when they finally break their drought someday (RMC MONSTRE PLEASE), or if/when my younger kids start credit whoring like us and need them. Until then, even though we go to Montreal from time to time, au revoir La Ronde. You might not be a very good park, but you're also not as bad as many make you out to be. One final caveat: My two previous trips, again over a decade ago, were full of the worst crowd behaviour I had ever seen at a park. It was more amusing than offensive to me as someone largely unbothered by what other people do, but if people cutting in line or in general being rude bothers you, you would not have enjoyed those trips to say the least. I don't think much as changed, sadly, based on other reports I have read or watched on Youtube over the years since then, but we had such surprisingly light Sunday crowds that we had no problems and only saw the things mentioned above.

Six Flags St Louis is probably going to have some behind the scenes updates in 2025. Chief among them getting a competent local management team in place. Zero parks should be sharing presidents. Not even tiny ones. Supposedly there are multiple job openings for head chefs across the chain but I don't know if this park is one of them - IMO this would be one area where job sharing IS acceptable for a year as Cedar Flags attempts to set up a management team. Great America's head chef could temporarily oversee the STL menu for a year. I'd expect improvements to how the park approaches staffing in line with what happens at Cedar Fair parks, even before management is fixed, and a focus on park appearance. Cedar Fair also has a history of announcing restaurant changes later than other things - so if anything like that was happening we wouldn't know yet.