ajinaz

Came out to Disneyland for a few days this week. On Friday we won a Dream Flashpass, Dream After Hours Party at California Adventure, Dream Ears and we rode Pirates with Ed Begley Jr. How could Saturday top that? Sitting behind the Matterhorn and out of the smoke and ash we saw......... Jahan. Yep it was him in his TPR t-shirt. Following my personal celebrity sighting creed I did not approach him or bother him in any way. I just stared while he walked by. On a serious note: The parks were the least crowded I have ever seen on Thursday and Friday and only slightly more crowded today. I know that Disney is expecting smaller crowds in the 1st quarter of 09 but it looks like it is already starting. We walked on everything this week except a 15 minute wait for Toy Story Mania. We never used our dream pass but just kept it intact for a souvenir. The after hours event at CA was a joke. They gave out way too many passes so it was the only time we saw a line at TOT or Screamin. The smoke and ash today was really bad. I was always amazed at the way Disney World would suddenly have ponchos everywhere you looked just before it started to rain. Well today there were bandanas everywhere I looked. I saw several people walking around with them over their faces. Disney is certainly the expert in making lemonade from just about anything. Let's see what they can do with the economic problems coming their way.

As a publicly traded company does anyone know if their financials are available anywhere online? It would be interesting to see the breakdown by property. Here is another story with more info: http://www.bizjournals.com/albany/stories/2008/11/10/daily12.html I found this line to be interesting: Per capita guest spending was up 2 percent to $38.67 due to higher rentals, food and beverage, parking, admissions, and retail revenues. Only $38.67 including admission? That just sounds low to me.

Good news or a bit of elixir before the surgery? http://www.star-telegram.com/news/story/1028939.html More people flocked to Six Flags this summer and spent more money in the parks as the company reported a 60 percent increase in its third-quarter profit. Six Flags said net income grew to $143.4 million, compared to $89.6 million in the same period last year. Revenues also rose 5 percent to $489.3 million, up from $464.2 million in the third quarter of 2007. The New York-based theme park chain said 200,000 more guests visited their parks during the summer, taking advantage of the company's promotion where everyone paid kid's price. With the strong earnings report, Six Flags executives pointed out that the company is on track to be free cash flow positive for the first time in years. However, with $2.2 billion in debt and a stock price around 45 cents, Six Flags still has several financial challenges. "We cannot grow at the rate I know we're capable of growing at carrying this amount of debt. That is simply not a company I'm interested in running," chief executive Mark Shapiro told analysts on a conference call Monday morning. "The company is ready to fire once the noose of the balance sheet is cut away and cutting away that constriction is in the best interest of all of our stakeholders, so we are exploring all of our options and that is all we will say about that today." Executives declined to be specific during the call on what they're considering, sidestepping questions about whether Six Flags has hired advisers or how fast they intend to clean up the balance sheet.

This is where the proverbial can of worms opens up. There is often no way to tell where this person comes from and sadly people play on that knowledge. The rule should be simple. You leave the line...you lose. No exceptions. Another problem that needs to be fixed. They should be removed FROM THE PARK. If they hold a season pass it should be canceled. I think that this rule applies especially at Disneyland where the park is a summer babysitter. Kids get thrown out and they are back again the next day. Every person that enters the park should be told that they will be removed from the park if they cut a line under any circumstance. . At the airport they ask about your bags. They could do the same thing at the turnstiles.

When you put it like this I can agree. The best place for this park (certainly better than South Carolina) most likely is Vegas. An adult park still includes the very important 13-17 demographic. What a huge gamble it would be. Even by Vegas standards. On a related note. Does anyone know what the deal is with that empty lot (on Google maps) at the NE corner of Harmon and Koval ?

After reading all of these posts I guess I'm alone in my feelings that Vegas would never be able to support a theme park anywhere near the strip. If it was built off the strip you would be right back to the HRP problem. It would be out of the way. MGM spent what I would guess was millions on advertising along with tons of free advertising from news stations in Arizona, Utah and California and that place was still pretty dead shortly after opening. This all goes along with what I consider to be Vegas' failed "family experiment." Too many people do not want to go to Vegas with kids in tow. Vegas will always be about gambling, nightclubs and high-end shopping. Just like oil and water they don't go together. On top of that, many adults consider Vegas to be a major hassle. The traffic sucks and the constant barrage of stripper flyers on the street are a major turn-off to many people. As for the idea of having an adult park, I think that this is one of the problems facing SFMM. You need kids of all ages to be successful. Unless you wanted a full-blown Vegas adult park with dancer ride-ops and gambling on dispatch times. That might work. It would be an interesting novelty but novelties by nature always get old.

It looks like TPR wins! (at least it feels like we all won). http://www.mix969.com/pages/disney-photo/

Speaking only for myself here: My favorite part of a wild mouse is that the really cheesy ones seem really unstable. I like that on the high turns you almost feel like the car is going to flip off the tracks. This is especially true for a big guy like me. On the DK the walls take that element away for me. So what if it falls off? I'd just be laying on a wall.

This is a pretty accurate analogy. I remember sitting in Phoenix watching the local media throw this "ride" buckets of praise in live shots from the RR's. I rode it and the descriptions were exactly opposite of the actual experience. Do I feel privileged to have ridden it? Not in a million years. Do I tell people I got to ride it? Only to tell them a funny story about throwing good money after bad. Do I feel foolish for waiting in line to ride it? Oh yeah!

Great analysis. Las Vegas would be thrilled to be known as the Monaco of the United States. Why would they want to sell 100 dinners that cost them $3 at $5 when they can sell one dinner that costs them $40 for $300 . Thanks to the economy, Vegas will never be the same. Although we think that the economy can't get worse, I think it will. It will be many years before recovery happens. A coaster is simply a blip on the screen. When the convention business dries up, Vegas is in some serious s%$t. That won't show up for another year or so because many of the conventions for this year were booked back in the "good old days". They MUST go after the top execs. The ones with the golden parachutes that will soon be flush with our tax money thanks to the bailout. (Yeah, I know that they are saying they will build that into the plan, but that's just a smokescreen). This article is quite telling: http://www.gambling911.com/Las-Vegas-Economy-062008.html They could actually give the rooms away for free right now and people still wouldn't come. Airfare and fuel are just too high.

Yep that's the guy. Seeing him do it at Superman was sort of humorous. Working the controls on Ka ... not so humorous.

I went to the park on Saturday night and all day Sunday. Saturday night was pretty crowded. I waited around 40 minutes for El Toro and 45 for Nitro. On Sunday the crowds seemed much lighter but we did use the Gold FP so it was hard to tell. With the pass we never waited more than 10 minutes for our ride to be ready. Using the 75% policy I would guess that no ride had a longer than 40 minute wait. We got in several runs on El Toro and Nitro. Some quick observations from the weekend: 1. In my opinion, the employees at Great Adventure blow away the employees at SFMM. Every ride op we saw acted like they wanted to be there with one exception (see below). The crews on Nitro and El Toro were simply screaming. There was a lot of guest interaction and I noticed that they are constantly being moved around from job to job and even ride to ride. 2. The food service was really fast except at Best of the West. The service there was so slow we had to leave. 3. There's always that one guy! For some reason we ran into this one kid on both days. The first time he was working at the door to Superman. As we approached he was sitting on a trashcan and talking to himself. As we passed his phone went off playing this really hardcore death metal music. He took out his phone and started texting away. On Sunday he was working at Ka as a ride op. He was actually texting while working the controls! He looked over at me and saw that I had glasses on. Without putting his phone away he walked over and told me that I need to get rid of the glasses. I told him that they were attached to my head and he got this really befuddled look on his face and said, "F$%k man I'm sorry I didn't know!" The dude actually thought my glasses were permanently attached to my head. 4. The Dark Knight is the biggest waste of space I can imagine. I'm sure there are worse coasters out there but the Mouse at the Arizona State Fair leaves this thing in the dust. I could not believe that there were people waiting 30 minutes to ride. Skull Mountain with the lights on is better than this. Please Magic Mountain...... don't try to unleash something at this level of creativity next year!

Does anyone know if my SFMM Extreme pass with parking will get me free parking at SFGAdv? I'll be going this weekend and I'll let you know how the crowds are.

This is good to hear. Do you know anything about what really happened?

X2 Accident? http://ugv.abcnews.go.com/player.aspx?id=6151309 This video aligns with an earlier locked thread. The video doesn't really prove anything. Can someone from the park categorically dispute the information in this video?

I would guess that I have ridden it 15 times since the transformation and I have never experienced this. Every ride but one has been on the outside. However, I think that all of my rides have been in the front 2 or back 2 rows. I wonder if this phenomena is unique to just one or two rows, seats or even one of the cars. I think if it was a defect in the track it would be noticeable on all the outside seats.

Just a few random thoughts on this. 1. If you bought the season passes and camped out, I think that the cost pp would be much lower than has been mentioned on here. 2. If you were to do the West Coast, it would be cheaper to just fly JetBlue to SF or LA. But none of you can probably rent a car so that might not work. 3. Last year we did 13 parks in 10 days from Carowinds to Canada's Wonderland and down to CP and KI. I can honestly say that it was a great time but I wouldn't do it again. As others have said you can pretty much fill a couple weeks just hitting the East Coast, New England, and possibly out to Ohio and Kentucky. 4. Quality at a less than breakneck speed trumps quantity in a stupor.

I think what was meant was the park is cutting back on operating hours by closing earlier each day. "Instead of staying open until 1 a.m. through the summer as originally planned, the park has been closing at 11 p.m. since at least mid-July. It will close at 10 p.m. in August and at 7 p.m. after Labor Day. And at this point it plans to open four days a week instead of five in the off-season."

Reading the comments below the first story was really interesting. One comment said, "I'm not surprised, The locals all read about it on Griags list. How it was built on Blood money. No local would go there if they knew that. I have No intetions of going and plan on telling tourist NOT to waste their money on it either. " Does anyone know what this person is talking about? At first it sounds like a strange conspiracy nut. But reading the comments of people from around the park, it seems that they really hate the place. If the locals won't go and they are also bad-mouthing the place to tourists, things could go bad really fast. Does anyone else see the similarity between this park and the MGM park? When MGM opened they were in EVERY newspaper and news show in the country. That is how they advertised the place. But when you got to the park it was just dead. I know that most people on here would love to have a park all to themselves but the GP probably thinks they are in a place that must suck because nobody is there.

I noticed that there was a girl on KK wearing eyeglasses. Even with a strap, I have never been allowed to ride wearing them on KK, TTD, Excellerator or El Toro. Has this policy changed? I never really get to enjoy these rides fully because I'm blind as a bat and everything is really blurry. I find that without them my eyes try so hard to focus that it triggers a headache, especially on El Toro which is a longer ride. If Coaster Steve was allowed to wear those goggles, maybe I can ride with my prescription dive mask?

I think this will work perfectly. Here is what I'm planning on doing. Thanks!

Thanks for those links but I'm looking for something plainer than that. I'll just be printing them out on colored paper and cutting them out. I'll then write one student's name on each car and place it on the track. I'll attach a photo of a car that shows what I'm looking for. I know you might be thinking I could draw something like this but you have not seen me draw! Like this but a woodie coaster car

OK our flights are booked and we have a plan (and a possible alternate) Because of work/school issues we had to make some changes. We are flying in to Philly on Saturday 9/20 arriving at 4:30 in the afternoon. We plan to head to GADV right away (after stopping at Jim's for a quick Cheesesteak) and be in the park by 6:30 and staying till closing at 10. The next day we plan to go back to the park. When we leave the park we plan to drive back to the airport in Philly (probably grabbing another Cheesesteak on the way) and getting a few hours sleep at a hotel before catching a 6 AM flight on Monday morning. Now for a possible alternative: Does anyone think it would be possible to get on all the major coasters at Great Adventure in the 3 - 4 hours we will be there Saturday night? If we did get on all of them we were thinking about getting up early on Sunday and heading up to SFNE . We could leave SFNE around 6 and be at the Philly airport by midnight. What do you guys think? Since we won't be booking a hotel in MA we have the luxury of just playing it by ear. I'm just curious about what you all think. Also does my SFMM Extreme pass also cover parking at other parks?

Hoping someone can help me out. I'm a teacher setting up a bulletin board for the start of the year that is outside my classroom. The board is about 6 X 3. What I was going to do was draw a wooden coaster that runs across the board. I'm terrible at drawing but I think I can do this easily with a yardstick and a Sharpie. At the top of the board It will say "Welcome To Another Thrilling Year!" What I'm looking for is a very plain roller coaster car that I can easily cut out and put a student's name on and then put all the cars along the track that I drew. I know it won't look realistic with 30 cars on the track at once. I'm simply trying to convey a message. I did look on Google images but I didn't find anything. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

I'm looking to make a quick trip to Great Adventure to use up some expiring flight credits. I'm limited to only two weekends that work for me. September 27th or October 10/11. In September I can only go on Saturday since the park is closed on Friday. In October the park is also open in the evening for their Halloween thing so I could go Friday night and Saturday. Is the park generally crowded on the Halloween weekends? I'm only interested in rides so the Halloween thing is not an issue for me. Suggestions?