Mechanic

6/10 is pretty good for me.

Voted repeatedly and often. Good luck to you!

^^ Does somebody need a hug?

I could have sworn that somewhere back in the early discussion about this ride (several months ago) that someone (Robb, I thought?) had said the new coaster definitely wouldn't be built in Psyclone's old spot. Having that stuck in my mind (for whatever reason, real or imagined) had me thinking it would be a terrain coaster, built to take advantage of the mountainside. It was a little bit of a letdown when the first construction pics showed up and it was confirmed that it would be built on top of Psyclone's grave. That said, I'm honestly not disappointed with what I see so far from the promotional art and video. Yeah.. It would have been awesome to get a terrain coaster, but I really like the speedy look of this layout. It does seem a little bit on the short side, but I'll take quality over quantity. While it's not exactly what I was expecting, I'm still excited about it and I can't wait to ride it. Like many others, I wonder how they'll pull off the theming. I guess I'll just hope that I'm pleasantly surprised when I actually see it all done.

Nice pics and descriptions of CGA's haunt. Thanks for posting. Just curious.. Where exactly is "Camp Gonna Getcha" set up at?

PCP is a hell of a drug!

I also thought the FastPass thing would be kind of lame unless you were visiting alone, (What fun would that be on your birthday?) until I read this in the FAQ section: That's sounds really cool. Our annual summer trip to SoCal is almost always near either my, or my oldest son's birthday. (One of them in late June and one in mid July) It's not a "huge" extra perk, but it's a nice gesture and one that I will take into account when visiting next year.

Too bad your day didn't work out exactly like you planned, but it still seems like you had a good day for the most part. Oh, and by the way.. AWESOME videos!

Anyone happen to notice the time? LOL

My experience has been exactly the opposite. I have always been allowed complete freedom to adjust the seat/restraint to the height that I personally desire. I have made mistakes along the way to finding the position that I now prefer, but any time I rode a stand up in a less than ideal position I had no one to blame but myself. I strongly disagree that "riding it correctly" is either nonsense or B.S. The position that you assume before the height of the seat/restraint is locked has everything to do with how comfortable, or not, your ride on a stand up will be.

I'll go along with those that have already mentioned Superman The Escape. It was really fun and thrilling the first time, I suppose just because I wasn't entirely sure what to expect as far as how it would feel. Now I'll only ride it if it's a very short wait, or if it's a super hot day. (Because then I don't mind hanging out inside the very cool air conditioned queue.)

The dictionary that I looked in didn't specify any number of degrees when I looked up the word "invert". It simply says, "To turn inside out or upside down." It doesn't say 180* upside down, or absolutely perpendicular to the ground, or any of that. Personally, I consider - most - elements to be an inversion if they meet the following criteria: If not for being restrained in the car, would you fall out if the car you're in was not moving? (Assuming you didn't hang on to anything) If the answer is yes, then I consider it an inversion. That's just my own personal opinion however. I understand that many may not agree and that's certainly their right. That said, for the most part I will defer to rcdb for the inversion count on the vast majority of rides, although I do disagree with their assessment of a few coasters. V2 at SFDK is the most glaring example I can think of off the top of my head where I don't agree with rcdb. All in all, it's not a HUGE issue to me one way or the other, but since the discussion is already here, there are my 2 cents.

The biggger question here is: Was she texting on her phone while stealing the 10 grand?

^ Exactly my point. ^ Fair enough, but still... I'm just not feeling it.

When it's full, the queue for the Disneyland Jungle Cruise can be a bit deceiving. I had ridden it so many times when only the ground level portion of the queue was used that I didn't realize just how much they snake you around the upstairs part.

"Hey, let's go to a theme park so we can see what Rome is like when we're already in Rome." Somehow that just doesn't work for me.

Isn't Disneyland's Space Mountain also a Vekoma?

Wow, it's pretty amazing to me that they were able to evacuate it that fast. As I recall from at least one of the threads about Aftershock, it was said that no evacuation platform had been built.

Brass ring, big man, not gold. The common saying, "Grab the brass ring" comes from these types of carousels. You really should have known. Still an enjoyable TR however.

While that park may lack some theming, it still looks very nice in your pictures due to all the trees and plants. I'm sorry your son wasn't able to ride as much as he would have liked to. It did still look like you were all having a good time though. I always look forward to checking in on your updates and, as usual, this one didn't disappoint. Thanks for sharing.

I really enjoy the pictures and commentary. I'm sure I will find the little tidbits that I pick up from reading the TPR TRs very valuable when I can someday make a trip to some of these great places you visit. I just really can't get enough of all the awesome photos. This picture in particular had me cracking up: Sieg Heil, say what?

Medusa west.

^ Yikes! Maybe I should be glad that no one wanted to ride it with me. It probably has been about two months since I last rode it. It ran fine for me then, but it sounds from your experience that it's gone downhill. Now I guess I'll just have to ride it to see how bad it really is.

I realize that I'm in the minority, but I actually like Kong. I'm tall enough that my head sticks out far enough to not get my ears punched by the restraint. I've honestly never had a "bad" ride on it and although it's certainly not anyone's definition of "smooth" I've never found it be exceptionally rough. My wife has never minded riding it either, but my kids all wince in pain at the mere mention of it. To each their own I suppose. I haven't been around to enough different parks to really understand why so many people dislike Vekoma coasters so much. I haven't hated any of the ones that I have ridden. In any event, as I said, I didn't ride it yesterday so I can't comment on how it was running that day. Absolutely! I had begun to get into the Six Flags basher rut several seasons ago after a few less than entirely pleasant visits to the then Marine World, and Magic Mountain parks. I have since been very impressed by the efforts that both parks have made to turn things around. I just haven't noticed nearly as much improvement in employee morale/performance at SFMM as I have at SFDK. I was really surprised to read in someone's TR from just last week that they had recently been running only one train on those rides. While that's been fairly common operating procedure for the spring season, it was awfully late in the summer to still have been running one train operation. I can only imagine what the lines would have been like if they had only one train running on those rides this past weekend. I had forgotten to mention in my original post that the MCBR on Medusa seemed to have considerably less brake effect than I remember from previous rides. Maybe it's just because it had been a while since I'd ridden it that it felt different, but I could have sworn that they used to slow it down a little more there. By no means am I complaining, it's just an observation. Perhaps someone that works at the park that happens to read this can confirm or deny? Thanks for the comments.

I visited SFDK today with my youngest son and his friend from the neighborhood with whom he plays youth football. We arrived shortly after park opening and could tell by the parking lot being about 3/4 full that it was going to be a busy day. There was some sort of Jet Ski race/exhibition going on in the lake, but it didn't look all that interesting so we skipped that. The good news is that Roar and Kong were both back to running 2 trains. Even at that, the park was pretty busy and had longer lines for the coasters than I'd care to wait in. To solve that problem, I ponied up for Flash Passes and we skipped the lines. Medusa's 3rd train is still partially torn apart, but appears to be in the final stages of re-assembly. I couldn't talk anyone into riding Kong, so I don't know how it was running, but all the other rides we went on were running well and ride operations were fairly smooth. We also got the most spin-tastic ride EVER on THBS by having just my son's smaller and lighter friend on one side of the car, and my son and I on the other side. We spun SO much that I actually got a bit of a headache that stuck with me for about half an hour or so. I continue to be impressed by the performance and enthusiasm of the employees at SFDK. The ride op on Tasmanian Devil gave us all a little extra treat by spinning the ride after it had stopped swinging at the end of the ride cycle. At first it seemed he was just rotating the ride platform to line up the entrance and exit, but then he juiced it up and gave us a few fast revolutions before slowing it down and lining it up. It was pretty fun and everyone seemed to enjoy it, even if it did catch a few people off guard at first. You could tell he was having fun doing his job and it really showed. The girl that came out and got the crowd pumped up for the tiger show really did a nice job as well. I could go on about the employees, but those were two that really stood out to me today. Even the very few employees that didn't seem entirely interested in their job were at least attentive and reasonably efficient. Whatever SFDK is doing to improve employee morale and performance, I hope they keep doing it. It's working. In my experience, the park has continued to maintain and improve upon the turnaround they started a couple years ago. The 2 restrooms that I happened to use today were exceptionally clean and fully stocked. Photo op characters were in several locations in the park. I saw some dolphin-shaped themed trash cans near the bird show stadium that I had never noticed before. I didn't notice any litter anywhere today. I'm really glad to have our home park be a good example of what Six Flags can do when they set out to make things as they should be. We'll probably be making another visit or two before the holiday season and then really looking forward to the "Holiday in the park" event that we enjoyed so much last season. So, that's about it. Sorry for not having any pictures for you, but I realized that I'd left my camera in the other car when we were already about half way to the park.