Zand

My plan over the next couple years was to finally start traveling to new parks and areas of the country I haven't visited yet. However, my wife talked me into blowing that plan completely to hell and instead we are now Universal Annual Passholders. Honestly couldn't be more excited...IOA is far and away my favorite park right now, plus we just really enjoyed the atmosphere at City Walk and Aventura (which is like...$120 per night with a season pass). Having a place in Florida to take $80 RT Frontier flights to every few months sounds good to me. Maiden voyage on our new passes is in 4 weeks, which will be my 3rd trip to Orlando this year (which is 3 more times than I've been to Agawam, MA this year if that says anything). Can't wait to race some dinosaurs.

Well then... Maybe they'll just use the giant hole as theming.

I'm starting to wonder if Universal flooded worse than what has been reported. BGT and Disney are almost fully open save for a few random rides but Queue Times shows 3 rides open on the Studios side and IOA is still saying 100% closed. Edit: Spoke too soon. Looks like they got everything running except the water rides and Hulk.

Forgive me if I did this linking thing totally wrong... Some dinosaurs escaped the Jurassic Park River Adventure show building during the Hurricane. Wonder how long this closure will last.

I totally forgot Black Diamond exists lol...I rode it once like 10 years ago. I don't really remember anything about it and I never want to walk past Phoenix to ride it when I can just ride Phoenix again instead. Guess I'll have to refresh my memory next time. It's cool that Knoebels integrates some local history into a ride like that though.

If you really want to get into the weird Pennsyltucky stuff, take a small detour through Centralia. An underground mine has been burning since the 60s, causing the whole town to evacuate and be torn down except for like 8 people who refused to leave and still live there. You might even see smoke venting out of the ground in some areas. Back in the Mapquest days in like 2004, we drove from Knoebels to Hershey at night and it sent us down I think Route 125 which is a windy ass mountain road full of hairpin turns and, back then, absolutely no cell service. I refused to drive near Knoebels at night for a while after that lol, it was rather terrifying. And I'm someone who spends a good deal of time in Vermont.

I thought LSMs would've been impossible on the amount of track they have before heading uphill, but eltororyan's video says I'm dead wrong. I didn't realize how little of the track the hydraulic launch actually uses.

Keep arms down, head back, and hold on.

That makes me think...maybe CP is turning TTD into the world's first stratastraddle coaster.

Well, since they've been kind of running it half assed the last few years and this park is on a kick of killing off Intamins... MF next year? J/K. This sucks though. I like TTD a lot more than Kingda Ka so the "2nd option" of still getting the same ride experience kind of sucks IMO. We'll see, maybe the "as you know it" will just mean "oh we're just changing the queue line" and this will be overhyped. Maybe they're painting it purple, adding flames, and calling it Bizarro. Who knows.

I've never been to OOB but I do know it's much smaller than any of the Jersey Shore towns and obviously way smaller than Ocean City MD. I just checked and they actually have 3 credits at Palace Playland...an SBF spinner and a kiddie credit like any good oceanside park, but also a legitimate windstorm-sized steel coaster. Also, if you're there to swim in the ocean be aware that the water rarely gets above 60 degrees north of Cape Cod. Save the ocean swimming for NJ lol. Vermont is a giant culture shock to just about anyone from anywhere else. A lot of the ski towns are lively at night, but otherwise there are like 3 cities with more than 20,000 people in the whole state and even those have very little going on at night. It's almost like a foreign land if you've never experienced it. I love it there but I could never live there full time, although January-April I'd be totally fine living near the mountains.

First time in Vermont? Lol I went to college in Northeastern VT (about another hour north of WRJ) and, as you saw, just about the entire state rolls in the sidewalks at 6pm or so every night. Maybe one out of every 5 exits on 91 has a 24 hour gas station with a bathroom, but other than that you're out of luck driving in VT at night (especially if you hit a large animal which happens too often). If I was travelling to school at night, I would actually take the 15-20 minute longer route from my house up 93 in NH instead. Canobie is largely ignored on this forum because it lacks in terms of coasters, but by small family park standards it is a fantastic place. It's a much much better experience than Lake Compounce IMO. Tons of good flats and generally has a great atmosphere, except it can get very crowded due to being the closest amusement park to Boston. I used to visit at least once a year but unfortunately haven't been in almost 10 years. They have an 80 foot height limit unfortunately so they'll never get much better in the coaster department, but maybe someday they'll get a good GCI or something to draw more folks north. Excalibur is a good coaster during the day, but amazing at night. Like...pitch black Beast style night rides. New England used to have two fantastic woodies with legendary night rides, but Lake Compounce decided they wanted to turn into a dump and stop taking care of Boulder Dash so...yeah. But if you ever get the chance to visit Funtown at night, it's worth it for Excalibur alone. Portland is an awesome eating and drinking town too. Oh...you missed a credit or two in Old Orchard Beach ME at Palace Playland. Not far from Funtown if you ever go back.

Do they still have Spaghetti Wednesdays? We stopped by in 2016 on the way to Lakemont and, as luck would have it, it was Wednesday and they had all you can eat Spaghetti in one of the picnic pavilions.

Of course I have a Texas trip slated for next spring and this thing was one of the coasters I was looking forward to most, especially since I never got the chance to ride the Batman side of Chiller. I would hope it's just a refurb considering the park has not officially announced that it's closing. If it were permanent I feel like they'd give everyone more time to go ride it one more time. But, who really knows with this company. Maybe I'll just have to stop in St. Louis.

I definitely miss the days of you and @coasterbill writing in depth reports. I do understand how tedious it gets writing all that and sorting through pictures though. The information with a side of humor was always appreciated! Before I went to BGT in April I actually went looking for Bill's BGT reports and had to delve back like 10 pages to find his TR thread lol. Anyway, great TR and really looking forward to getting down there for Pantheon. Probably won't be till next year unfortunately.

El Toro is currently trending on Twitter this morning. You'd think it exploded into pieces and a million people died.

I did notice that it was a bit of a rough landing coming off that hill (both my rides Tuesday were in the back row) but nothing this extreme. If there was some warping in that part of the ride then I don't know how they missed it if they had to carefully inspect the whole coaster for damage after the derailment.

I swear I'm a giant jinx for this park when I go outside of HITP. I was there in 2019 the day after Wonder Woman tried removing itself from the ground. I was there the day last year when the Log Flume crashed. Then a couple days before El Toro derailed and now it happened again. I don't understand how this keeps happening to El Toro. Hope this doesn't force some major changes to the ride experience.

Might be the last time I post in this thread for a couple months as I have nothing planned anytime soon, but at least I can leave off with... El Toro. Ole!

Stopped in for about 2 hours today. Doesn't sound like much time, but long enough to ride Batman, JDC twice, Nitro, Skull Mountain, El Toro twice, and grab dinner at Granny's. Obviously walk ons everywhere plus Great Adventure has better ops than Disney these days so oftentimes you could get on and off the coasters in a matter of 2-3 minutes. Only observation I can point out is that Kingda Ka VERY sparingly ran. I think I saw maybe 2 cycles with people on it the whole time I was in the park, a handful of empty test runs, and otherwise nothing happening at all. Didn't bother going over there to ride it as I didn't have time to wait through breakdowns. Otherwise everything seemed to be running well that I observed. I think the most interesting thing to me was getting to JDC right around 4:00 and they were occasionally sending entire trains empty because the place was so dead. I walked right up into a waiting front seat my first ride then stuck around in the station and hopped in back. There were more people in the park on January 2nd than there were today. Couldn't believe how dead it was. Also saw on Facebook that I was at the park 11 years ago today. Earthquake day. Was anyone else there that day? Bizarre for sure.

Runaway Tram. I don't have a picture. Watch the tram car please.

Early report: Breakfast at Pink Cadillac was excellent as always, our traditional opening of Capt'n Jack's at 11 went off without a hitch, rode the world's greatest Boomerang which was great, and now sitting at Capt'n Jacks drinking Pina Coladas again watching them test Zoom Phloom so I won't be getting burned by a closed Flume today. Surfside opens in 10 mins. PigDog in a couple hours. Great White and Screamin Swing laps tonight. I sure wish I lived here!

I did ride it a couple years ago and liked it a lot, although I wish I would've visited when Tropical Storm was still there. And I guess I'll have to try "Dark Ride" when I go back to (hopefully) ride the Flume next year. I walked past it yesterday and almost did that but decided to use the rest of my credits on the shitty Frisbee instead haha. At least I can make up for it with an It marathon today. Maybe I will whore myself out to the Wacky Worm too if I'm desperate.

Stopped in Ocean City on my way into Wildwood tonight. Since I still hadn't been to Gillians, we headed there first. I knew there were no new coasters for me to ride (I'm not enough of a whore to pay $7 to ride a Wacky Worm or a powered Dragon Coaster) but figured I could check out the Ferris Wheel and Log Flume and walk around a bit. Upon arrival, the first thing I see is a giant sign on the ticket booth saying "Log Flume closed." Well...balls. We ended up getting $20 worth of tickets so we could both ride the Ferris Wheel and then I could ride something else. When we walked out back the first thing my wife said was "it looks like a permanent carnival." We got on the Ferris Wheel which might be the slowest moving one I've ever ridden. It only goes around 3 times since it takes about a minute to go around. The prison bars make it very difficult to get pictures, and the slowness of the thing just made me way more nervous than I usually be on one of these. Used the rest of my credits on the Frisbee which didn't swing much and took a while to get going. Just felt real janky and also had Jesus quotes written all over it for added effect. This whole place was so f*cking weird. Headed down the boardwalk to Castaway Cove which felt like Islands of Adventure in comparison. Been here a few times and there was nothing new, so just got a Gale Force pass as there's no way I can drive past it on the way to Wildwood without stopping to ride it. Unlike last year when the queue house was totally full and I waited 45 minutes, there was only a 2 cycle wait this time. Ended up with the front row, and as usual this wacky thing totally delivered. Although I have a soft spot for Nitro (especially in January), this very well may be the best steel coaster in New Jersey. The insane ejector, fun positives, whippy twists, wacky transitions, and glass smooth experience make for an A+ ride and I still can't believe a tiny seaside park has a ride like this. Grabbed a slice from Manco & Manco on the way out (make sure you get a slice there when in Ocean City) and completed the trip down the Parkway. I know Wildwood is the big star on the shore for adrenaline junkies, but don't ever drive through without stopping to ride Gale Force.

The best steel coaster in New Jersey. Gale Force, as taken from the...uhh...much jankier Gillian's Wonderland on the other side of Ocean City.