DirkFunk

No. No, it hasn't. News literally sells you nothing but carnage because they know it will get your attention. Look at the actual statistics published by Federal and State governments. There are real numbers being compiled which are exceedingly clear. You are safer now than at almost any other time in human history.

Yes, I know. They left in the post 9/11 era and now they've returned. So were Cedar Fair management incompetent when they ditched them or something? Did the world change significantly in the last 5-6 years to merit their return? Or is it neither? I'm guessing "neither". Magic Mountain being safer because of security is another example of this same sort of thought process. The first thing anyone who's taken a statistics course knows is that correlation does not always equal causation. The murder, robbery, and assault rates in Los Angeles have each decreased by over 50% since 2001 and the gaps are even larger compared to the 1990s. The reasons for this drop vary from mass incarceration, acculturation, economic development, and even decreases in lead exposure. It may be that the cost of entering the park is deterring enough to prevent the increasingly small pool of violent criminals from entering it with the desire or willingness to do harm to others more than the posting of a guard out front with a wand.

People love the term "entitled". Mind you, Cedar Point has never had permanent metal detectors in front of it ever. Cedar Fair got rid of them at Kings Island years ago. Most non-corporate parks hadn't had them, and many still don't. The big Orlando parks just began to use them in the last year. Metal detectors are personal searches, and until very recently, searches of this nature were not normative anywhere, certainly not every imaginable public venue. I get the response: "The world is different." Last week, I was at a cemetery where the bodies of kids lie from a terrorist suicide bombing at an elementary school committed that killed 45 people, most of whom were young children. The bombing was in America. The year was 1927. In reality, homicide is near 50 year lows and less than half of what it was in the early 1990s. What's different is people are constantly bombarded with horrors because horrors get eyeballs and eyeballs get advertisers. In other words, you're demanding I (and everyone else) be searched to deal with a concern that is basically in people's imaginations.

I love these strawmen. So good. Personally, I need to just accept that increasingly I'll have to leave the US to get the kind of experience I want at a theme/amusement park if I want to stay in the hobby. Everyone here is too damn spooked by the barrage of scare tactic news to think rationally.

Depends entirely on how many people are there and how many security guards they have working. If you arrive 20 minutes before opening but the "secured zone" is already full, you'll have to wait for the park to open before you can go through metal detectors, possibly still in a line of other people, and then you can move to the line to get in. To put this another way: Does anyone here want Knoebels to move to a single gate w/metal detectors to make themselves feel safer? Meth is the drug of choice in those parts and there's a whole lot of guns around. If you do want that from Knoebels, I kinda want you out of my hobby forever.

Yeah, I'm sure this saves them some money on insurance. Of course there's been shootings and bombings at airports at - where else? - the security line where there's a huge mass of people constricted from running away by barriers and equipment. But the perception is about how a civil suit jury would react, and they're as dumb as the people who think this will be effective.

Not that I know of, but it's better to have the detectors to prevent one in case it happens. May as well make a side unit of TSA if you really want to prevent it from happening. Definitely worked in Brussels and Istanbul's airports. Wait....

A year or so ago I remember going into the park via the resort entrance and waiting 20-30 minutes to get wanded because there were only 2 security guards and a couple of hundred people. It was definitely a thing. Definitely not fun. Business entities don't like to double/triple line items in the budget, and the odds are extremely good that security that would have been doing things like monitoring queue lines and shops or responding to, for example, guests personal effects being stolen, is going to be moved to the gates. Perhaps you won't be shot or stabbed in the park, which basically never happened before anyways and can still happen at this new checkpoint or in the parking lot, where those sorts of events always has occurred over the last 25-30 years in this industry. But I kinda expect to get line jumped a lot more and have operators/entrance personnel (already cut in numbers from a decade ago) to increasingly care less about it.

Have you been to Six Flags? Yes?

Given how much of a s#itshow their metal detector operations have been in the past, my expectations are exceedingly low.

If you go with the direct route west to California, the obvious things to see on the way to are: -Adventureland Iowa (I'll assume you haven't been if you haven't done Arnolds) -Henry Doorly Zoo in Omaha (very, very highly rated) -The Archway in Kearney, NE (white elephant project, interior exhibits were actually designed by Disney Imagineers) -Wyoming State Museum (free) -University of Wyoming Geological Museum (dinosaurs) -Natural History Museum of Utah (also dinosaurs but honestly one of the best natural history museums in the nation and an outstanding piece of architecture to boot) Adventureland and the Zoo are going to require an hour or more, but the others should be more straight forward.

If you drive for 8 hours and hit no traffic on the Indiana Turnpike or the outskirts of Chicago on a Friday night (I put the likelihood of this at "minimal"), you'll still have around 3 hours of driving the day after you check into a motel at 1AM Central. If you take the Badger over on the late route, at least you and your family can take a nap in transit. When you arrive at Valleyfair (on the Saturday before 4th of July) you pretty much have no shot at arriving at opening, so you'll need to buy Fastlane bands in advance. Nickelodeon Universe opens at 11AM that Sunday. You have three hours of driving between Nick Universe and Arnold's. If you manage to ride everything at Nick Universe in one hour (which won't happen, BTW) and spend 15 minutes eating lunch, the best you can hope to arrive at Arnold's at is 3:15PM. If you spend two hours at Arnold's and leave, you have 6+ hours of driving ahead and you still need to eat and almost certainly get more gas before your next sight. In this scenario, you will spend 17 hours driving in your car to spend 5 hours actually doing stuff. Again: the drive is around 16 hours in length. If you drive 4 hours towards Amarillo and get to Needles or Kingman, you'll still have 11-12 hours left. You are also crossing two time zones and losing an hour each time you break one. To get to the park at 9PM (one hour before closing), you will need to leave your hotel that morning no later 7AM, and you will basically not be able to stop. If you are driving this far and thus spending this amount of money on hotels and gas, why don't you just spend more time doing the parks in this region instead of spending your time going to parks that you've already visited multiple times? Yes, you have a Six Flags season pass and a Cedar Fair seasons pass. You're also buying two tanks of gas and multiple days of food/lodging while crossing half the continental United States for what purpose? So that you can rush back and go to Six Flags St. Louis?

No. If the Sunday after 4th of July isn't madhouse, I'll be shocked. I'd personally say no. Probably more of a 5-6 hour park, realistically, but that also depends on how much time you want to spend on rides. It should be. Platinum Passes at CGA offer entry there and your pass should mimic all other's in terms of access. Why don't you just spend the whole day at SDC and go to Lamberts after the park closes? It's open until at least 9PM, the park closes at 7PM; that's a two hour window. You're obviously not that concerned about super long drives and tight turnarounds timewise. Then you can leave that next morning, drive to OKC, do Frontier Land, and even put another hour or two on the road in before settling in for the night if you so desire. 1) July 4th: People will show up. 2) Park not open until 1PM. You have 16 hours of driving to cover between this point and showing up at Knotts to, I would assume, ride everything on July 5th. If I give you being able to mop up the entire park in 2 hours, that means you're done by 3PM. If you manage to cover the ~1,075 miles between these two in 16 hours plus sleep/get ready for 8, that means the absolute best case scenario is you appear at Knotts Berry Farm at 1PM Pacific Time. If you stop for absolutely anything, the clock stops moving backwards. Food from something other than a drive thru? Any tourist sights? Any rest? You can't do it without it cutting into your Knotts time at absolute peak season. BTW: You know it's gonna be really hot in some of these places, right? Amarillo in July is brutal. Are you planning to leave early from Magic Mountain? You're probably going to run into some delays on that route and its over 5 hours away. You're also double backing to go to Santa Cruz at night. I-80 through Nevada is a wasteland. You have a day built in for that but not the longer drive between Amarillo and Anaheim which has exponentially more interesting stuff along the way. I don't understand. If you don't clear Chicago metro that same day, you're gonna end up swamped in traffic trying to come home that Sunday up until about the time you'd get to the I-94/I-69 interchange. You could take one of the ferries across, but you're still not getting home until the next day. It's at least 11 hours to get back to the Detroit metro area from Minneapolis by car. Why don't you just drive home? Or only do Six Flags Great America? If you start going the opposite direction, at least you can take the Badger. Look, I get that you clearly have your heart set on going to the West Coast. I see it, I grasp it, that part makes sense to me. But you have some monster drives and I'm not sure that this is being spaced at all correctly.

When looking at my mapping, we will be coming from frontier city park, to get to the grand canyon. After a second look, you are correct. Flagstaff is a shorter distance. May pass on cliffs if it will save us a few hours. Cliffs is in Albequerque and there's no shorter route to get there from the Grand Canyon. As is, it's still 17 1/2 hours of driving to get from the Grand Canyon to Tulsa, and you're attempting to do that in three days, plus drive from roughly Barstow to the Hoover Dam and to the Grand Canyon (another ~5 hours in the car) and go to Cliffs and go to Frontier City. I mean, again, it is theoretically possible (I think?), but you basically are dedicating yourself to to fast food and minimal sleep. I don't even know where you fit in breaks for the bathroom or refilling gas, much less can I go about making lots of suggestions to do different things or add ons.

Technically this trip might be possible based on operating hours, but you're gonna skip past a ton of parks and be driving some enormous distances. I'd love to give you some tips about what to hit, but you don't have enough time really built into this schedule to add almost anything.

Weird. I have never been to the park and seen those two slides closed and this is the first I've ever heard about any issues at all with them. The longest span was last year for 6 weeks: http://www.orlandosentinel.com/business/tourism/os-disney-summit-plummet-open-20160502-story.html So the park has been open for 22 years and the slides were down for 6 weeks due to a maintenance issue is a problem because.... ? Seriously though, we probably have people in town about once every other month who visit Blizzard Beach since we moved out here and not once have I heard someone say those slides were closed and they have never been closed on any of our personal visits. I can't see how this is even an issue or why it's being brought up other than someone purposely searching for a reason to slam Disney on something that's not really an issue. The idea that a ride or a slide would break down and need maintenance after 20 years of operation is not outside of the norm for theme park attractions in the slightest. It's not a slam. But when you fully enclose all the good stuff, it makes it a lot tougher to remove/alter/fix "the good stuff" later. Wild Wadi doesn't embed all their stuff either, which is how they were able to replace existing slides with trap doors a couple of years back.

Weird. I have never been to the park and seen those two slides closed and this is the first I've ever heard about any issues at all with them. The longest span was last year for 6 weeks: http://www.orlandosentinel.com/business/tourism/os-disney-summit-plummet-open-20160502-story.html

I know they've been testing a lot of waterfalls on this thing, but there's also the possibility that some of the stair structures go up through there and have all sorts of themed elements. Also, keeping the mountain somewhat open means you might actually be able to replace one of the slides/easily repair them, unlike Blizzard Beach (where Summitt Plummet/Slush Gusher keep going down due to all sorts of issues they can't fully rectify).

First: (ahem) http://www.themeparkreview.com/forum/viewtopic.php?p=1662135#p1662135 Second: I thought "maybe he wore it ironically." So I did reading. No. Matter of fact, I get the feeling that he's a poser. Whatever though, he created himself some sort of empire in Connecticut and we'll see what happens to all that litigation now that he's gone.

The same people who told me before the metal detectors came in that they were going in swore up and down it had nothing to do with cell phones and everything to do with stuff like knives. I get that there's a lot of disinformation - I can't even name the person who told me what I know as hearsay! - but not once do I think Universal has stated that the metal detectors were brought in because of cell phones on coasters.

People can say whatever they want to about Intamin, and lord knows I have. But raft rides are pretty much something they do better than anyone else.

Thinking? Bruh, they pulled it down last off season.

People argued that California banned lap-bar only inverting coasters at the same time that Montezooma's Revenge was operating daily at Knotts. That's all I'm sayin.

THIS. I'm tired of people being like "Hey, this is great, no more queue lines!" No, not it isn't great. If I fly to Spain in a few weeks and they tell me, "Look, we don't want anyone waiting more than 30 minutes to ride Red Force, so maybe you can ride it later today if the line is shorter?" I would be a very, very, very unhappy camper. I pay money to go to the park to experience attractions. If I have to wait in line, so be it. That's always been part of it. But to not be allowed to wait in line and thus experience attractions AT ALL because it is considered to not be the way some creative type wants me to experience their creation? Holy christ, this isn't fine art. It's a theme park.

I think taking a ride over to the Marblehead lighthouse and Port Clinton area isn't a bad idea. Could also take a ferry to Put-In-Bay (SEE NEXT POST) Yelp tells me there's a place called Volstead now in downtown that's ostensibly a speakeasy, so that automatically is the most interesting bar in Sandusky not at the park. I'd also throw out that if you went to Put-In-Bay, drinking is kinda *the thing to do*. One of, if not the, longest bars in the world is there. Do two different patters for both days. Not much is open by Maverick for early entry typically, so spend one day with that and Millennium Force in mind. The other day should be the stuff closer to the front like Gatekeeper and Valravn. If open, the breadsticks by the mill on the Frontier Trail are generally pretty good and a solid value. Same with the provolone sticks at Dragons Den or whatever its called between Rougarou and Iron Dragon. Cheese on a stick and the fresh cut fries generally get good reviews.