DirkFunk

Dragons had a pretty awesome queue line, but one of the issues is that the ride was both at a park that rarely had giant crowds and was a people eater. The queue line simply ended up being something to pass through quickly en route to the station and the almost constant walk on crowds (a bit like now, honestly).

I never once had an issue with cast members in my visits there. I also try to initiate contact in French, so probably that helps a little.

Hey, T2:3D is still reasonably popular.

The job market thing is true for the regional theme park industry as a whole and by and large the adjustments being made are bordering on nonexistent. The business plan is often cornerstoned on low wages to front end employees, and investors would be skittish if they paid more to those people and cut into revenue. In short: Free Market Capitalism rewards those who make money by producing a crappy, lower end product.

Complaining about IP based attractions at this point when they're the only thing that every big theme park company is developing seems dumb. Get a new hobby if it bothers you. As for this park: WTI is trading at around $46 a barrel. I'll believe this gets done when I see it.

Fallon will have to be actively terrible to be worse than Twister. That...thing...is hot garbage.

Yea but then you have parks like CP or KI that are closed from now until the end of April/Beginning of May. So yea it's pretty terrible At least there's options you can drive to now. It isn't the mid 90s when every park closed on Labor Day. That SUCKED.

With Dollywood, SDC, Great Adventure, and Hershey running coasters into January and mountain coasters operating all year long across the country, worries about the "off season" seem almost laughable. It lasts, what, second week of January through to mid March now on the East Coast when LI Adventureland and Busch Gardens Williamsburg open? Oooh. How terrible.

Costa Maya is probably your best opportunities for Precolumbian ruins given proximity and the reasonable size of the sites. Roatan has some really beautiful areas, but the area immediately surrounding where the ship lets off for NCL and RCCL is pretty lousy. Cozumel, IMO, is excellent for diving or snorkeling and not much else given that most of the big name excursions like Tulum first require a boat ride from the island of Cozumel back to mainland Mexico before transferring to a fairly substantial bus ride. Coba's the grandest site you'd be able to see, but you're on a ships tour that will likely give you no more than 90 minutes in a place several square miles in size with somewhere around 3-4 hours of combined transport time to and from. It's a lousy way to go see it. Belize is also surrounded by a large reef (same reason you tender from a spot a couple miles off shore) and there's snorkeling excursions there, though the jungle around is also pretty cool to check out. As always, look at independent tour operators, look at their ratings on Tripadvisor, and look around Cruise Critic.

It looks like it's going to invert there or at least come close to it. Is it going to go through the wall in the back there? That's what I understand will happen.

There's a couple super low rent funfairs in Guinea Bissau and Senegal, so those. Those people deserve something nice.

First - thanks to Dave again for meeting up. Great dude. Second: from what we were told - -Flying Aces is obviously on pace for a early 2016 opening -Shuttle sounds awesome. Will apparently have two trains with a Mr. Freeze like station. -SFX Coaster will be done when it gets done. What it is and how it works are still progressing and there's been changes as a result. I enjoyed Ferrari World more than I expected to. There's not a ton of rides, but they're all at least interesting if not good. I don't rank stuff anymore, but if I did, Formula Rossa would be super high on that list. Amazing ride.

I can count on one hand parks I've visited with as many ECVs as Dollywood or SDC, and they aren't going with a policy resembling this. Count me with Neil, generally speaking.

An image from the Hubble Telescope of how the Universe would look after Kumba is removed altogether. Taking away Kumba even melted the ice caps. In all seriousness, I will physically fight you if you don't like Kumba.

No. I didn't want to make it sound as if it did either, so if that was how you read it, I apologize. If you go uphill and turn hard to the right, the train doesn't merely run on the top wheels. Those side wheels - the ones that if not making good contact with the side rails produce the infamous "PTC shuffle" - are taking the brunt of it. And depending on the angle at which the train is headed and at what speed, it may indeed be running on underwheels in most of the train. Remember, a train is made of multiple linked cars with vehicles at the back being "pulled" to some degree by those to which it is attached ahead of it. The surface *definitely* makes a difference. Otherwise, why would retracking on wood coasters ever matter? That's not the only way to do it, and in many cases may not be the most effective due to the way something like a non-articulating train moves through curves or traverses hills. Changing banking, the radius of turns, drops, or pull outs - they can all make significant differences to the amount and location of stress that a ride takes from operation.

It will ride on underwheels as long as the forces on the train are trying to move it up against gravitational force. This can happen on a flat surface or a parabolic one depending on how the fast the train approaches it going uphill. Additionally, you'll see trains that primarily end up running on side wheels depending on the surface. It is my understanding that many of the changes made to Voyage since opening year were to make those sorts of transitions move more fluidly by reducing stress points on the ride. My belief is that a lot of this has been done to MS, but that the manner in which it is operated negates those gains. There's a much, much better description of what I'm saying that was done by Dave Altoff and can be found with a fairly quick google search. He's fairly well educated on the topic and is a certified ride inspector. But basically the argument that "trims will save maintenance cost" is largely theoretical and flawed.

If you're traveling fast enough and you get to a small pothole, what happens? If you've spent enough time driving, you know that the forward motion of the car is such that you'll basically pass right over the hole with minimal vibration. With a coaster, this can be the case. Mean Streak doesn't always run on wheels that are down on the track, and when the block is off, you'll find the train sometimes riding on the under or side wheels to match the track curvature. If the train isn't going fast enough, sometimes it hits those and it ends up bouncing going uphill or through turns. The smoothest rides I've ever had on Mean Streak in the last 5 years were with no block because it hits the track the way it is supposed to. Whenever the block is on, it is totally unrideable.

To me, there's a world of difference between doing animal encounters with smaller or docile species versus trained and often unnatural behaviors performed for crowds. Jumping, sure. Doing synchronized flips? Less so. And yes, zoos do some trained behaviors, but nothing remotely like what you'd see in a circus. No one at an AZA zoo is teaching a bear to ride a unicycle. I think the difference then is pretty obvious.

This story absolutely killed me. I have to believe I would know who was involved if there were names coming out. Just too funny.

To me, there's a world of difference between doing animal encounters with smaller or docile species versus trained and often unnatural behaviors performed for crowds. Same with advertising feeding times or enrichment item disbursement vs. (as an example) One Ocean. There's no need for reward/punishment type training when you give a tiger a block of ice or a big ball in their enclosure, whereas there most certainly is when you're trying to teach it tricks. But in any case, zoos are moving away from that and we're seeing things that I find much, much more interesting in their place (canopy tours, ziplining, amusement rides, etc).

I go to a ton of zoos. A *ton*. I rarely see performing animal shows (maybe 15-20% of them?), and when I do, we're generally discussing a single species of animal like sea lions or dolphins. Most zoos are eschewing those sorts of things in favor of constructing larger and more "realistic" enclosure spaces for their animals. That's been a trend ongoing now for a couple decades. Animals are happier, more likely to breed (which is an income source for zoos, let's be realistic here), and it gives visitors a much more thematically interesting area. The African exhibits at Columbus and Binder Park Zoo, just to name a couple in the midwest, are outstanding and can be put against destination themers for content. Oil prices are now diving below $50 a barrel and I don't see them making the call to reverse that decision. No matter what the "actual cause", I think it's the right thing to do and makes them more of a contemporary product. There's something like this in Sentosa too. I'd love to see it.

There's a number of reasons why they were chosen, but the biggest difference between them and 99.999% of zoo animals in the United States is that orcas perform tricks and most zoos are long since out of the circus act business. Even circuses have had to change; Ringling Bros. is retiring the elephant tricks after years of complaints about their treatment of the animals. A fair amount of those complaints stem from entirely legitimate causes. Are there some people who would like to see all zoological parks closed down? I'm sure. There's a very long, steep slope from "End orca breeding program" to "close all the zoos and end pet ownership". They were slow to the punch and lack the finances to really gun for this due to being saddled with so much debt from the Blackstone acquisition and spinoff.

If you need the orcas to pushing humans in the water to be entertained, maybe be honest with yourself and admit you really don't care much about them? I don't think that's entirely true, I meant I could have sat and watched them swim all day and dind't feel the need to see the One Ocean show becuase I'm not a huge fan of it, but the old Believe show that included the interaction was one of the best live shows I've ever seen in a theme park, it was spectacular. There's no doubt that it is a spectacle, but if you're really interested in seeing the animals and care about their well being, do you need to see someone flying 30 ft in the air?

This is how I feel. If you need the orcas to pushing humans in the water to be entertained, maybe be honest with yourself and admit you really don't care much about them? Watching a 6-7 ton animal jump in the air is pretty goddamn amazing to me, and a really great enclosure I think would be just as interesting as synch'ed up pop music and backflips, if not more so. Imagine a tunnel like in the Sea World and Merlin shark exhibits running through the center of a 50-60ft deep tank with them swimming above and below.

Probably the latter. To be really honest, they would be doomed to have that happen any ways due to the limited genetic pool they have of orcas. Either they'd end up being severely inbred, or alternately, they'd need to find new genetic lines (see also: Russia's decision to wild catch more orcas). I'm not personally bothered by it though, as I'm not that hot on performing animals being any theme park's centerpiece and would rather they transition away from that.