DirkFunk

Also, yes, I feel a degree of shame for knowing this. But then I can share that info to you and you can make informed decisions or something. It works.

110% the same ride. Guaranteed. First time they rolled it out was Delaware last year and it had no lighting whatsoever. Track layout and paint scheme is exactly the same. Both pictures show Zamperla 420STD mice. The tell tale sign is the double up. The 316STD doesn't have that, and the only one on the road in the US is owned by NAME following the old Farrow Shows route (like Illinois and Indiana State Fairs, Astro Unit or something like that). Wade's played some indie midways where they might have booked in Vandervorste's mouse. Other coasters they have are the RC-48 from Morey's, Crazy Cat (Zyklon which is getting pitched for an identical copy from Interpark), and Comet II (Old Indiana's/Murphy Bros. Wildcat named after the Texas State Fair Comet).

$100 says this was Wade Shows in Macomb and that your guess is right. Wade actually did a ton of work on it to make it travel worthy. One story I was told (all second hand) was that Wade doesn't believe the cars were ever torn down on a regular basis at MO and that the only thing keeping some of the restraints closed was corrosion.

For the record, I attended the NAPHA event at KK the day after Holiwood Nights. You didn't hear about it? Don't feel alone. There were only 28 attendees, I think. Anyways, Ed Hart was given a plaque and took a few questions. Before even doing that, he referred to TT and stated we'd see something in the next 30 days. I guess that would mean we just have a couple more weeks left before anything is announced, but the way he stated things with regards to the ride, it sounded like it was not being torn down. Take that for what you will.

Kinda, in so much as blood brings oxygen to your brain. Cerebral hypoxia is the technical term. You might also see the reason why it happens on coasters referred to as "g-loc," short for "G-Force Induced Loss of Consciousness."

Le Monstre getting the RMC treatment horrifies me because it might force me to go back to La Ronde. Someone please have an event there with 67 hours of ERT.

Obviously you forgot this.

The famliy who had ownership of the park had desired moving it for years and was gifted land and tax breaks to make the move. From an economic standpoint, it was absolutely the right move in so much as it provided them extra space for free and allowed them to become profitable much more quickly for being what was, in some ways, a new build park. That's rare. They then completed their goals by selling the property for $65 million dollars to Premier. If you're actually a fan of going to amusement and theme parks, you might be thinking to yourself, "Hey, wait, but Elitch's sucks now!" Yes. And it has sucked for years because the corporate structure running has been fairly rotten and conditioned the locals to expect absolutely nothing good from it. It wasn't good for theme park fans. It was good for some rich people who wanted to get out of the theme park industry and didn't give a crap about preserving rides or creating the best experience possible. They literally moved some rides onto a toxic waste dump, rebuilt one of the most famous and legendary rides of all time as a steaming pile of manure, collected public money and then private money (fronted to it by banks that subsequently went belly-up and needed your money to bail them out when companies like Six Flags went bankrupt) and ensured many future generations of children to have access to luxury automobiles. So yes, moving Elitch Gardens was the right decision for the few people who owned it and was pretty much a lousy outcome for everyone else.

Last time I stayed in a cheap hotel, the toilet flooded in the middle of the night and the AC had a foul smell. But I suppose it's just luck of the draw. I suppose we could still consider it though. Hit up Tripadvisor IMO. The Milan Motel 6 has become my budget standby for Cedar Point trips now that the Bon Aire wing of Breakers is a grass field. Not every cheap motel is equal, so use other's experience to guide you.

I've sailed out of Rome previously, and while I haven't sailed out of Barcelona, I'm pretty aware as to what the distances are like from boat to the center of the city and the comparative ease involved getting from point A to B. Rome is an amazing, amazing place worth multiple days (assuming you want something other than generic rides from your cities), but also happens to be about an hour's drive away from the center of Rome to the city itself. Barcelona, for a number of reasons, I think is more manageable as a port to visit when sailing. Just go on Google Maps, look at where the ships are, and then look at any of the major sights. It is much more convenient. If it was me and I'd never been before, I would sail out of Civitavecchia simply because I think the inconvenience of the distance is a negative for shore excursions and the like, and I think Rome is really worth the time and effort. I can also shoot you the name of the car service we used to pick us up from the hotel and take us to the cruise port. It was a bargain compared to official transfers. You could take the train and transfer to a bus if you really wanted to save a lot, but the point A to B car service is, for this, I feel worth it.

Jump the turnstiles and scream gutturally at people. Seriously, there's not much to it. You get a metrocard from a machine, then point the pass in the direction the reader at the turnstile/gate wants, it passes through and reads it, then you're free to go. Parking lot? I dunno, get a well lit one near a public thoroughfare. Looking at the subway map, you should plan on taking the F Train from Coney Island & Stillwell. Get off at Avenue I Station and it should be less than a block walk south along McDonald Ave. from the station stairs to the entrance. When you get ready to go to Central Park, get back on the F train and take it to Manhattan and get off at 63rd and Lexington. Walk three blocks West and you can't miss it. When you're ready to go back, take the F train again the opposite way until it terminates at Coney Island. Yeah, they have free parking. Walking is silly in this instance.

I think taking public transit to Long Island is more hassle than it is worth. You are right - parking and traffic in and around downtown Manhattan is going to be difficult for Victorian Gardens. However, taking the train to Staten Island and walking to the park there is going to be very time consuming compared to driving and parking (for free) there. If you absolutely *must* do this all in one day, I'd start at Staten Island's Fantasy Shore, then rip through Long Island & Fantasy Forest before bringing my car to park at one of the parking lots in Coney Island (there are several). At which point, I would take the subway to Kids N' Action (there's a stop very close to it), to Manhattan for Central Park, and then comeback to Coney Island and clean up there *last* as they are likely to close the latest by a huge margin over any of these other parks. I have no idea if that is all logistically possible, I'm just telling you what gives you the best odds of making this happen. If you're stopping at Funplex on the way before you get to these, well - Funplex opens at 10AM. Assuming you have no traffic and everything goes well there and you leave by 10:15AM, the earliest you can realistically expect to be parked in Staten Island is 11:30AM assuming you speed, there's no traffic, and you immediately find a parking space. From there to Boomers (the furthest park), you're looking again, again, best case scenario speeding slightly, no traffic, immediate finding and parking, as being an arrival of probably 1:15PM. It may be possible, but some of this is really at the whims of the subway.

Regional parks appeal to people regionally first, nationally far second, internationally not at all. Anyone who's been to Orlando in the last 5-6 years has seen a huge expansion in BRIC visitors - international visitors. So while prices are rising, attendance is going up because there is simply nowhere else that has the concentration and quality of theme parks as does Orlando, Florida, much less the other intangibles (i.e. cruise ports in Tampa and Canaveral being nearby, Miami and South Beach within a 4 hour drive). On the other hand, while cities are increasing in size, so are the number of alternative entertainment options available to people. There's expansion of destination shopping, professional athletics, collegiate athletics, museums, movie theaters, and all sorts of competing outdoor entertainment. In most markets, there is no longer even competition among amusement or theme parks because the industry is in what you'd call a "mature market" phase. A mature market is one which has reached a state of equilibrium in which significant growth and/or innovation is no longer required or occurs. 40 years ago this was not the case, and that's when you saw suburban themers popping up like wildfire to copy the success of Six Flags Over Texas. All those theme parks "won" their battles. The wars are over. Now everyone is just gliding and trying to show growth in different ways; increasingly per capita spending via expensive food/drink is one way, for example. Queue management systems (Q-Bot/Flashpass/etc) are another. (One caveat to that: The Mom-And-Pops and privately owned don't need to show continuous growth to investors. They just need to be profitable. Holiday World, the Herschend parks, Morey's Piers, Knoebel's - those are places that as long as they make money their owners are happy and will keep reinvesting. The corporately owned (Disney/Universal/Palace/Six Flags/Cedar Fair/SeaWorld) will always, ALWAYS have to not only show a profit, but show growth to make investors happy. Consider the challenge of that when you realistically can't get more people inside the park.)

I actually like Excalibur a lot and would be bummed to see it go. It is something different in an increasingly homogeneous world of rides. Long term given everything changing the way it is in the world, it makes sense to upgrade the water park and get some new Proslide/Whitewater stuff, but that doesn't do much for me personally to excite me and get me headed that direction.

You need to understand more how Orlando works. Universal isn't putting a small dent into Disney's marketshare, but instead they are simply increasing their own. When people come to Orlando for vacation they look at the number of days they need. I'm sure there is plenty of research out there that tells us people aren't spending LESS days at Disney, but instead they are spending MORE days in Orlando to do and see more things. This isn't hurting Disney, but it's most certainly benefiting Universal, and as a whole, that's a great thing. The more money brought into the area and the longer people stay in town is what Orlando wants. The whole concept between Disney Vs. Universal is something that mostly falls on the fanboy level that doesn't understand how the industry works, especially here in Florida. "A rising tide raises all ships" is by all means what is happening here. Exactly. For whatever reason, this hobby (like a few others) inspires that kind of brand loyalty and people say dumb things. By the same token, people look at SeaWorld's attendance woes almost always focus solely on Orlando where they have just a fraction of their overall chain. SEAS owns 5 theme parks, 5 water parks, plus Discovery Cove. Harry Potter has no effect whatsoever on how many people go to Aquatica San Antonio.

Only the ones making the list are shown.

I'm not sure I put much stock into the numbers given that Comcast/NBC claims that 80% of Orlando ticket sales are 2 park tickets in their last earnings report. Still, you know that if the same people crying about how the numbers aren't true showed IOA with 12 million people attending that they'd be talking about how wonderful it all is and yelling at some nebulous Disney fan population.

There's an explanation deep in it where they explain how the numbers are generated. Either parks give them the numbers or they guess the numbers based on a number of criteria. Nothing is weighted based on "year round".

Outside the big chains, very few parks can afford a 10 million dollar ride of any sort. It simply isn't a viable strategy. Also, one should keep in mind that coaster are ultimately just rides like everything else mechanical that takes riders at an amusement park. If you can get 85% of the people to come in for years 1-5 of a coaster's lifespan for 50% of the price of a more expensive attraction, you'll make more money. At that point, if you send it through the wood chipper, it doesn't matter because you've broken even. Obviously no one aspires to do that, but that's the reality.

I didn't see one for Thunderbird. Maybe if you unplug some of the generators powering the ride though...

A really solid wood coaster can still be built for well under 10 million dollars. Wooden Warrior cost something like $2 million and it has a great reputation. The Chance/Morgan GT-X coasters are really a steal also for something like 7 million.

Intamin's product does indeed cut down on the maintenance, but comes with a serious price tag a lot of parks can't afford the up front cost of. RMC has basically blown the plug-and-plays out of the water with what they do because the rides can accomplish things like dive loops and inverted stalls that traditional wood coasters aren't capable of. Having said that, there's no serious argument to say that the experience of riding an RMC wood coaster is really more similar to riding a traditional wood coaster (Legend @ Arnold's, Phoenix, etc.) than those rides that GCI, CCI, TGG, and so on have put together. Those rides basically use identical tech to what's been put on tracks for 100 years now, Timberliners excluded. Traditional wood coasters require serious maintenance and the current climate of theme parks is that of publicly owned corporate parks in mature markets that have to show continued growth without really having large attendance increases. We're fast losing the few remaining wild, more traditionally styled wood coasters we have, and soon they'll be completely gone and something for grey haired men to talk about. Is that really progress? I guess it doesn't really matter what I think.

These things run on a power arc. As the train accelerates, it covers more ground and requires increasingly more power to pull it forwards. Probably it'll have about the same strength of launch with the remaining 1.5 seconds spent still accelerating, though at a slower rate than compared to when it was at a stand still.

I had heard something about a removal with a tie in to a closely associated park of Holiday World. I wasn't there though and certainly can't substantiate it.

Personally, I thought what you wrote came across as pedantic. Everyone that's not hot about the change knows they did it to cut down on maintenance costs. They said that publicly what, 30 times, give or take a couple pronouncements? I don't care if it is "good for business" or not. It isn't as good a ride now. Sorry if hearing that bothers you?