viking86

I remember when we had summer..... best day of the year!

I swear that batwing was trying to rip my feet off! Definitely one of the craziest inversions I've ever experienced on a rollercoaster! I would say that everything up to the MCBR on Montu is close to perfection. After the MCBR it meanders around a bit, but the final corkscrew finale is great! I loved Cheetah hunt! As you say it's not intense at all, but it's super fun and it's one of those rides which I could just ride over and over without needing a break, and every ride would be just as fun! I'm still a bit confused about the heartline roll though, and I would easily have traded it for having lapbars only. Probably my favorite coaster at BGT! Just walking up to the ride you get the sensation that you're about to ride a legend, and boy does it deliver! Such an amazing ride! I can't believe this thing was built all the way back in 1993... Thanks for sharing this great trip report!

Well that sure looks impressive! It will be very interesting to see what they will do with the rest of the layout.

I just ate a grasshopper!

The only screaming I find annoying is when you have teenage girls who for no reason are screaming their lungs out as the train slowly rolls out of the station and towards the lift. But other than that screaming is a part of the experience. I mean, who doesn't love walking up to the park gates and in the distance you can hear the roar of a rollercoaster combined with screams of joy and terror(*). For me that's a part of the parks "soundtrack" and adds to the experience. (*except this means the park is open and you're not inside yet, that may not be something to love)

Manta is an awesome coaster! That pretzel loop in the backseat is a proper "Oh F*ck" moment! The pull force as you're being pulled down the first half loop is just crazy! The Dine with Shamu experience looks amazing, and it doesn't matter if you pay $22 or $29, it's still an absolute steal. I never even thought about checking the price of this, as I just assumed it would be on the expensive side. That was definitely a mistake!

Cracking photos! Love the photoshopped ones of Dragon Challenge! But I also have to give a little shout-out to the picture of Rip Ride Rockit, I love pictures where you can see such a wide range of facial expressions!

All those wild mouse coasters seems to have very abrupt brake runs. Crazy Mine, the Maurer Wild Mouse at Hansa Park, springs to mind in terms of recent experiences.

Well, let's give this one a go. It was tough to select five parks in each category, and even tougher to rank them. But I think this list is fairly accurate. Top 5 Favorite Parks 1) WDW - Magic Kingdom For me this park is indeed “Magic”. The moment when you look down the Main Street and see the castle just fills me with happiness. The park has a great ride selection, particularly Space Mountain is such a fun rollercoaster, and when the darkness sets in and fireworks lights up the sky it’s hard for me to think of a better place to be. Honorable mention goes to EPCOT. 2) Liseberg A couple of superb rollercoasters, scenic location, an abundance of games and some of the best operations I’ve ever seen outside of Disney makes this one of my absolute favorite parks. Seriously, on my visits Balder has been either walk-on or had a very short queue and they still had 5-6 operators on the ride and both trains running. 3) Busch Gardens Tampa One of the best steel coaster collections in the world! Enough said! 4) Six Flags Great Adventure One of only two Six Flags parks I have been to (the other one being SFNE), and for me this park is all about the rollercoasters. It’s really hard to beat this rollercoaster collection, with El Toro being my favorite rollercoaster of all time! 5) Hershey Park The combination of a beautiful scenic park and great collection of rollercoasters puts this one into my top-5 list. Top 5 Bucketlist Parks 1) Cedar Point I don’t think this one requires any additional information. 2) Tokyo Disney Sea It’s no secret that I’m a Disney fan, and for me a visit to this amazing looking park is one of my dreams! Just being in the park and taking in the surroundings looks like an amazing experience! 3) Europa Park Possibly the best park in Europe? I don’t know, but I would sure like to find out! 4) Phantasialand Awesome theming combined with some fantastic looking rides. With the addition of Taron this park should be high on anyone’s bucket list. 5) Kennywood I actually had a really tough time coming up with a 5th park here, as there are so many great parks to choose from. Dollywood, Silver Dollar City, Kings Island, Kings Dominion, BGW, Efteling, Alton Towers, etc.... However I decided in the end to go for Kennywood, as the parks offer something no other park does with their collection of classic wooden coasters. Plus, Phantom’s Revenge looks f**king amazing!

I too believe that if an impact was the cause of the break, we would have seen a lot more twisted and bent steel. Oh, and this was posted a couple of hours ago on KMG's facebook page.

Love this trip report so much! It's so much fun to see all these pictures from parks that I know close to nothing about. Storyland looks particularly impressive, with it's scenic location and great theming! That has to be some of the coolest theming I've ever seen on a flat ride!! Food and model trains, sounds like heaven to me! (although I don't think anything can beat the bar in Prague where they have model trains bring the beers to your table)

I will be very surprise if it's not a Medusa style drop. Personally I would prefer the same as you, a straight drop, but I guess a drop with an inversion is more marketable to the GP. I'm very curious to see what they will do with the rest of the ride, if they will stick to the straight track/180 degree turn layout, or if they will go a different route. I guess the former if the most probable.

Holy crap that is scary! I have no desire to watch any of the videos, my imagination is more than enough. It will be very interesting to read the accident report when the investigation is done. From what I know KMG has a very good safety record.

It's 11 PM and somewhere in my neighborhood there's someone still doing some sort of construction work!

Great to finally see the full layout of this ride. Everything up to the MCBR looks solid and should provide a very fun ride, provided that it will actually run decently. I haven't been on any of these Zamperla rides, but from what I've gathered they don't provide the smoothest ride experience.

New beer from my local brewery, Gateway Addictive IPA 6% from 7 Fjell. Not the most exciting IPA, but still a good beer. I also have to say that their new cans don't look as good as their bottles.

How has ridership been for Dragons over the last couple of years? During my visits in 2014 and 2015 the ride was walk-on, despite all other rides having decent lines. Granted the ride is a capacity monster with two trains running on both sides, but it seemed like most people who made their way to that corner of the park where there for the Potter stuff and not for Dragons. Of course my two visits is not something that can be used to draw any conclusions, but if this is the norm then I can understand the removal from a business standpoint. So while I'm not happy about the decision to remove one of the best and most unique B&M inverted coasters ever built, a new Potter coaster is guaranteed to draw in huge crowds for Universal!

It does indeed look rather innocent. Hard to imagine that there is an underground drop tower inside. I'll be very curious to hear how the ride experience is.

^Winning is fun! I started with 300 NOK ($37) on my betting account, after a couple of very good days I just withdrew 1100 NOK ($137) and I still have 675 NOK ($84] remaining on the account to play for.

^Let's wait and see! I have a feeling that 'serious airtime' might be a bit optimistic, given that it's a family coaster, but I'm sure it will be a lot of fun! But we can always hope... What's most impressive to me is the scale of the construction shown in those pictures, particularly in the third picture. With both Toy Story Land and Star Wars Land on the way that construction area is HUGE!!! The park is going to have a completely different feel once both these lands are finished... and that's a good thing!

Lots of great pictures there! I think this one was my favorite, along with the "nerd-shot"! And the Skloosh pics were a lot of fun too!

^It will definitely be exciting to see how it works out, there is so much potential for creating cool stuff with this. I love the idea of falling asleep to the view of space, or to have a space battle outside your "window". The latter is maybe something I would prefer to be able to activate myself so that you don't have to 'plan' to be in your hotel room at a given time. Either way it would be awesome!

Awesome trip report Bill! I've always enjoyed your writing style, it's always fun to read about your experiences. Thanks for sharing! Funny that, as I was reading I thought it would be hilarious if this guy was actually a member on the TPR boards. Then I scroll down and this is the first post.

^^I totally misread that as "It's in the Netherlands as most amusement rides are..." But yeah, that's pretty interesting. I had never heard about the company either.

^^Chuck is right, the whole park is great! Since not all my footage made it into the park video, I put together and uploaded the raw footage of the awesome Schwur des Kärnan!