Stephen G

A Couple of weeks ago Landry's Restaurants, Inc. who own Kemah Beach and Boardwalk announced that they are going to be tearing down the Iconic flagship hotel in Galveston Texas to make way for a new amusement park over the Gulf of Mexico. The Flag ship is a hotel that was built in 1956 Ironically replacing a previous amusement park known as pleasure pier that had been damaged by a hurricane. The hotel was severely damaged by hurricane Ike in 2008 and has been closed since. Very little information has been made public but the construction application asks permission for a 225-foot ride although it dose not say what kind of ride it will be, demolition started last Monday. Personally I am very interested to see this develop in Galveston and hoping for more information in the future. http://abclocal.go.com/ktrk/story?section=news/local&id=7975420 http://galvestondailynews.com/story/181598 Flag ship hotel before Hurricane Ike After

My opinion on the Steel vs Wood debate is that I do not think that we should call it a "hybrid" Since as many of the riders have said and can be seen it is far different from a steel coaster and equally different from a wood coaster, the box style steel track/wood structure gives a completely different ride. I think that a hybrid is a tubular steel track on a wood structure , personally I prefer the title SFOT originally used of a Iron Horse coaster and really if we start seeing more rides converted/built in this style, It might be best if we just created a new category instead of having this debate with every coaster that is built like this.

question? has any one gone to see if they have relocated the Chaparral cars station for the giants que line? And if so do you have any photos?

If you Remember a while back when we said we needed a chopper to get some shots of the giant, well I found this on youtube today there are some very interesting shots of the tunnel.

They tested a full train yesterday "January 20th" right now if you go the the Texas giant page http://www.sixflags.com/overTexas/rides/TexasGiant.aspx and look at the web cam, on slide 31 you can see a full train coming out of the 3rd turn, since it is not seen in any other slides I would assume it was a success or it flew off the track some were after the photo.

This coaster is going to be completely insane, with the speed it has there is going to be some serious ejector air on the first hill and probably on the small hill before the first turn. I wish they had shown more angles to see what the lift hill pass under is going to look like speed wise.

Pretty much every hill/drop on shock wave at SFOT. also the second drop on titan in the back row.

I am going to suspect that they will tear down the old chaps queue house and build a new one using the whole chaps platform+ entrance and exit of the chaps, It also raises the question if they will move the giants entrance all together over to the chaps current entrance/exit, but yes they will most likely be moving the chaparral cars platform and reuse the queue house, but will the chaps maintenance area stay the same?

These have to be my favorite coaster cars of all time "well at least ascetically" I don't know how they ride yet, that last photo got me a bit exited!

From what I have seen they still have to add the walk way next to the track, At least in all of the models Rocky Mountain have made, show there being a walk way along the track and I am sure there is still much electrical/Compy work to be done before they can let her rip, like fixing all those gaps and kinks we have seen in the past. Also I was up at SFot Saturday picking up more of my Haunted house junk I had stored and they seemed to be replacing many of the more deteriorated timbers which I suspected that they would be doing a lot of work on the older support frame. I cant wait till this beast opens. "I wonder if they will let a dead clown be a test dummy?" need to call boss...

So Don't trust the guy selling Dipin Dots but the guy selling kettle corn you can trust, I cant wait till this beast opens!

I hope Magic Springs Gets some new rides, Its Probably one of my favorite accidental park Discovery's, First time we went there It was just be cause we happened upon this little park out side Hot Springs AR and said lets give it a look and were quite surprised by how nice and clean the park was and very well maintained, and having a very nice setting in the Ozarks. Perhaps I can go back to Arkansas after I ride the new Giant