TBpony414

Thanks for the holiday update Robb! I watched the video to see the Dapper Dans perform and they really are great! WDW sure knows how to deck the halls, no doubt about it.

Sad to see this TR come to an end but it was a lot of fun to read! TRs are my favorite part of the forums because of the different pictures, details, funny captions, etc. Did you visit 3 pizza places on the tour or more and you just didn't take pics? How long is the pizza tour? And finally, what is the name of that cupcake place?

WOW!!! I'm really impressed with the whole place. I've only been to stuffy old places on Broadway or The Kennedy Center, National Theatre in DC, etc. The architecture of this new center is incredible and I love how the main room is set up differently from the smaller one. Usually I don't like "modern" things because it feels cold and dull, lifeless, colorless. But this takes modern and really twists it into something amazing that looks and functions beautifully and is inviting. Thanks for posting about it, Robb! And be sure to let us know how awesome it is when you see your upcoming shows there I've never been backstage before (sadface) so am not sure... What is a fly system used for?

Do they actually sell those Disney models or are they just displays? If they actually are for sale, I can't even imagine what they would cost... thousands of dollars for sure. They're really cool to look at, though!

Happy to hear we have another Hersheypark enthusiast here! I love HP and grew up going there, Kings Dominion, and BGW each summer. HP has always been my favorite as I think they have a really solid lineup of coasters and flat rides. Also, they have a Subway! Hooray for non-greasy chicken fingers for once. Storm Runner is my fav. ride there and is one of the only rides anywhere that I'll actually wait for the front. IT IS WORTH THE WAIT!!! Front left is my preferred seat but the launch is awesome and while I am usually a backseater, something about the air flying in your face takes my breath away every time. Yes it's short but who cares. I'd so much rather have a shorter coaster, or a ride like Great Bear that meanders for the last 1/8 of the track but the rest of it is badass, than a coaster that half way through I want to get off because the end section is overkill. Lightning is my fav. side of Lightning Racer but either is fun. I always say that if someone built an El Toro style racing coaster I could die happy LOL. Wildcat used to be awesome but I avoid it at all costs now. Occasionally it's fine but there are times when it will try to murder you and no amount of visits to the chiropractor afterwards will help the pain. The Claw is super fun, as is the Trailblazer (it's at the bottom of the hill by the dolphin stadium across from the BBQ pit place, under Storm Runner) and sometimes you can get a really awesome cycle on Flying Falcon. Comet is still a hands-up, good time woody and worth the wait. It always has a wait but the station is very tiny so from the bottom of the ramp it's only about 7 minutes. Musicbox Express is insane, be prepared to break a rib because it shows no mercy. Great Bear is awesome and relaxing in a way that other inverts are not. I don't like 2908324 flips and corkscrews but GB has just enough to make it fun yet not sickening. SDL is awesome and the log flume is really good too - you only get spritzed at the end so no worries there. ZooAmerica is cool and in the summer when it's 100deg I love walking through there as a break. They have decent enclosures and nice signs with details for all the animals. It takes about 40 minutes to walk through if you briefly stop at each animal. I haven't been to Chocolate World in quite a few years but they really try to press you on buying candy so don't go in there hungry!! Definitely plan to go back there next year. Not only is it a beautiful park with a lot of flowers, nice employees overall, a great collection of rides but they mess of coasters is really cool to look at. We usually take a break in the afternoon and just watch the coasters go by from a bench somewhere. Keep in mind that if you buy a ticket for, ex: Saturday, you can go Friday night for the last few hours the park is open for free. That's a good way to get in some great rides and come up with a plan for the next day. We always take the right pond path to Skyrush, then hit up Comet, SDL. Then you have to make a choice which way to go - some people go from there to Fahrenheit and then The Claw, Lightning Racer, Wildcat, etc. We go the opposite way from SDL to Great Bear, Coal Cracker (log flume), Flying Falcon, Trailblazer, Storm Runner, eat lunch at Sidewinder (which is great with the new restraints), then go to The Claw, Lightning Racer, Musicbox Express, and double back over to SR, GB, Comet. If you don't know where you're going it can be quite confusing but that's part of the HP experience

What exactly happens in Houdini's Great Escape? I heard you sit on a bench and it makes it seem like the room is spinning but I didn't get that impression from your TR. I'd try it myself but get dizzy and severe motion sickness at the drop of a hat so didn't want to risk it. I've been to SFGAdv 3x this month and each visit has been great despite some minor and major problems encountered. I found all the ride attendants to be helpful and friendly as well as the majority of the other staffers. We went on the Safari last weekend and really enjoyed it. Kingda Ka is only tolerable in the blue train and El Toro never, ever gets old! They do have a great lineup of rides there and if they can just get that darn path from Zumanjaro over to El Toro connected it'll save a lot of time and energy walking around. Zumanjaro was surprisingly one of our favorites. How does it differ from Blue Fall?

"We have not done Muppet 3D in a long time. I actually think the only time I have taken Claire in there was when she was maybe 3 or 4 and as soon as we left she threw up in a garbage can. Maybe that’s why I haven’t gone back." ^LOL the same thing happened to me when I was 4 yrs old visiting WDW with my family and that was also the last time we ever did Muppets 3D. I also threw up after Star Tours. Do they still have the Honey I Shrunk The Kids giant ant out to crawl on, and/or do they still have the Indiana Jones show? Doubtful on both. Like I said, it's been a while since I was last there.

Enjoyed seeing the rest of your trip! I've never been on a Disney cruise (hoping to remedy that soon!) but I have a question: does the cruise feel like it's too short, being that it's only 3 nights? There's so much to do and it seems like you'd need at least another day to soak it in. Or maybe that's part of their marketing plan - to leave people wanting more and then they book another cruise? Either way it looks great!

I can't believe you went on Manta... 3x!! Now you are officially a flying idiot I got a good laugh out of you wanting to stay and watch the dolphins and whales while Claire complained and wanted to move on. Usually it is that way but it was the opposite for me. When I was last there back when the dinosaurs still roamed, I was 13 years old and my mother, who loves animals and has the patience of a saint, was the one who had to draaaaaaag me away from the viewing areas so we could go to the many shows and ride rides. We probably spent a solid 2 hours just watching the animals swim around and reaching our hands in to pet the dolphins LOL. I could have spent the whole day just going from viewing area to viewing area watching all the animals swim around and never getting bored. I'm still that way and often will just sit out at the barn watching my horse graze in the field because it's so peaceful. Hopefully on one of your upcoming trips you'll be able to spend a full day at Discovery Cove!

Bad bunny! Too bad I'm not closer, I'd come over and get him for you. Most rabbits seem to do well with a metal puppy playpen which you can buy at any petstore. My current bunny is tiny and has 2 pinched discs (I actually built him a wheelchair so he can balance and hop around normally bc he only has use of one hind leg) so I don't worry about escaping and only have a 24" high playpen he sleeps in. I can easily unhook the latch to open it up for easy cleaning or just step over it. The majority of bunny owners get 36" high playpens which if you have a jumper may be what you need. Some of them have built-in doors which is super handy. Alternatively, you could clip a bedsheet over the top of the 24" one like a roof using chip clips and then just unclip it every day when you go in to feed and clean up the area. I bet if you used a potato peeler to slice carrots or cut up tiny pieces of bananas you could lure him to you or into the garage

OMG she rode it and liked it? The good news for you is that next time she even slightly hesitates at riding Big Thunder Mountain you can tell her to hush up because she rode Manta. Ha! Really enjoying pics of Discovery Cove. I don't think I've ever actually seen inside of it except in brochures. Did I read it right that the DC passes are good to use at SW for 14 days? I don't quite understand that. Who visits FL for 2 weeks? I've heard of 1 extra day at a sister park but not 2 weeks. Am I confused again? Since you're a travel agent extraordinaire, can you explain the appeal of renting a cabana? They seem to be all over these days but I never see them being rented except for celebs or very large groups of people. If you're at a place like DC, wouldn't you want to focus your time on the experiences there and not lounging around in some secluded wicker furniture tent waiting for someone to bring you a drink? Enlighten me, please! LOL.

Lucky!!! I've been dying to get the Volcano rollback. Was it in the morning? With the momentum it gathers falling down, does it roll back all the way to the station by itself or does it slow down and use tires in reverse to drive it back to the station?

I also somehow missed this TR but am really glad I saw the latest installment on SFMM. Because I enjoyed your great details on each ride and your thoughts on the park experience, I just went back to the first page to read all about your other park visits. Bonus points for turkey jokes and Zoolander references mid-TR!

Nothing like a really good looking ride sign - Dorney seems to have that down pat!

Flying coasters (like Manta) are not as crazy as they look! If Claire was still getting used to WDW coasters though, Manta would scare the pants off her. Journey to Atlantis (the boat one) is actually one of my favorite rides and if you like Splash Mountain you'd be fine on it. It doesn't get you that wet and it's part log flume part roller coaster. Next time ride it!! I LOVED Sea World when I was there 10+ yrs ago. Lots has changed since then so I'm excited to see your pics.

Another fun TR over But you still have a ways to go on your other one so that will keep me busy with reading material! That's a lot of cows! It's great you are able to give them good care and great quality of life in the fields, etc. I hate thinking of animals cooped up in scary, overcrowded barns their whole lives but it is a fact of how farm animals are used these days, unfortunately. I'm not really a cat person either and they multiply like rabbits! Speaking of which - I have had house rabbits for 15 years and a great forum I belong to and highly recommend is called Binky Bunny. My sn is the same over there as it is here so if you're interested in ideas to keep your escape wabbit safe and contained during the nasty Ohio winter maybe hop on over there They're fantastic pets but require an enormous amount of work plus they're devilishly smart and love to find trouble!

Love some of the pictures in this section. The globe which looks like it's hanging from a ceiling, the photo after "and more fireworks" which has multicolored lights with streamers. I also really like the sideways photo of the dragon when it first blew fire and the photo of the dragon right before the 2nd flame went off looks like something from a professional Universal brochure! Unrelated - How big is your farm and approximately how many cows do you have? Do you have other livestock too like horses, goats, chickens? I've always wondered about that lol. Among many other animals I have a horse (she's just a pet) and my only experience with cows has been watching The Incredible Dr. Pol on National Geographic Wild, which may or may not portray an accurate depiction of dairy farms.

2-3 pages back I posted my experience a couple weeks ago when they closed the park more than 1 hr earlier than advertised with no warning whatsoever. We had reserved El Toro and when we arrived at the queue a little before 11pm were denied access, in fact they were running the last train empty at that moment and the place was deserted (except for crowds of folks just like us who were clueless) so they had closed the line at least 20 minutes before. No warning whatsoever. We were able to reserve Bizarro after that and when we arrived that too was dead and they had closed up shop, lights were off, etc. Very irritating. I understand closing early due to lack of attendance but more than 1 hr, with no warning whatsoever? No. Say the park is open until 11, keep the park open to 11, and if things are going well extend to midnight. There were plenty of workers and scare actors there on Saturday night so if they were short-staffed it was not at all obvious like it normally would be.

^Thanks for the mini TR on your day at SWO. Too bad about Antarctica being a letdown. I haven't been to SWO in over a decade but the two times I visited I really loved it. I'm an animal lover but them making a big deal about every animal being a rescue is overdoing it and most likely not true. I understand their reasoning in doing so. I talked at length with an animal trainer at BGW one time about their animals and they confirmed that there are quite a few bred in house but a few, such as one of the dogs, a couple cats, and a potbellied pig, were rescues. (I'd love to see SWO try to explain how their captive-bred orcas are rescues LOL.) I can't wait until I can get back down to Florida to see how the place as changed. Overall they do a lot of good with educating the public and rehabbing injured animals. If they didn't exist there would be a giant hole in what we as the general public would know about important and very large oceanic animals. There would most certainly be more extraordinarily tiny stadiums taking absolutely terrible care of their orcas, dolphins, sea lions, etc. but because of SW more people are educated and therefore a lot of those places probably make efforts to improve the living and dietary conditions. On the whole, if a small percentage of captive animals can teach people about wild animals and how to keep the oceans thriving then it is greatly beneficial.

I forgot to mention in my last comment when reading about you not wanting to get a jacket you liked at a certain time so you wouldn't have to deal with hauling it around the rest of the trip. Upon reading that I immediately yelled out loud "NO!! Get it now or you won't be able to find it later, which happens every single trip!" LOL and then the next sentence you wrote something about never getting it. Ack! The matching Disneyland jackets are nice though.

The first photopass picture of you and Claire outside Be Our Guest is a framer for sure! You both look so genuinely happy and I love the little teacups at the bottom. The first magic shot of Claire holding Chip is really cute too and she's actually smiling in this one too, not grinning and bearing it LOL. What is a bath bomb?

I wasn't thinking that the regular queue was called Standby, I've always just called it the Regular Queue. For some reason when I read through about the Gringott's ride it sounded to me that standby was the new single rider, or something. LOL I have no idea what I was thinking. The ride sounds really cool though! Does Platform 9 3/4 use some sort of projection to make the brick wall look like you're passing through it? It's cool to see it looking backwards there, it's almost like a metal detector.

What is the difference between the single rider line and the standby queue? They sound about the same to me!

This blows so hard, I would have been livid. On my many visits to the park this season I have a ritual where I hit Toro first, mainly so that if its running in the morning and goes down for whatever reason at least I got a ride on it. I usually try to hit it last too just to leave on the highest note possible. Im wondering if the closing early due to attendance is because they employ so many more people during fright fest (scare actors on top of all the regular employees) so maybe since crowds were so low it was hard for them to afford to pay all the extras. Either way you cut it, thats lame as f*ck. To say we were pissed is an understatement. When returning our Qbot a little after 11, despite still being able to reserve rides yet the rides were closed, I kindly but firmly told the gal that we were quite displeased, I realized it's not her fault and I'm sure she could understand how upsetting it was for us. After a lot of back and forth and her not apologizing a single time for the inconvenience she got a manager who eventually asked what ride I was upset about. She said she'd give me two exit passes to use the next time we came to the park for El Toro. Great! When I got in the car I saw that she put an expiration date on them for 11/2/14. How helpful of her to give me two passes that are essentially useless to me since the park is only open a few more days the rest of the year and we live 4 hours away. Grr. Interesting to hear other people's experiences with the park closing early! Disappointing but not shocking to hear they've done this before. Six Flags doesn't give a crap though and even though we were furious it hasn't turned us off. Will we get gold Qbots the next time we visit? Absolutely - there's no question that we will. There's just no way for us to enjoy the park otherwise and it's worth the extra money to us to have a smooth experience with minimal waiting in queues with sweaty hooligans.

I was in NJ for the weekend so we stopped by SFGAdv Friday from 8-11:30PM and Saturday from 7:30-11pm. I didn't take any pictures but will write a bit about my visits. Friday the crowds were huge and it took us 45 minutes to get from the parking lot through security and into the park. Lines were 45+ mins so we got the gold flash pass which was well worth the money. In fact, we had such a good time Friday that we went back Saturday and did the same thing. Crowds were significantly less on Saturday night. Some weird stuff was going on though. First the parking attendant said our gold season passes were not scanning so we should go back to the park we got them from (SFA) and get them checked. What? We explained that we were at the park the night before and everything was normal, showed that our passes say Gold on them and she let us through. Later on in the night we were waiting to get on KK and, with large lines, the decided to transfer off the 3rd train. Ok, whatever. We reserved El Toro next and by the time we got over there at 10:50 they had closed the ride for the night. The park was open until midnight so this was a little odd and quite disappointing. Went over to Bizarro and the same thing. As we walked around the park we noticed all the little boutiques were locked up, all the rides were dark, everything was closed with no explanation. One attendant I found claimed that they were closing the park early due to lack of attendance. There were still quite a few people there and plenty in ride lines minutes before so it was odd. It was as if there was some sort of park-wide malfunction since everything was shut down so quickly and more than an hour before closing. In our two brief nights there we got a heck of a lot done ride wise as well as ate relaxing dinners, saw motorcyclists in a cage and got hoodies on Saturday since it was much colder. Friday: El Toro 2x, Bizarro, Superman, Parachutes, Kingda Ka, Zumanjaro, Nitro 2x. Saturday: Nitro 2x, Skull Mountain, Superman 2x, Ka 3x, Zumanjaro 3x. We violated the cardinal rule of coaster riding and left El Toro for last so we could marathon it before leaving. BF insisted it would be fine and then they closed early so we sure won't make that mistake again. Ouch. Zumanjaro was the surprise hit of the trip! Drop towers are the only rides that make me nervous and they scare the heck out of my BF. Eventually he finally agreed to do it and we reserved it on the Qbot. Well actually, we made the mistake of riding KK first which reminded us just how high that tower is. Yikes. The queue to Zumanjaro is quite the walk and the screams from riders are so loud it can be heard across the park. Every single person we passed walking back was laughing and smiling so I figured that was a good sign. We loaded & were locked in quickly and waited while Ka launched above us. Sitting in the little hard plastic seats feeling the entire structure rumble and shake with the coaster zooming above us was absolutely terrifying. I looked over at BF and his face was absolutely void of all color LOL. My hands started sweating profusely. The overhead lap bar has almost nothing to grab onto and it's mostly metal so I couldn't even grip anything. The lift to the top starts quite slowly and then picks up speed, eventually you think you're at the top because it slows down momentarily only to pick up speed again (feels like it grabs on to another cable or something?) and continues for a while to the top. Holy freaking crap, 415 feet is VERY HIGH!!! Everything looked miniature. I instantly regretted getting on the ride and my heart was beating so fast I thought I might pass out. Ride slowed down, jiggled into place, clicked and dropped. The freefall felt more like 1,000 feet! I'm a yay-this-is-so-fun-screamer but I let out a my-life-is-ending scream the entire way down. We got to the bottom and we immediately burst out laughing, cackling, doubled over cracking up at the adrenaline rush. What a ride!!! We couldn't stop smiling and BF said he was excited to ride it again! Unfortunately by then we only had time to head over to Nitro before the park closed, but we did ride it 3x the next night. A+ addition and I highly recommend it to everyone. Ride dispatches on Friday were fast and Saturday was OK. I thought the way they loaded and stacked Ka to send 2 trains per 1 Zumanjaro was very smart and the line moved much faster than it used to. I don't see how they could get any more cycles in for either KK or Z because it was so efficient and there was little to no sitting around. El Toro was the star of the show per usual and we may make the trek way back up there to ride it again in 2 weeks.