michaellynn4

I was nervous to try it, but it's actually a lot of fun. Pretty similar to the experience a Chance Chaos would provide. We rode these on a hot, sunny, August day. I agree, Intimidator ran a lot better than it did for me back in 2014, and Fury was bats**t insane.

It's really cool to see how the landscaping has grown in around the old Golden Kingdom path. It's been at least a good seven years since it was open on a full time basis, and it practically looks like a full-blown forest now.

This looks as if a bad coaster melted in the sun into a good coaster! Looks awesome!

Try working at one during at that time. Fright Fest closing shifts were the worst. I've got stories. I've had soda thrown on me, people walk around the counter to just take food, fights break out inside and outside the building, and some of the most disgusting examples of human behavior possible. Cops were there all the time. We had to hire a security service one year because had just gotten to be THAT bad. *shudders*

Ahhh, so it's going to be another Hilton. Interesting. I remember back when this was approved in December, but I think this is the first time we're hearing an actual company attached to it. I like the additional renderings, really helps show what will be in store. This'll also help ensure more year-round business for the McDonald's and Burger King right there. We used to be slammed in the summer and be a ghost town in the winter. I still think anyone who bitched about the solar farm situation that doesn't say anything here is a pretty big hypocrite.

Yep, new scheme looks great!

Man, I really wish SFGAdv would get one of these sometime soon. This looks awesome. Maybe next year.

I totally understand that line jumping is annoying and never appropriate, but the appropriate thing to do is to contact security and not take matters into your own hands. Confronting them yourself only escalates the issue and risks something more serious developing, like a full blown fight. At that point, you're also negatively impacting the experience of those around you as well as making things more complicated for the park employees. Alert the appropriate personnel and let them handle it.

Yup, they're both right. A few years ago I'd say that you can rely on a calendar like that pretty well, but the crowd level will have no real rhyme or reason behind it now. I've seen slow sunny summer Saturdays followed by slammed overcast Tuesdays. If this is going to be your only visit in a while, you can hold out and see what crowds are like when you get there, but I'd highly recommend you go for the Flash Pass. If it's a money concern, start now and save a couple dollars here or there each day, cut out little luxuries. It'll add up faster than you realize.

We need a solid six months of people stopping bitching about Skyrush. If we can get through that without one "ThighCrush" quip, the Intamin Fairy will come back to us.

^ The black and orange circle doesn't hyperlink to anything (at least not for me), but I found the First Unread Post link that you mentioned. Thanks, didn't realize that was there!

One of the things I love the most about the new mobile view is the "New Posts" button that takes you directly to the first new post you haven't seen yet in a topic. Any chance that functionality could get built into the main forum? EDIT: I have since been made aware that this functionality exists and I just never noticed it.

For anyone like myself who enjoys CoasterDynamix's roller coaster models, Holiday World recently added a Thunderbird NanoCoaster and Voyage NanoCoaster to their online shop, each for $34.99.

I wonder how many of my other posts made your "most short-sighted" archive! Oh I absolutely agree with you. As much as I love the park, their additions and expansions over the years have, quite literally, really boxed them in.

You guys speak about moving the zoo as if it's as easy as right-clicking it and dragging it to a new location like in Roller Coaster Tycoon. I highly doubt the park is going to invest the capital into moving something as large and complex as a zoo when they could just build new attractions on top of the land to which people are proposing the zoo moves.

The main issue to the "added gate" argument for the water park is that its already completely surrounded by the amusement park itself. I don't really see how they'd accommodate that even if they were to consider that an option.

This'll help. They had a big(ish) hit a while back with Meant to Live, which is just as awful and whiny now as I remembered it. Bleh.

Raise your hand if you've seen Billy Joel in concert.

I don't know the exact size of crowd the venue can hold, but it's at least a few thousand. Lining up early depends on the popularity of the artist, sometimes you'll want to get in line a couple hours ahead of time if you want to sit up close. Odds are it'll be fewer people than what the Marshall Tucker Band attracted in 1981.

I think Wildcat is a frustrating roller coaster because it SHOULD be a lot better than it actually is. It's unfortunate that the track was beat up so much by the original PTC trains before it got the Millennium Flyers added to it.

Travesty. I do not think it means what you think it means. I'm one of the few, misguided, feeble-minded folks who actually kind of likes Wildcat, but I wouldn't lose a minute of sleep over it being removed in the future.

^ On the contrary, I think the forum would appreciate a good joke now and then.

There's a pretty simple explanation for the decline in foreign workers. You can not want to talk politics all you want, but there has been a well-documented decrease in work and student visa applications in the last year and a half ever since the White House and Congress begun initiating steps to make acquiring the visas more difficult. Additionally, various tech companies are starting to rely on the H1-B work visa program more and more, which is the program parks would use to hire temporary foreign workers in the past. This, coupled with the overall decrease in approved visas across the board, and that helps explain why theme parks may be struggling with staffing issues. You can have whatever opinion you'd like on the current state of politics and the administration, but those are facts. There are also some very interesting statistics on a variety of contributing factors to the decline of the "summer job", as it's not necessarily just an increase in laziness. From the article: Short answer: more and more teenagers are focusing on their education, including an overall increase in college enrollment and an increase in students taking summer classes. As someone previously stated, the days of a bachelor's degree being enough to stand out in a job market are long gone (hell, I'm kicking myself for going straight to grad school and getting a generic MBA instead of waiting and choosing a more specific masters degree in my field to help my resume stand out more). Are there lazy kids out there? Absolutely, but that’s no new thing - I worked with plenty of other teenagers growing up who had questionable work ethic. It’s important to avoid the rose-tinted glasses when discussing this subject. I myself am one of those middle-class adults who tends to wax nostalgic about my summer job experience and used to have pretty strong opinions on "making sure my kids grow up right, know the value of a dollar, understand the meaning of hard work, blah blah BS BS yadda yadda". However, facts and statistics don't lie, and, once my kids are old enough, I'll need to consider what the culture, education environment, and job markets are like in order to figure out what's really best for their future before I choose to “gift” them working papers on their 14th birthday like my mom did to me.

Doesn't sound like it. It was down for me when I visited in late April. Left me a little disappointed, it seemed like a fun mine train. I had figured it was just that day, but every report I've seen since then has mentioned that it continued to be down.