teacherkim

Glad you had fun and sorry about LR. Took my son 3 tries to get it As a short person I HATE the restraints on MM, there is so much space between my shoulder and the restraint that it jams me up and actually gives me bruises on the tops of my shoulders. Don't pass up Dragonflier next time though, no joke, it is a very very fun coaster. Hope you got to see some of the Smokies and the surrounding area.

When my husband, Steve, rode steve he thought it was rough and that the RMC trains were uncomfortable. However, he is not an enthusiast by any stretch of the imagination, so what does he know. There that statement is grammatically correct, on topic and factual On a serious note I have a huge soft spot for dive coasters, so guess we will just have to come back down to SFFT to try out DDC (is that the abbreviation we are using?) even though we were there earlier this year. Darn.

RP is seriously one of my favorite hotels that I have ever stayed at, and I am counting theme park and non theme park venues. I love that place.

Edit to the there is nothing going in where TW was comment; apparently there is a haunt maze in that space, so any "activity" anyone noticed before FF was that going in.

You must just go across the bridge really slow while you are watching Eagles Four hours sounds about right from your neighborhood, unless you stop off at Fast Eddie's for a few beers and a basket of peel and eat shrimp first.

Griffon is by far my favorite of the dive coasters (have not made it up to Yukon Striker yet) but I can't quite put my finger on why. I just know that I find Shiekra and Valravn really fun BUT Griffon usually has me laughing like crazy. And as Bert and Zach know I took one of the most serious faced coaster ride pics ever on Orion, lol, so I don't always show it.

Been out of the country for the last 10 days so just getting caught up. While we would all love a new coaster, I've always agreed with the stance that investments in the park that bring in the masses are better for the bottom line. For example many enthusiasts ignore the water park BUT the mom that has to sit all day while the kids ride stuff and she doesn't will notice the quality of the water park as that's where she will spend the day to relax and have a "pool" day. Multi-generational rides like JL, water slides, and the carousel are an investment and get a good roi for this particular park. We can argue all day about the demographics that make that reality, different for every park. Doesn't mean that corporate hates us or loves us, they do what's best for the bottom line. At some point we will get a new coaster, it just isn't a priority right now for park investment imho. As far as TW site goes, the boy says you are all crazy. He looked at it and there are no markers or any sign of anything happening there Zach, why does it take you 5 hours to get to SDC? Do you stop and eat rolls at Lamberts for two hours?

It's not really a cost issue, there just traditionally haven't been any flights from STL into Knoxville that don't go some super round about way like through Denver or I can fly into Nashville and still have a 3 and half hour drive which seems dumb. Ends up taking the same amount of time as driving and costing more so not worth it. Apparently Delta has just added a flight with a short layover in ATL (been getting some notifications since I am flying Delta soon to Paris) So that MAY be a game changer. I'll pay for it if saves me a lot of time.

When we finally got some rides on it in May of this year, it was my son's third attempt and my second. Keep in mind that is a one way 8 - 8 1/2 hour drive with not a real flight option to cut the time. First time we were on it as we were pulling out of the station he insisted he would not believe it was happening and/or celebrate in any way until we crested the lift hill, lol.

Not yet but the boy is mostly working SkyScreamer now that Eagle is closed so I will tell him to try to get some info out of the supervisors. Of course he is 18 so he's not very talented at spying yet.

Should be. As far as price it varies a lot depending on whether or not they have a two for one going or pass/member discount (which is usually in play) or buy one get one half off or any number of other promotions. Worst case scenario it shouldn't cost you more than $15 pp

This is definitely a good thing even though it will be a short term bummer. I too hope they restore the rock mosaic, it really was super cool. As well as perhaps new signage that lists all of the coasters parameters that made it a world record breaker at the time. The current sign at the entrance/exit is in very sad shape and almost unreadable. I actually talked to Tom Rebbie the owner/CEO of PTC about Eagle (we got to tour PTC at CoasterCon) and he definitely has a fondness for it since it was the last coaster designed by the company, whom John Allen worked for at the time. The company often gives out awards similar to ACE's landmark coaster thing, which Eagle already is, to parks that preserve PTC's.

I did but I think Zach was being his usual sarcastic self and metaphorically giving his opinion that Eagle is the only good ride; therefore if it is closed for him the park might as well be closed. If I have to explain you to others Zach you aren't composing your posts well

Well I never found out what caused the fight but as an fyi to anyone headed to the park in the near future, latest intel from the ride op that lives in my house; Eagle is closed probably for the rest of the year with work walls all around the old games area, entrance and Superman. This is to facilitate the dismantling of Superman and construction of Catwoman Whip. Several of the games buildings have already been torn down. On the plus side, apparently when it is all done they will go back to using the original entrance of Eagle.

^ There's a difference between being stuck in gridlocked interstate traffic with no escape heading into the Cajon Pass, and driving around the surface streets of Hollywood with a billion different means of escape if Fairfax gets backed up. Guess I have gotten lucky, lol! Driven all around San Francisco and multiple times around LA and never had gridlock that lasted more than 10 minutes and I've always found California drivers to be aggressive but fair and decent drivers. Where I live people speed up and purposely try to block you getting on the highway all the time. Stupid. But I actually like to drive, my husband hates driving......so to each their own.

And I would take the traffic in LA (just drove all over for a week there) over the people in my hometown that simply Do. Not. Know. How. To. Drive. Lots of volume in LA but at least drivers know how to merge and are relatively courteous about it compared to St. Louis. In fact we kind of had fun driving all around Hollywood when we made a stop at the La Brea tar pits on our way from SFMM to Belmont Park in SD. Funny how differently we all view the same thing, lol.

Sorry if I over abbreviated! SkyScreamer and Boomerang.

There was a brawl that needed lots of security toward the end of the day between SS and Boomer yesterday. Bad enough that they had to cease operation of SS which double sucked because it was down all day Sat and much of the day Sun. Let you know if I get any details on it after today.

We were there on Sat Aug 28th and did NOT get a break from the heat, which usually is not an issue for me; but105? Holy hell it was hot! Anyway we were on a SoCal coaster trip and since we had been to SFMM before decided it would be the sacrificial Saturday park since we were going to have to hit one of them on the weekend and therefore could skip some of our less than favorites if time was an issue. We used our memberships to do the free upgrade to Platinum for Gold price on flashpasses AFTER I explained to the employee that I was allowed to use that perk once at each park not just once total like she thought when she told us we weren't eligible and then seemed to take a while to understand that we had been to other parks that year After she confirmed with the supervisor she did the transaction all the while being amazed when I told her we had actually been to 4 other SF parks this year and that I understood the procedure better than she did. Anyway, I can confirm that the indoor queues are not being utilized for lines due to Covid. Not because they are particularly worried about the spread but more because they didn't want to have to argue with guests about masks and such. At the end of the night when I had hit the wall but my son was waiting in line for one more WCR ride I had a long chat with the young, naïve, and clearly inexperienced ride op who confirmed that. When people lost their shit because some girls pulled the "excuse me we are catching up with our people" ploy, skipped the whole line and then he let them go on not realizing he had just been bamboozled I suggested he might want to make people show him who they were catching up to when they tried this. He did and was most amazed when they then would walk off since there was in reality no one to catch up to. And when he complained they were never going to get to leave because people kept joining the line after park close I suggested he might want to physically put the ribbon across the entrance and tell them the line was closed. Again he did and was amazed at how well that worked. You're welcome kid. Seriously I should have gotten a supervisor's pay that day. We did go straight to WCR at the back of the park and were able to get a regular line wait of only about 25 min and thus was able to save our FP for a second ride when the line had gotten a lot longer after the GP made it there. Then at the end of the night when most of the people had melted the wait was back down to about 30 min. Also, right at dusk a whole crap ton of bats came out and were flapping all around the park and helpfully eating all the bugs congregating at the various lights around the park. As far as I could tell no one else had a clue that they were there. One other couple stopped to look because they saw me staring up at the sky and they were amazed when I pointed out the bats, lol. No idea what cave and/or abandoned building they spent the daylight hours in but it must have been fairly close. Other than that pretty typical SF Sat summer day. Only major ride that we would have done but couldn't because it was down was JL. Oh yeah and Tatsu which I gather has been down a while.

We were there on Thurs 8/26, not the Dippin Dots Lady but an employee in one of the stores told me they were waiting on a part from Gerstlauer that they had not been able to get due to the current supply chain mess. Take that for what you will. Every other coaster was open that day. Jaguar went down briefly but they got it back up in less than an hour. Waits were low and we actually got to a point about 4:30 where we had gone on everything we wanted, and actually headed out before park closing which is unusual for us. Nothing bad on the park it was just kind of a dull slow day due I am sure to many schools going back that week.

Just as an fyi - we were there last Monday 8/30. Park was super dead (I know it was the first day back to school for a lot of the locals) Tidal Twister didn't even have a train on and 0 activity around it. Every ride should have been a walk on but in reality was a station wait due to super slow ops, not that it was a big deal with such a low crowd. One weird thing was that Electric Ocean was listed to be going from 4-6 but the park was closing at 5? So not sure what was going on with that but didn't seem worth it when it would still be daylight out either way. We did everything we wanted to do in about 3 hours, at a leisurely pace and including grabbing something to eat. Left about 1 and spent the rest of the day at the Zoo. It was the last day of a SoCal trip so not a big deal to us since we kind of wanted to see the Zoo anyway and had already spent the evening before at Belmont Park, but kind of a meh visit.

Weird just during the fair...............? Hmmmmm. I feel like it's weird all the time, not that that's a bad thing, lol.

We were going to stop there in December but already have a pretty packed trip (which is a bigger family Christmas trip) so we may just wait on BGT until spring break time. At least we have time to think about it. Disappointed because I was really hoping to get on it while we were already going to be in Orlando and Clearwater the two weeks leading up to Christmas. Oh well.

Here's hoping, we are going to be there right before Christmas,

On the topic of hours for the rest of the year. I have noticed that right now they are not listing the two November weekends between Halloween and the start of HITP as open. Usually it would be 12-6 hours under the theme of "fall weekends". So not sure what is up with that. At the moment the employee availability request only goes through Sept 19, which will be the last weekend before FF.