teacherkim

To quote Billy Joel "you may be wrong for all I know but you may be right"................while I realize everyone is going to speculate and have an opinion; I'm going to do my best to just give it a fair chance and wait and see how it works out. I'm not sure we will fully realize the impact until at least a few years have gone by. I also think just lumping one chain bad and one chain good is a bit of an oversimplification. Both chains have their pros/cons and both chains have their stand out parks and their regional nobodies. I do hope they offer some sort of all encompassing pass.

I'm glad to see they've been continuing with updates on FB. Not only the new ride but food and drink offerings as well as Trivia Tuesdays. I know I have kind of harped on this but I really think it is so important for the park to engage the community. Despite whatever gripes we might have as individuals, we certainly all want the park to be successful.

I notice it. Didn't get triggered, lol, but noticed it.

Well PETA is going after them anyway. Not so much the park itself but the company that provides the animals and, I think, the staff for the petting/animal areas. Demanding an investigation and that the state do extra inspections, etc, etc. And then apparently goats got loose a few days later.

Ok, good to know. I've never had insurance through the airline, I have a yearly, very inexpensive, policy through an insurance company. It doesn't cover cancel for any reason but does cover things like health related delays or airline delay/cancellations. You might want to look into that for the future.

So apparently the merger will be finalized by July 1st. Interested to see what sort of announcements/changes (if any) we get after that.

Was your insurance through the airline or through a private company? Just curious. Joel and I are flying United to Europe for the ACE trip in July. We'll see how it goes. I much prefer Delta but they just couldn't match the price/schedule for this particular itinerary.

Video played just fine for me. Someone's getting a chewing out and/or potentially fired after that. That's all they would have needed was for someone else to get injured at the park. Plus is one of the camels had gotten hurt PETA would be all up their ass.

No line skip program but like Mikey said lines will be manageable once the water park opens. Even if your kids can't do the bigger slides, the water park is very good and the bigger slides have a single rider queue so if your kids are old enough to wait for you at the exit it will be fairly quick. I would suggest doing KK first and just staying in Louisville and making HW a day trip from in there. KK is eastern time zone and HW is central time zone and about an hours drive. So you will basically arrive at the same time that you leave and then it's not so bad just driving back to crash in a hotel in or near Louisville. There is truly nothing else to do around HW unless you want to rent one of the cabins and look at the small lake. I mean there really aren't even any restaurants. A subway and maybe a pizza place. There is a very good restaurant about halfway between Louisville and HW called the The Overlook Restaurant (theoverlook.com) with good food and fabulous views of the OH river. If the timing works out its a great place to stop. Fyi, it is eastern time so it will be an hour later than the park.

Lol, some gp on FB actually complained about it going up too fast and she's worried it won't be safe. She wants them to slow down! Was talking about how when rides go up too fast there are dead bodies

So, we decided on a bit of a whim to spend the day at the park yesterday. About a 3 hr 15 min drive for us each way, so we just did a day trip. We did not go to the water park this time since it had just opened and I suspected they wouldn't have everything going yet (that turned out to be accurate) and I also assumed the water would be fairly cold especially after the storms and hail of the night before (not sure if that was correct but based on the frigid temps of the log flume, probably) Although from observations there did look to be plenty of people that gave it a go. Good Gravy is a very basic layout, as expected with a Vekoma family boomerang, but the theming and the queue are absolutely fabulous. Grandma's house is still decorated in all of it 60's mid century kitsch, including dark brown cabinets and orange countertops in the kitchen. If you're old enough you know what I'm talking about, lol. Even if you don't want to ride it, go through the queue. Ops were still brushing the rust off. Really slow at Voyage but we saw a whole group being trained so I'm willing to give them the benefit of the doubt that they just need to get a little more practice in. Although the Legend crew was rocking it. All major rides going, no downtimes that I am aware of. In fact the only rides I saw not open were some of the slides in the water park as mentioned. Crowds were manageable. It was a good day. Already had a couple shows running, the high dive show and a magic show that seemed to be geared toward kids. Thanks to HW for having the EV chargers! Nice to get some free juice along with the parking, drinks, and sunscreen.

Aren't all the Scandinavian cities just so immaculate and orderly? I think when you were at the Skywheel you were right down by the fish market and where you can catch the ferries out to some of the islands in the bay. Suemolinna island is absolutely lovely if you are ever in Helsinki again. The market has huge amazing produce, particularly strawberries the size of small tomatoes and a wide variety of handmade/local crafts. I still have some amber earrings I bought there about 12 years ago when we were there. The wheel wasn't built until after we were there but it looks like the same area.

So, if you watch Theme Park Worldwide review of it they had some info about this. Apparently, two of the trains did not yet have a stabilizer element installed on them, safe to operate but not fun for the rider. If you get one of those two trains, terrible ride. Any of the other trains and it's fine. Theory is that the park decided to go ahead and run those two for capacity. How long it will be until that is corrected (if that is 100% accurate) no one seems to know. I do hope they get it fixed before we are there in July. That one in is probably pushing the boundaries for me on motion sickness issues and I want to ride but really really don't want to get stuck with a "bad train"

Hopefully, they will keep up steady progress on it. I honestly don't think most people will be that upset if it opens late summer or even in time for FF as long as they see that something is happening and it doesn't stall at some point.

Lol, seriously?

Whoops, ok Boomer.

I will be excited to see the carousel after getting the demo of how the refurbishment works back in Sept 2020, not to mention the historical importance of it and several of my friends from back when I owned horses and did equestrian competitions very much want to come and see the completed carousel. BUT...........overall I think it is super that they are FINALLY getting better about promoting things. One festival and a couple new shows may not seem like a big deal to most enthusiasts but for locals that seldom go to other parks it will be nice. Particularly, for non riding parents and grandparents that are hanging out with kids all day. Hopefully, they continue to promote things, so far even minor improvements have been met with mostly positive feedback on social media. People just like to know things are happening. It will be interesting to see how quickly they get Joker up and operating since they are promoting it as this summer. I mean, I can't ride it but it will be popular and that corner of the park will be looking pretty good now.

Dunno, but I talked to one of the FITH ride ops who was hanging around during ert, waiting for her boyfriend who was an OR ride op annnd she didn't know the exact nature of the issue (or she wasn't saying) but did say, and this is a verbatim quote "it's big time dead" So, let the speculation begin, lol!!

Oh yeah and we were given some samples from the new pretzel place. We got hot dogs wrapped in pretzel (like pigs in a blanket) and some little dollar brisket sandwiches, both were quite yummy.

So, we got on the new FITH yesterday and I thought it was great. Kept all of the original storyline but with updated audio/visual and of course all new set pieces. The differences are slight but only enhance the experience. For those worried about screens instead of physical sets. Don't, 99% are physical sets with just a few discreet, well placed screens. Curious to see if RMC branches out with more of this sort of thing since it was obviously out of their normal wheelhouse. Unfortunately, I really was counting on some more rides to be able to see everything but that didn't happen. After first ride of the day we were supposed to get an hour of ert on it at park close but it went down late in the day and had to be evac'd so never got the extra rides. The park very graciously subbed Outlaw Run for an hour of ert and everyone was pretty happy about that. Anyone who complains about this redo in any way is clearly just and angry old man on the inside, yelling at clouds. As for the rest of the park. Wildfire had apparently been struck by lightening on Friday and the computer kept seeing a third ghost train and doing e-stops. They did get it up and running in the late afternoon but had to go down to one train ops to make that happen. Thunderation was down all day, no idea why. Powder keg and TT both had a little down time but got up and going fairly quickly. Good news, every coaster that was operational was using 2 trains, with the exception of course of Wildfire.

You didn't, no worries. And you made a valid point......................I just don't remember the others being such a big deal, anticipation wise. BUT as you point out there wasn't the daily social media/drone footage blitz going on AND to be fair some of those were at a time in my life when I wasn't focusing that much on theme parks. IOA for example, truly one of my favorite parks now, opened when I was about 30...........establishing a career and heavily involved in a completely different hobby that took a huge time and money commitment. About ten years later I had stopped such a huge commitment to the other thing and was introducing my son to theme parks and rediscovering in myself a long lost love for them. So all of that played a part in my probably not well thought out comment

Looks like a super fun, unique experience! We had a couple tiny airports like that in Peru, lol.

Quick jump in because I'm going out of town tomorrow. We were there on Easter, agree with most of what Dan said although the GP on FB were all thrilled that Buccaneer had gone back to it's original theme and no one at the park seemed to care that it looked Carnival like, just saying. FYI-Easter crowds were very manageable so a good day to go while all the pious are in church. Agree there is no way Joker will be ready until later in the season, but I didn't expect it to be. One thing to note on parking. We used the speedy pass thing. The lanes that were labeled speedy pass were closed but another lane opened up for us automatically anyway So, we went to preferred because we get it on our pass. The security guard checked my pass level and let me in, but I did notice some people still had cards they had gotten at the tollbooth. I was chatting to him while my son was putting the chargers on plugshare and he told me that there would be days when reservations would be required but only on days they anticipated it to be really busy and he thought it would be on the website. He did not seem very sure and I'm thinking there are still some operational kinks to work out on this one. Speaking of the chargers, we saw at least 4 getting used, mostly by plug in hybrids which have less charging opportunities than Teslas or full electric for example. There were 8 in preferred and 12 in regular. I asked the parking lot guard about non electric vehicles using them and he said it hadn't been a problem the first few days but that there was nothing they could do about it anyway since they didn't own the chargers. Ok, but they are on your property? I take that more to mean, we don't have the manpower or will to deal with it and don't want to start a fight. I get it, but irritating just the same. Hopefully, their proximity to the parking guard will discourage most. Overall though, it was obvious that work had been going on and hopefully now that we have a dedicated park president once again the effort will continue which will result in better environment for the employees and better guest experience; the FB updates are a good start. OK, I'm outta here for a couple weeks.

I get that, I'm much older than you and was around for all that plus Epcot and Animal Kingdom...........but, my point is that this is going to be on such a grander scale on both the rides and how grandiose it will be than those were when they opened, or at least it seems that way to me. Maybe I'm just not remembering the hype or maybe I'm just legit way more excited about a Universal park than Disney And to be fair I wasn't really thinking along the lines of China or Dubai, since those are not easily accessible for most people from the USA

I'm soooo excited about this park! Universal Orlando is already my favorite park and to have a brand new park of this scale and quality; whoop, whoop!! I mean how often does that happen in a lifetime?!