joelwee

Edit: ^ you beat me to it.

With Cedar Fair lately, the ride will be half built before we ever get an announcement! They don't need to announce new rides, when they have enthusiasts watching the webcams and reporting every move that maintenance makes.

^ I'll never understand that mentality. "You clearly don't know anything about roller coasters because you don't have the same favorite that I do. My method of having fun is superior to yours."

Six Flags hosted its quarterly conference call with investors this morning. From "In The Loop" on Facebook: I wonder if we'll be seeing Six Flags Darien Lake or Elitch Gardens again? What do y'all think?

I can get my fill of Robb yelling, "Weeeee!!" on YouTube, so realistically, I wouldn't buy a BluRay volume.

Om nom nom nom...

Looking closely at the webcam, it looks like they removed the track segment from inside the station.

As I said above, I once waited 3 hours for X2. I don't plan on ever doing that again. If I know a line is more than an hour, I usually don't wait. Was X2 worth that long of a wait? If you're visiting the park and have never ridden it, then yes, I would definitely say it's worth the wait (or whatever it costs to buy a Flash Pass). Since SFMM is my home park, it wouldn't be worth it for me to wait in a 3-hour line again. But after that wait, it felt REALLY good to finally ride it.

Knott's Berry Farm's boysenberry pies are the bomb. I bring one home whenever I visit that park.

As I said above, I once waited 3 hours for X2. I don't plan on ever doing that again. If I know a line is more than an hour, I usually don't wait.

Great news about WCB! SFMM is my home park, so it won't be much of a trip for me, but I'm looking forward to meeting and riding coasters with some fellow TPR peeps.

Yes, I do. Do you smoke?

The Boomerang/Xcelerator webcam is back online. The mini-sun and the crane are back out there; it looks like they're removing another section of track next to the station. The lagoon is still empty.

What a travesty that would have been, not only for the loss of whizzer itself, but also for the likely loss of most of the wonderful trees and other plants that have grown in and around whizzer over the past 4 decades that help make it the best night ride in the park. Whizzer was wonderful back in the day with 5 train operation and before seatbelts, but the fact that it now runs its course through a literal forest is pretty fantatstic too. Thank god that management reversed course and saved this masterpiece. Revolution at SFMM is the same way. The old Schwarzkopf has had trees grow up around it for 40 years, and it's almost like driving through the forest. I wouldn't care nearly as much about that ride if it didn't have that atmosphere.

Not from this week, but still gold. Oh sure it is. Just follow the trail of body odor and desperation.

It must be a chain-wide policy; when I rode the Boomerang at Knott's a few weeks ago, I had to get out and walk around for a re-ride, even though the station was completely empty.

Surrender

I felt the same way when I visited the park two weeks ago. I've ridden TC a ton since it opened and it does seem faster now to me as well. It just flies through the course and the airtime is even more amazing than when it opened. I don't know if it's a matter of the ride being fully broken in now or what, but it definitely seemed to be running faster to me. I just rode it for the first time last summer, and I've ridden it a bunch since then. It seemed kind of sluggish during the winter, but that sure wasn't the case last weekend. I'm not sure what contributed to that, but I hope it stays like that all summer. On another topic, the park pressure-washed Riddler's Revenge last week in preparation for the repaint, and Wood Coaster Developments posted on their FB page that the retrack of Apocalypse is complete. I expect to see Apocalypse open sometime in the next couple of weeks, unless the park purposely delays it for some reason.

^ I picked up a new one from SFMM today. For those of you who aren't familiar with the park... in one corner of the park, they have a wall with pictures of their major coasters, including close-ups of the trains. They have Batman and Riddler's Revenge situated right next to each other on the wall. Some guy, looking at the pictures, yelled, "Hey, what the heck! Those two are the exact same ride, but one's blue and one's green!" Yyyyeah, except on the blue one, you hang underneath the track and whip through small loops and around tight corners while, on the green one, you stand up while going through a bunch of tall loops.

I ended up spending a few hours at SFMM today. The rest of my squad showed up about an hour before I did, and told me the park was packed. By the time I showed up (around 5:00), I saw a LOT of people leaving, making the last few hours of the day much more enjoyable. This weekend's warm weather seems to have loosened up the rides' wheel bearings, because it seemed like every ride was running faster and smoother than normal. Viper is back to two-train operation, which is good news for those of us who like to marathon that ride. X2 and Tatsu were, surprisingly, only a 20-minute wait. I skipped Full Throttle, since it seemed to have the longest line in the park, and headed over to ScreamPunk District to finish off the day with Scream and TC. If you haven't ridden front row on Scream, do yourself a favor and give it a try next time. Front row is my favorite row on floorless coasters, and in Scream's case, it seems to be the smoothest row, IMO. TC's operations were running kind of slow tonight, so we didn't get to race, but HOLY COW, did it fly! Its airtime game was top notch as it whipped through the cycle. Even in a middle row, I was out of my seat for most of the ride. Viper - 1 X2 - 1 Tatsu - 1 Scream - 1 Twisted Colossus - 1 Helpful Honda Express - 1

^ Or "I'm farting on all of you!!" while passing over a group of people on an alpine coaster.

Nobody ever wins those games, though, so there was no "danger" there.

To make it worse, you didn't visit any parks during spring break. I have three tests next week.

Some parks need these extra security measures. SFMM was plagued by gang activity back in the '90s; it was known as Six Stabs Tragic Mountain by the locals, since six people were stabbed at an all-night party. The park stepped up their security with metal detectors, and the park is much more pleasant now. But at other parks that don't have this problem, I really don't see the point in installing metal detectors, other than as a CYA move. I believe this was a chain-wide move. Knott's Berry Farm just received metal detectors earlier this year, and there's a firestorm in the Cedar Point thread about new metal detectors.