nannerdw

Define "as much." Seriously, though, Thunderhead is great, and it seems to never generate a line when I'm there, even on Saturdays.

Ride feel is extremely similar to El Toro, though this ride throws you around a bit more and feels just slightly more like a traditional wooden coaster. The one bump on El Toro (and there really was only one from what I remember, on the shallow floater air hill after the turnaround), was more jarring than any of the bumps on Lightning Rod, IMO. Also, the laterals coming out of the outward wave turn are pretty strong. It reminds me a lot of the twists on Skyrush, though without feeling like you're actually going to fall out, lol.

Yes, the back had some (maybe 4 or 5) pretty severe jolts throughout the first part of the ride, but then everything after the 2nd wave turn was smooth. My front and middle seat rides were smooth throughout the entire ride. I got a front seat ride after 10:00 pm. The middle of the ride (exit of first wave turn to exit of outside wave turn) was absolutely pitch black. I couldn't even see the track Did anybody else feel like they were getting tunnel vision at the top of the wave turn? Maybe it was just the position of the sun shining right into my eyes that gave me that impression, but I was like "Yeah, the first drop had a lot of sustained airtime before the pullout, but I really should not be greying out right now." It was kind of strange. Could be that I'm just not used to being out in 100 degree heat, lol.

I got 3 rides on it today. The line was about 30 minutes. Airtime on the quad down in the back seat is amazing. It easily tops El Toro for me. It had a couple of weird, jarring bumps going into and out of the first wave turn. Other than that, though, it was a very smooth ride. ProTip: Put the seat belt buckle ON TOP of the lapbar if you can. Otherwise you will get stabbed by it in a very unpleasant way, lol.

When I was there, they said they would close off the queue for Beast right at park closing, and then keep cycling people through until everyone who was already in line got to ride. They had to wait for the fireworks to end before they could start it back up, though, so I'm guessing it stayed open pretty late. I was over at Bat by that time, though, and got the last train of the night right before the fireworks began. I'm jealous of the people who got to be on the drop tower when the fireworks started.

I was never a fan of Beast. I always thought of it as a giant, overhyped and overtrimmed mine train. However, last week I finally got my first night ride on it, and I totally understand now. I was blown away. The feeling of speed was incredible, the tunnels were pitch black, and the winding turns through the woods were completely secluded from the rest of the park. Also (and I almost couldn't believe this) it really was one of the smoothest non-hybrid wooden coasters I've ever ridden. I'm not even kidding. The only night ride that even comes close for me is Voyage, but that ride takes its toll on you very quickly. I would also highly recommend The Bat in the front row at night. It's a surreal experience.

...Also, the new lapbar is basically a tourniquet, so that's... umm... not any better than it was before. Sorry, Vekoma, try again. Actually, I don't think there's anything that could save this ride. There is only one solution. It must be dropped into the fiery pits of Mordor. It may seem alluring with it's shiny new red paint job, but make no mistake, this ride will consume your soul if take more than a passing glance at it.

Racer at Kennywood (well, half of it at least, lol) Maybe I can ride the other half later and count it as a new credit

About 10 minutes, in mid-afternoon. It really was one of the best walk-through attractions I've experienced (even though it's mostly just cheesy props behind glass, and some bare hallways without much decoration, though a couple of the rooms do have some really nice deco). Just the experience of stumbling around through the moving hallways was totally unlike anything else I've experienced. Everyone was falling into each other and laughing hysterically the whole way through I think I'd rank it as my #2, after Mysterious Mansion in Gatlinburg, though admittedly, I haven't been through very many walk-through attractions yet. I'm planning to do Netherworld in Atlanta this year.

Sky Rocket was super uncomfortable for me. Good luck riding this if you're over 6 feet tall. The placement of the shin guard left zero room for my feet, and I had to contort my legs in a weird way and turn my feet sideways so the lapbar would close, just like Tempesto The shooting dark ride at this park is amazing, and the Noah's Ark walkthrough attraction was ridiculously fun; I went through it 3 times. It felt so much like a haunted house, I half expected scare actors to be hiding in the corners. lol Also, those staircases inside the boat freaked me out a little bit. I've never felt like an amusement park attraction was trying so hard to make me fall and twist my ankle. Good thing I have good balance My ranking for the coasters in the park: Thunderbolt > Phantom > Jackrabbit > Racer > Sky Rocket I actually forgot that Exterminator existed, and I forgot to ride it. whoops I didn't look at the map and just assumed there was nothing else behind the (very nicely themed) Pittsburg Plunge. Also, I think I prefer Black Widow to any of the Huss Giant Frisbees I've ridden.

The lines were really short today. Most rides were a total walk-on, and Valravn took about 20 minutes in the mid afternoon. I re-rode Gatekeeper in row 7 left, inside seat, and it was very smooth. Then I rode it in row 8 right, outside seat, and had a pretty rough ride again I also rode Mean Streak in the back for comparison to the front. I noticed no difference in roughness. The experience was mostly the same, except for a slight, almost airtime moment down one of the drops in the back seat. Still not a "horrible" ride by any means. Lots of Mean Streak's footers had orange spots spray painted on them. This can only mean one thing... CP must be getting a bunch of new RV campsites next year!

FWIW, Raptor and Banshee were both amazingly smooth for me, as long as I remembered to lean into the restraint on the transition into Raptor's brake run. Again, new restraints eww, but I found them to be very comparable rides otherwise. I'd put Raptor slightly ahead, but only because I nearly blacked out going into Banshee's second vertical loop, lol.

^ Well to be fair, Mean Streak doesn't pin your whole upper body to the seat. If it did, that would be a much different story.

Front left, and back right, both outside seats, both single rider (which I'm thinking might have more to do with the vibration than anything else).

I'll try riding Gatekeeper in the middle of the train today, in an inside seat, and early in the day before I get worn down by too many other rides, and see if that makes a difference. Of the wingriders I've ridden, Thunderbird was smooth as glass, Wild Eagle was mostly smooth, with just a few patches of mild shakiness, I really don't remember how smooth X-Fight was (RMC Goliath must blocked it out of my memory) but I think it was about like Wild Eagle, and Gatekeeper vibrated throughout most of the ride.

The lines weren't too bad today. I'm surprised I actually managed to get in all of the major coasters in a single day for once. Dragster (walk-on)- Great launch, decent airtime at the top, and so much smoother than Kingda Ka, it's not even funny. Even the brake run on this ride is intense. Millennium Force (10 minute wait)- The drop in the back seat wasn't nearly as amazing as I remembered (from my last ride like 9 years ago). Honestly, after visiting King's Island yesterday, I thought Diamondback's drop was much more exciting. I definitely never thought I'd say that, lol. MF was still just as smooth as I remembered, though. I had no problems with roughness at all. Maverick (25 minutes, though the line got much longer soon after I rode it)- Excellent! Better than excellent, in fact. The ride was one of my favorites already, but now with the new i305 vests, it's even better, and extremely re-rideable. much comfort very airtime wow Skyhawk (walk-on) - Still one of my favorite flats. Any ride with that much airtime and restraints that give you enough mobility to reach forward and touch your toes is a win in my book. Rougarou (10 minutes) - Nice, smooth, forceful ride, with some quick transitions and a couple of moments of decent airtime. Better than Mantis. Would ride again. Wicked Twister (20 minutes)- Best in the back seat, IMO. I've always loved the beach-side setting of this ride. I really wish there were more rides in this park that offered a beach view from the queue. The ride is over pretty quickly, but it packs a punch. It's worth riding twice in a row, front and back (just don't bother sitting in any of the middle seats.) Gatekeeper (walk-on)- Way too rough to be enjoyable. The EXTREMELY tight (stab into your hip bone) lap restraints were truly horrible for me, too, just like every other B&M that uses these restraints. At least the vests don't lock like Wild Eagle. The first drop was great, but this ride gave me more of a headache than anything else in the park, even Magnum. Blue Streak (5 minutes) - Not too rough, and has some nice airtime moments. Iron Dragon (15 minutes) - It's hard to give this ride a fair review right now, since I'm still getting over how incredible my night ride on The Bat was at KI last night, so I'll just say... This was an ok ride Power Tower Blue Side (10 minutes) - I like that the "down" side of this ride still has a pretty quick rise to the top, and a couple of floaty bounces on the way down. The inital drop itself is pretty uneventful, though. I didn't bother riding the Red "up" side. Corkscrew (10 minutes)- The front seat has better airtime than almost any other ride in the park, just sayin'. These Arrow OTSRs are never kind to my shoulders, though. I'm too tall to experience any headbanging on these types of rides, but there was still plenty of clavicle banging to be had. I had to hunch over in the seat to fit, so my back was hurting once I got off of the ride, too. #1AndDone #IWishTheseRidesJustHadLargerOTSRsSeriously Magnum (15 minutes) Good thing I took some headache meds this morning. Has as this ride always thrown you around so violently through the turnaround? I used to love this ride, but it was a bit much for me today. I had to take a break after this one. The ending bunny hops were still as great as I remembered (they're the only good part of the ride, IMO), I just had to scoot forward in my seat so the uncomfortable lap restraint would hit a meatier area on my spindly thighs, lol. Gemini (10 minutes)- Has some nice airtime in the back seat. These rides are very smooth, but just have a couple of awkward jerky transitions in the helices of death. Mean Streak (20 minutes)- I rode in the front. There was no airtime to be found anywhere on the ride, but it's really not that rough at all, IMO (at least not in a way that actually hurts), it just kind of shuffles awkwardly through the transitions and jostles you around. You have to ride it defensively. This is not a hands up kind of ride. Raptor (30 minutes) - The first drop is so good in the back seat. Very few rides still give me the feeling of losing my stomach. This is one of them. The MCBR didn't kick in at all, so the second half of the ride was relentless. I've never noticed before, but that straight section just before the cobra roll is actually a very very tiny bunny hop. You can see it clearly when you're standing in Valravn's plaza, and it's actually noticeable when you're on the ride. Pretty cool Maxair (15 minutes) - Great speed, and great views of the midway below. The purpose of that (very pronounced and inward facing) crotch nub confuses me so much, though, lol. Why does it exist? Whyy? It's not really much of an issue for me on this ride like it is on Top Spins, though. Cedar Creek Mine Ride (Walk-on) - One of the better mine trains I've ridden. The drop down to the water is great in the back seat (or as close as I could get to the back, since the back seats were closed off). Again, like Mean Streak, lean forward and ride this one defensively. Valravn (45 minutes) - This ride has the same uncomfortable restraints that I hate, so I wasn't looking forward to waiting a whole hour and a half for it. I finally got in line at the end of the day, though, and got on right as the park was officially closing. It's a nice relaxing ride, until you hit the brake run and realize just how stupidly tight the restraints have become. The view at the top of the lift is gorgeous (still nowhere near as gorgeous as Griffon, but I can't fault Valravn for that, lol). The airtime on the first drop was so minimal that it really didn't even feel a like drop to me. The second smaller drop was more fun, IMO, at least in the front seat where I was sitting. Standout moments of the ride were the airtime hill and the 0g roll. The ride had a slight rattle, but not enough to give me a headache, so I didn't mind.

Flyers would be such a great addition to this park, especially if they went out over the water like the ones at Indiana Beach... On the fly-o-planes, I usually just stop after a couple of spins. That ride is a major workout, lol. I kind of wish it had OTSRs, but that would make it much harder to flip.

Is it a manually-controlled ride cycle? Still no off-axis flipping Maybe they're still getting the hang of the controls.

I made a new version of the spreadsheet with a few fixes. See first post for download link. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Version 3.01 - Changelog: - Park list moved from Summary sheet to a separate Parks sheet. Current Park Names entered into that sheet will now show up in a dropdown list in the Park column of the Visits sheet. - Park and Visit totals moved to Parks sheet - Park count now only includes parks categorized as "Permanent Park" - Added Filter: Is New Credit This Year (will remain blank for a credit that has been listed previously in the same year) - Fixed Credits/Year graph, so that new credits ridden twice in the same year will still count as new. - Excel has a "feature" which makes messy duplicates of your Conditional Formatting rules when you paste rows into a table. If the formatting gets messed up, you typically have to go through and delete any auto-added Conditional Formatting entries, and manually fix the "Applies To" ranges so that they span the entire table. I've added a VBA macro to automatically remove all Conditional Formatting, and then add back a single default formatting rule every time the Visits sheet is activated. -I also added an address column to the Parks sheet, to take advantage of Excel's fancy new mapping tool.

I made a thread a long time ago with the master spreadsheet that I use for journaling all of my park visits, as an example for other people who like nerdily counting credits like I do. I didn't want to bump that thread, though, b/c I'd rather post this in the Random subforum. Now that I'm more comfortable with Excel's features, I wanted to have another go at it. I didn't really care about all the specific ride stats, like steel/wood, inversions, and track length. Excel does have some rudimentary relational database features via the PowerPivot addon, which could help prevent duplicate entries of this ride-specific data. It was frustrating to work with, though, so I just scrapped that idea and pared it down to the basics: ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Linky to file: Coaster Count 3.01 - https://drive.google.com/open?id=0Bz19S2TregSZX09JRFl3QkhrSW8 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Inputs: Date range of park visit Park Name (fill in Original Park Name in the collapsible column next to renamed parks, or next to rides that have been relocated) Ride Name (fill in Original Ride Name in the collapsible column next to rides that have been renamed) # of Laps on each ride during visit Totals: Running total of laps on each ride Credit #, which shows up next to each new credit Total Credits (I count renamed and/or relocated rides as the same credit) Total laps on all rides # of unique parks visited (re-named parks are counted once) Total number of park visits Extra collapsible columns that can be used to filter the data view: Filter by: Original Park Name Year of visit Old (re-ridden)/New credits Summary Sheet: Graph with the number of Old/New credits per year Top 10 most ridden List of all parks visited, sorted by visit count ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Old versions: Coaster Count 3.0 - https://drive.google.com/open?id=0Bz19S2TregSZZ3dXd0NIWHJ6UlU

From yesterday afternoon: I got 5 rides on Storm Chaser. Like other people have said, the airtime is noticeably better in the front, and IMO, the first drop is better in the front, too, because of the awesome hangtime. The airtime on this ride is intense, but it's nothing compared to Lightning Run's finale. I'd still rank Lightning Run as the best coaster in the park. Cyclos really surprised me. I thought the counterweight would take away from the intensity, but by the time it was making full revolutions, it felt like it was pulling at least 5 g's through the bottom, and gave me a bit of tunnel vision. I wish I'd gotten a chance to re-ride it before the thunderstorm closed everything down. T3 was actually even worse than I remembered. It's the same old T2, shuffling around like crazy, just replace the headbanging with a lap restraint that stabs painfully into your thighs. There's no reason to ride this more than once. Thunder Run had some nice airtime and really powerful lateral g's through the turns. It's pretty rough, but not in a torturous way like T3. and the Larson drop tower, amazing, as always

The ride op at Carowinds started making remarks about how high I was going, so I got nervous and stopped snapping. I think he was actually okay with it, though, lol. Most of the flyers I've ridden weren't really snappable. On the one at Holiday World, I could barely even get the seat to move up and down; it just sort of oscillated in place. I'm hoping that's not the case at SFOG.

The first drop looks crazier than I was expecting