ahecht

I would imagine that wind loading on the ship would tilt it a lot more than the weight of the Northstar arm.

The PLC issue came directly from the Gravity Group rep at Holiwood Nights a few years ago as the reason they stop testing when the park goes to full week operation in May.

As was mentioned above, Giant supermarkets have $15 off tickets and free parking when you buy two regular tickets. Dunkin donuts stores in the area will also have coupons, but only through April. Another thing to note is that you can use the preview plan to get into the park for free the evening before you use the tickets (2.5 hours before the park closes most days or 3.5 before the park closes if the park closes at 11).

I said "No, only weekends", but I can usually make a Friday work. It's the middle of the week (Monday-Thursday) that's difficult.

One thing to remember is that they can't test the Timberliners while the park is open every day since they have to completely reprogram the PLC to recognize the different brake fin configuration.

http://touch.latimes.com/#section/-1/article/p2p-75479569/ The one good thing about Carnival's shoddy maintenance is that it means Jewel of the Seas will have Cozumel all to itself on my cruise in two weeks. I doubt that the Carnival Triumph will be able to make it there.

I've gotten rain checks in 2009, 2010, and 2011 when the park decided to close mid afternoon due to rain (I have horrible luck with weather at SFNE). In all cases the bad weather had mostly passed but the park was too empty for them to keep open. They didn't announce that they were giving them out, but they would give them to anyone that asked or complained and word got around quickly. They are probably announcing it as a policy because word is getting around about them closing early due to light crowds. I've been at other parks (mostly Magic Mountain) where the park stayed open after bad weather had passed despite there being less guests than employees in the park.

I'm not a big fan of tomatoes (or vegetarian food in general), but the fried green tomato sandwich was my favorite quick-service meal in either park. That thing is amazing!

Since the dead horse apparently needed further beating, the guy that did F&@%ING CRUISE SHIP and F&@%ING LAS VEGAS made another video -- F&@%ING CRUISE SHIP 2. This one took place on Freedom of the Seas:

Last time I did that, the ticket booth gave me a voucher to get in to the park but I had to turn in the voucher to get my pass processed. Unfortunately, that meant that when I tried to hop over to DCA I only had the blacked-out pass and had to wait for a manager to come and do an override. Because the pass wasn't technically used to enter the park, I couldn't use it to get fastpasses. They may have fixed this problem by now, since I did this back when the AP processing was in the Space Mountain on-ride photo shop, so probably 2004 or so.

First "coaster" was the Dragon's Tail mountain coaster in Labadee. First roller coaster (no quotes) was Manta.

The issue with the lawsuit was that US Maritime Law prohibits contracts that absolve shipping companies of negligence, so the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeal declared the waivers invalid. That said, Royal Caribbean did relax the rules in February right before my cruise on Independence, and the memo didn't actually get to the sports staff until midway through the cruise.

Maybe they're planning on building the star flyer on the Catapult site and keeping the skycoaster.

It should go to [PARK_NEAR_ME] because [REASON].

If there was a news story about any cruise ship having a 100-person norovirus outbreak I would say that. Heck, I've been at summer camps where more than 100 people got norovirus. No one mentioned when the Carnival Glory had 208 people get noro last August. The only times a norovirus outbreak was mentioned in this thread were the massive outbreak on the Crown Princess that ended with the ship having to return to port two days early due to 752 people getting sick over two consecutive cruises and the outbreak on the P&O Oriana where 417 people got sick. I will add that of the 16 norovirus outbreaks reported to the US CDC in 2012 (which doesn't include Carnival's P&O outbreak listed above, since that ship returned to a British port), 11 were on lines owned by Carnival Corp. Only 4 were on Royal Caribbean owned lines. Just sayin...

http://news.yahoo.com/royal-caribbean-cruise-ship-back-port-108-sick-191914459--finance.html Slow news day?

Both ships were scheduled to visit Key West between Nassau and Florida or vice versa. Even if there was room in the schedule, Half Moon Cay (Carnival and Holland America's private island) and Princess Cays (Princess's private resort) are in the wrong direction, meaning they'd either have to reschedule with Nassau (which may not be possible or may incur financial penalties) or double back and waste a significant amount of fuel. Besides, Coco Cay is much less out of the way than Key West, so I imagine that there are significant fuel savings for Carnival that help offset the payments to Royal Caribbean.

Can't be any worse than when Bud Light takes over the island.

^There's actually a huge amount of land available for the Simpsons to expand in USH. If the Simpsons take over Doc Browns, Cinnebon, and the El Pollo Loco, they might as well continue through the El Pollo Loco outdoor seating area all the way to the Rock Vegas area (I'm sure Simpsons themed games would be more popular than games based on a decade old Steven Baldwin movie). And heck, once you're at Rock Vegas, the wide-open Wild West theater plot is right there.

Hatred of Potter aside, a burger place is better than the Transformers ride?

(With apologies to Jeff Foxworthy) You just might be an ACEr if... You're more excited about a quick-service restaurant and a bar than one of the most technically advanced dark rides in the world and a highly themed roller coaster.

But here's the thing: I was at Sea World on Sunday and, despite the Styx concert, the park was empty (5 minute wait for Kraken and 15 for Manta), although the 55° weather may have been a factor. I also spent Tuesday and Wednesday at Busch Gardens Tampa where the weather was fine and the crowds were very light as well. If you took out the huge Quinceañera groups (please!), we would've practically been the only people in the park. Montu was literally a walk-on all day and was sending out quite a few trains with only the front row filled and Cheetah Hunt had only 10 to 15 minute waits. I think this is more a case of Universal doing something right than a massive influx of Northeasterners and government workers.

DisneySea's Fantasmic! (which is, at least in YouTube videos, more impressive).

I was "stranded" on Independence of the Seas while all this was going down. The CNN International channel on the ship was covering this constantly, so there were a lot of people on board talking about Carnival (the Cruise Director even took some pot shots at Carnival during one of the shows). I did run into one guy wearing a t-shirt and jeans in Portofino (the upscale Italian restaurant on the ship) who said that he really didn't like Royal Caribbean very much and would stick with Carnival for his next cruise despite what had happened.