abovethesink

Thanks. I worded the question poorly though. I figured either would be light Monday. The question I meant to ask was which would be busier on Sunday? Thanks again

Part of a large and already expensive roadtrip. Any sort of Quick Queue/Flash Pass is not an option.

Hey all, we will be visiting BGW and KD Sunday and Monday. Is BGW the busier of the two like I would expect? Should we go to Kings Dominion on Sunday and Busch Gardens on Monday? Or does it not really matter? Thanks!

They are saying that it is unlikely that we will see that logo physically in the parks anywhere. It is the logo for the corporate offices, basically, and the SF parks merging into the new chain will keep their established logos on the ground. It is speculation at this point, of course, but I suspect they are right. I don't know why the new chain would spend money on switching all these out when the one thing the SF side brings above anything else is national brand recognition and those established logos are a big part of that.

Great Escape damn near had its new Gravity Group open for opening day! It was just a couple weeks late. Though I am not sure that I want other parks learning how to build coasters from The Great Escape... They might, you know, just not do it at all for 20 years at a time in that case.

Nothing more serious in the world. Except maybe stand up comedy, of course. And bummer on the 8/3 reopening target. That will be a big factor as we plan out our days on the fly for sure.

I am sorry if I distract from your stand up routine, but if I may ask politely, is Shellraiser down longterm? I haven't been following. Regardless, our summer road trips are specifically about getting out to new to us parks and attractions. You could call them credit whoring trips and be 90% right. Without the new Vekoma, Great Adventure doesn't have anything new to offer us as we have been so many times. Even with the disappointment of Shellraiser being down, if it is, we would still go to Nick Universe over SFGA because going to new places and riding new to us coasters is the mission statement of these roadtrips. I'd be surprised if we weren't back for a long weekend at Great Adventure a non-credit whoring capacity within the next year or two anyway.

We are starting our summer road trip on Saturday. We are driving down to Virginia for KD and BGW and driving North from there, needing to be back to way upstate NY by the following Monday. Other than hitting the VA parks (first time since the year Verbolten opened) and then Six Flags America (never been), it is wide open in terms of what we can visit within the time window. There is no hope the new Boomerang is going to be open by say next weekend (20th/21st), right? I don't think I can prioritize getting SGAdv on the list otherwise. I still need all those NJ boardwalk parks, Coney, Nickelodeon Universe, Playland, etc.

Again, no first hand experience, but what I have read from others isn't that these are necessarily rough, it is just that you can feel a noticeable rattle which is a departure for how most B&Ms used to stay glass smooth for years after install.

I might just be missing it, but I feel like this is kind of an underdiscussed development in the industry. I haven't ridden any of them myself yet, but a lot of people have gotten off Penguin Trek, Pipeline, Iron Menace, and Dr. Diabolical noting that they are pretty rattly out of the gate. This did not use to happen with B&M. The rattle that developed over time used to take years.

Upper level Six Flags management is all gone now. All that is left is the Cedar Fair people.

For this to be relevant, we would need to be at that point in the theme park industry. Do you think we are? If so, why?

It is hard to say, honestly. It still feels wide open in terms of how AI is going to impact any sector. Ride design seems like an obvious application. A refined, more specifically trained/designed AI model could probably already spit out workable rollercoaster layouts that could be picked through and tweaked by an engineer rather than have the engineers design from the ground up. It is hard to imagine that the actual physical running of a park would ever be less human labor intensive though. I think we are a long, long way off from being accepting of the failure of machines in terms of how it impacts human safety. For example, if my home state of NY switched to all self driving cars and there were 1000 deaths a year from the AI in them screwing up, we would be outraged. Absolutely pitchforks to the capitol building levels of outrage. I don't think it would matter that that would be a tenfold decrease in deaths from auto accidents. Our brains don't work like that. We are emotional animals. As for your larger AI concerns, they are far from unfounded but we are also going to hit a wall really quickly in terms of what they can do for one reason: Power. These models are incredibly demanding. We don't generate enough energy on our grids, or even come close, to move them along lot further than they are now. In the next decade, there is going to need to be a dramatically increased efficiency in the models in terms of their power consumption AND a dramatically increased output in the power we generate. This is all under the political landscape of climate concerns too, so it might not be long before these models start getting regulated on those grounds as well.

I've read your posts. There isn't much of anything in them that I see as completely unreasonable. There are definitely reasons to be concerned here. Like I said, the track record for consumers with large mergers like this is not great. Competition breeds better results. The only other reason I am not as doom and gloom about this other than what I said above is that I don't think the chains competed much anyway, only in a couple markets overall, so in that sense this might not be as impactful as most comparable mergers. But I could be wrong, for sure.

I have become more cautiously optimistic about this. I get all the concern though. The track record of large corporations merging his historically not benefited consumers to say the least and that could very well happen here. I am not blind to that very real possibility. It is just that this "merger of equals" is PR bullshit and I am happy about that. Cedar Fair is legally the acquirer in the deal. Cedar Fair shareholders are getting more than 50% of the stock. All the high level management is coming from Cedar Fair. This "merger of equals" is Cedar Fair acquiring Six Flags spun in a way to try to not impact the Six Flags brand, full stop. Long term, it is harder to make predictions about the future. It always is. Again, there could be some bad outcomes here. But in the short term at least, it seems to me we are going to see the Cedar Fair model applied to the current Six Flags parks. For the smaller Six Flags parks, not great probably! But I can at least look forward to the flagship parks currently in the old SF chain to get cleaned up and improved presentation coupled with much more aggressive capital investment in new attractions.

I got to the park on Sunday and took three laps on The Bobcat, two in the back and one in the front. Very good ride. This was our third Gravity Group family woodie with the other two being Wooden Warrior at Quassy and Kentucky Flyer at Kentucky Kingdom. The Bobcat ranks well against both of them. I think Wooden Warrior is my slight favorite by an ever so slim hair still, but The Bobcat is a very fun ride that is right on its heels at worst. Excellent addition to the park. I preferred the back compared to the front too if anyone cares, but it wasn't by a lot. Some of the mid-ride airtime was stronger in the front, but the double down and first drop were worlds better in the back. We also marched back to Comet for a back row ride and that thing was hauling to say the least. Still a super solid classic. Mostly we were there for our two year old twins though, so we spent time in the kiddie area. They loved most of the rides, but I don't think they liked their first credit very much in Frankie's Mine Train! It was the only ride they didn't try to demand to get right back on. Before we even went over to Great Escape, we went into Lake George Expedition Park (formerly Magic Forest) too. That place is great. It is full of classic flats from the 50s and 60s, mostly for little kids, all with displays on what park they came from and details on their origins. Very cool and very charming place. The mile long dinosaur walk was impressive too with the towering animatronics in a "realistic" wooded setting. The littles loved it. My 13 year old son and I also were pleasantly surprised to find that they had thrown up an SBF Visa in the offseason too. We had no idea and left with a bonus credit.

I did read that the Cedar Point president (or some other very high up if I am remembering exactly who wrong) did say recently on a radio show that this would not be an all summer issue, but I am still surprised to see any movement this quickly from how it sounded.

June 1st will officially be the opening day of The Bobcat. Also, there is no cat on the front car in any of the pictures.

Hopefully I don't ruin your tried and true standup routine, but I did add "if they care to". Honestly though, as an accountant with lots of experience with corporate accounting, I would be shocked if they didn't have the data available. There is probably one poor soul locked in basement using the turnstyle counters to measure throughput rates with tears in his eyes as he contemplates why Six Flags has him do this if they are never going to look at the data and also his life choices in general.

Everyone who would care about the figure knows it is a theoretical maximum. I am sure the parks/chains have their own data on what percentage of that maximum they tend to hit and do the math for their own situations accordingly if they care to. That's all there really is to it.

That's too bad! Bummer. Great Escape is usually pretty good at delivering what the park has to offer, old ripped out Bobsled not withstanding. Anyway, I remember the original target for The Bobcat was Memorial Weekend, which is next weekend. Have we seen any indicators that this is still on the table? We are only a few days out.

Yeah I doubt they are doing anything close to the Morey's SLC re-do, but even just tossing on the better trains is night and day. See Riddler's Revenge at SFNE as a regionally close example. Add at least some reprofiling too and we are probably going to have a real winner here. I didn't expect this and it is a very pleasant surprise to couple with the work the company has been doing on Predator each year. I really hope they continue working on the existing coasters (trains please!) before looking forward to any new big capital investments that would take away from their ability to fix the current problems.

With Triple Loop now open at IB, I wonder if they will ship their now experienced refurbishment team up to the Niagara/Buffalo area to start working on the shuttle loop for Niagara Amusement Park. That could be dead in the water though. Haven't heard anything about it in what feels like a year at this point.

Well it is good that they identified a problem and are getting it addressed before anything happened. At the same time, it is less good that the whole stated mission of this Zamperla overhaul was increased uptime and it is down for an extended, unknown amount of time pretty much right out of the gate. Hopefully this is the one big issue the ride will have and it will be reliable going forward afterward.

We last went in 2022. SkyRush had an awful shake in the wing seat I rode in and was pretty smooth on an inside seat. I only had the two rides. Looking forward to getting back and trying it with the new restraints. They didn't completely ruin the ride for me, but they were very, very bad. Now I just need SFNE to replace the god awful bricks on Superman.