Photo TR: Andrew's Spring Semester in the South

[Swimace]

In order to further procrastinate from packing up my house or studying for my one remaining final exam, I have decided to create thread and throw together a trip report with some of the pictures I have taken this semester. I hope you guys enjoy it!

 

 

So I’m starting off with the tail end of spring break. I got a beach house with some friends for a week in Florida, so it was pretty much your typical college student spring break. There were 15 of us piled into a house made for 8, so there were some fun times to be had down in the Sunshine State. Well I have a job for the summer with the City of Gainesville, so I split with my group at the end of break to go to Gainesville to fill out job paperwork and get drug tested for the 10,000th time this year. Since I was on my own for the drive from Gainesville to Clemson, I decided to stop at Wild Adventures for the afternoon on Easter Sunday.

Well that was fun, SFOG will be posted up within a day or two.

Thanks for reading! Time to head back up to Clemson for some more school and training

VekomaBison say goodbye!

I took a stop off at the Wild Mouse on the way out, it was pretty fun with a couple pops of airtime

People at Magic Mountain can't do this

The theming at this park is flawless, the rides just blend together so well

I rode it three times just to be sure; I would have ridden it four times if I had wanted to die.

"ouch-ouch-ouch-ouch-ouch"

Did this really used to be smooth? It sure as hell wasn't today!

What's this? Is it the mythical smooth SLC?

Ok, seeing as this is Wild Adventures, the classiest place on earth, I just have to wonder about that last rule. Do they mean you can't physically be wet, or do they mean you can't be drunk?

"I wish I lived at a Florida park"

Well that was... umm... maybe I should just go back to my car....

 

Time to look around the park some more

Please die.

 

That is all.

Cheetah is set back from the park and goes into the animal area. I wish I could have gotten a decent picture of the habitat on the other side of the coaster, seeing as it's built in an emptied drainage pond.

Gerstlauer trains.... thanks for the bruise.

If you look closely you can see that this portion was retracked. The new sections were actually pretty fun!

Cheetah: "through the ugly metal supports"

Oh dear.... here it comes...

S&S Power Inc: “Wo d eader In le tical Amusenent des eop look to s pi”

"Big" tower/Little tower

There was one person riding this, and he was an employee. When I took a ride dispatch took about 15 minutes because they had to raise, lower, and check every single restraint three times before the thing would actually get going.

I was there on the grand opening weekend for Wild Adventure's new ride, there was stuff all over the park promoting it. Apparently this thing came from the highly regarded Wild West World.

Moving on to the other side of the drainage pond....

Vertical Loopage...

Woohoo! A train with two people in it! It probably only took about ten minutes to dispatch!

mmm.... sexy Vekoma track

This one isn't that rough, although that can be said about pretty much any boomerang after you've been on the one over at Knotts...

Look! A Vekoma over on the other side of the.... umm.... really bad smelling swamp

Half of the coasters weren't even running today. Wild Adventures should have bought Deja Vu from Six Flags, it would have fit in perfectly...

Hooray for roller skaters!!!

Ant Farm Express is the first ride to welcome you to Vekomaland

Wow, good thing I don't feel awkward walking around a completely empty park by myself...

Wild Adventures... a poor man's IOA

It looks like it's going to be a busy day at the park.

South Georgia, regrettably located right between Gainesville and Clemson.... awesome.

Leaving town, be back in May!

I rolled through Gainesville Rock City to fill out my job paperwork. $10 an hr, 40-50 hours a week, now Erik knows where his tax dollars go...

This is the house I stayed in over spring break. It looked like this for about 3 minutes, since 15 college students can be sort of messy

[ParkTrips]

hahahahaha

 

you went to Wild Adventures.

[coastercrazed49]

Great Pictures.

Wow I never realized how many Vekoma coasters are in this park. Also its ashame that Cheetah is so rough. It could be a great coaster with some new PTC trains, or even better Millennium Flyers.

 

BTW good luck with your summer job.

[Shavethewhales]

I don't get why some people go to parks just so they can post long TRs about them complaining about what a bad time they had. Isn't there anything better to do in the FL/GA area?

 

The park doesn't look all that bad to me - it may be nothing compared to the parks around it, but I would love to pay it a visit myself. The flaws it has will surely be mostly worked out in a few years as the Herschends bring it up to their standards.

 

Good photos though.

[ginzo]

The park doesn't look all that bad to me - it may be nothing compared to the parks around it, but I would love to pay it a visit myself. The flaws it has will surely be mostly worked out in a few years as the Herschends bring it up to their standards.

 

You're clearly easier to please than I am if you're excited to go to a park that features:

 

Vekoma SLC

Vekoma Boomerang

CCI Hybrid Woodie with G-trains

 

It's gonna take a LOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOONGGGGGGGGGG time to get this dump up to Dollywood standards.

[ParkTrips]

I don't get why some people go to parks just so they can post long TRs about them complaining about what a bad time they had

9 credits.

[Swimace]

^ hahaha, exactly.

 

I don't get why some people go to parks just so they can post long TRs about them complaining about what a bad time they had. Isn't there anything better to do in the FL/GA area?

 

The park doesn't look all that bad to me - it may be nothing compared to the parks around it, but I would love to pay it a visit myself. The flaws it has will surely be mostly worked out in a few years as the Herschends bring it up to their standards.

 

First, I didn't go to the park strictly for the purpose of posting a negative trip report, that's a lot of effort just to create a thread on TPR. No, there's not anything better to do in that area, especially when you're on a road trip just passing through the area. I didn't mean to come across as complaining, I was just reporting my day at the park with a bit of sarcasm.

 

Wild Adventures is a park that is essentially built in swampy grasslands, there is no shade in the park and it needs some crucial landscaping. I am not lying when I saw that they have a train ride that circles an empty drainage pond with animals in them. Forget the rather bland line-up of rides, that may be one of the easiest things for Herschend to fix. It's going to take more than a few years to bring this park up to any sort of standards.

 

 

Thanks everybody for posting you responses!

[Pufferfish]

Great TR! Its sad you can't come to Carowinds on Sunday, I will be there that day if you can hold off your trip.

[TheRapidsNerd]

I've kinda wondered about this place. May check it out anyway next summer. Never been, so why not?

 

Good or bad, nice to see more of this park and get a better idea.

[BeemerBoy]

The park doesn't look all that bad to me - it may be nothing compared to the parks around it, but I would love to pay it a visit myself.

Wild Adventures on line one.

 

They'd like to clone you.......about 2 million times.

 

 

Really good report thus far, Andrew. There's nothing wrong with criticizing this place at all. I'd consider it an absolute miracle if it becomes a worthwhile park one day. Heck, at this point, I'd rather buy a season pass to KI than ever visit WA again. It's the cleanest dump I've ever seen.

 

Anyway, you take some really good shots. Looking forward to more.

[Erik Johnson]

What no rides on Insect-O-Slide or pictures from the insane Tiger show? If you missed out on those, you need to go back.

 

I still need the Cheetah and Mine Train credits, so I guess I have to go back someday.

[downunder]

^Talk about missing credits, I missed an operating credit at La Ronde just because I couldn't work out it was a coaster from the french park map. It was up the back and indoors though.

 

I liked the trip report, every park is some kind of adventure (or misadventure), damn it's better than any park my home town of Sydney has ever had.

[jynx242]

One PLUS thing about Wild Adventures is that it is CHEAP! I haven't been in a couple of years, but had a good time when I went. The SLC kind of beat on me (they all do,) the boomerang was a boomerang, Cheetah beat the crap out of me, but being a coaster masochist - I rode it twice more. Tons of kiddie credits. It also didn't break the bank.

 

SFOG is my "home park" but Wild Adventures is about an hour closer. It's a meh kind of place, but I've always gone with friends and had a great time.

 

Thanks for the trip report, I giggled quite a bit.

 

David

[VivaLaVibora]

I think that these rides might be great: Yo-Yo, Wipeout, Power Surge, Chance Alpine Bobs, Boomerang, Sidewinder, and the Mouse Coaster.

 

I don't think the price is right for this park though. Someone said it's cheap. It's not so cheap to me if you only want to go one day instead of two. It's says it's $45.00, and you get one day "free". You get in SFOG for $29.99 on the Internet for one day.

 

I haven't been to this park, and that's why I think those rides I was talking about might be great. I want to talk about Cypress Gardens though. Cypress Gardens is a higher priced park too. It's $39.99 for two days also. When I went to Cypress Gardens, there was hardly anyone in the park. People usually think why go to a park two days in a row, if you can get on rides the first day with eveyrthing walk-ons.

 

Cypress Gardens have roller coasters, but they aren't like Six Flags, or Cedar Fair roller coasters. They are all pretty kiddie. I think the Power Surge, and the Yo-Yo are great at Cypress Gardens though. If they got rid of them, I probably wouldn't even go. The Starliner I think is great, but I don't think one roller coaster is worth $39.99 if I'm only going one day to the park.

 

My dream park would be flats like Wild Adventures (I'm guessing these are run like the carnival ones) such as the Power Surge, Wipeout, Yo-Yo that tilts, Alpine Bobs, a normal old Tilt-A-Whirl (which they don't have- They have a G5.), and some other flats like an Orbiter, KMG Fireball, and than have Six Flags Magic Mountain roller coasters, or Six Flags Over Texas roller coasters. I don't seem to get both of them at one park.

 

Cedar Point has come close with having a Tilt-A-Whirl, a Chaos, and a Flying Bobs, but I think the Flying Bobs is too slow for me. They also have a Himilaya which is okay. I don't believe that all carnival rides are all great though. I think the Super Sizzler, Inverter, Super Shot drop tower, Kite Flyer (at Cypress Gardens), Cliffhanger, and the Hurricane are just good rides.

 

There are bad rides in my opinion though such as the 1001 Nachts, Round Up, Pharoah's Fury (at Cypress Gardens, and Wild Adventures), Gravitron, Zero Gravity, ARM Mega Bounce (at Cypress Gardens = Worst Flat Ever!!), and so on.

[BeemerBoy]

^ I'm lost.

[307]

^ I'm lost.

x2

 

Is this a TR or just a place for La Vibora to tell us about his dream park?

[Swimace]

Ok, here's my second update: Six Flags Over Georgia. I live less than two hours away from downtown Atlanta and about two hours away from the park, so I usually make to SFOG multiple times a year. The day in the report was actually the day after Bike Mike and all of those guys visited the park. A cold front had moved in the day before and so for the entire day it was windy and in the low 40's. That might not seem cold to some of you, but I'm from Florida so just believe me when I say that it was really cold that day. Joe/ParkTrips was with me today, and he's with in having zero cold tolerance.

 

As the result of the park being so cold, I really didn't linger around to take a lot of photos, so most of these were just taken in passing. With that said, it was a really fun day where we pretty much had the park to ourselves, so turn on your air conditioner full blast, make some hot chocolate, and enjoy the pictures.

Bye Goliath! Until next time!

So that was pretty much it for the day, hope you enjoyed the photos

The airtime coming off of this turn is insane, probably the best part of the ride

Cyclone is fun at the top of every hill, but not so much at the bottom

Again... clearly the cold was making an impact on our judgement

I love Scorcher, it's such an awesome compact B&M

We moved up to the front of the park to ride Scorcher.

 

p.s. I've always liked this sign

We rode "E Rattle & Roll" so that we could get inside. I had never ridden it before, so this was my first random trip on the wild side

Perverts...

"I think I just instantly got sick"

It looked like I was crying through the ride because my eyes were so watery. This was the one day in history that a front seat ride on Goliath was worse than our rides on Ninja or Cyclone

Well I mean there was no wait so why not?

Let's take a front seat ride on Goliath in the 40 degree wind!!

And then came the worst idea of the day...

I've always liked the big logo in the station

Batman was fun. Obviously.

It also got some spiffy new paint. Joe said it looked a little more "lime", but I wasn't dorky enough to notice

Mindbender was awesome, but the brakes before the second loop were on pretty hard that day.

We stopped by the Gotham area to get a solid dose of positive G's.

Monster Plantation POV!!!! OMG!!!

Lets be honest, it's not a trip to Six Flags unless you take a trip on Monster Plantation. For Real.

Thrilling Thomas Town contruction photos, hopefully they've gotten a lot more done by now

Woohoo for Wheelie!!

It's my favorite flat in the park, so we took a ride.

To be honest it wasn't really that bad today, although maybe I'm still going off of Wild Adventure's standards

Take it all in Eurotrippers, you guys are going to be in France before you know it. Goudirix isn't as friendly as Ninja....

Clearly the cold was taking its toll on our judgement...

Did GASM. It was fun. Hooray for GASM.

In typical Superman fashion it was a good time, it makes me want Sea World to get moving on their flyer

So we went to the back of the park and took a ride on gloomy Superman.

We didn't take a spin on SFOG's really fun family coaster today, but it still deserves a courtesy shot

Just stare at it and be nerdy, take all the time you need....

See.... Splashwater falls, the rapids ride, and Skull Island were empty today (although they usually don't open Skull Island until summertime anyways)

Ok, lets just talk about this one. It's cold as hell, Atlanta has been in a serious drought that has caused SFOG to close all of its water rides, yet today they feel like running the log flum would be a fun idea....

 

They closed it by the time we left though because nobody was riding it

If you hate Goliath, then you hate America.

If you hate America, then you are a terrorist.

Goliath has this large helix turnaround outside the park, but you probably already knew that....

Goliath's first drop in all of its insane amounts of coolness...

This is an airtime hill, some people like them...

So we got the day started in style. We rode in the back row and it was pretty much your typical Goliath awesomeness

I hope I'm in the right place....

What's that I see off in the distance?

As you can see from the looks of downtown, the day was pretty gloomy and cold. It was overcast in the low 40's with lots of wind.... Lets go ride some coasters!!!

[willski]

^Nice TR. Was this on a Sunday (like March 30th or so?)? If so, I was there that day, and it was cold as hell. I got 30 rides on Goliath, but that was by far the coldest I've ever been (or want to be) at a park.

[Swimace]

I'm cleaning my house out right now for the end of the school year, but I wish I still had my calendar so I could check. I think that's the day we were there, since I came back to Atlanta a few days later for a show at Masquerade that was the first week in April. Too bad we didn't know you were there or else you could have come freeze to death with us!

[Swimace]

The last few days have been crazy so I haven't really found the time to update this. I am now posting from Florida, but for the purpose of this thread just pretend that I'm still in Clemson.

 

Anyways, here is my TR from Lake Winnie. Most of you probably saw Scott's (Beemerboy's) TR from the day (if you haven't then go look at it and vote for yellow). This was a really fun little park and I had an awesome time with Scott, Shannon, and Joe (who showed up a little bit late because he was trying to save the planet for earth week). Anyways, the photos speak for themselves, so here are mine.

One last picture taken from my Fly-O-Plane. Thanks to Scott, Shannon, and Joe for hanging out and thanks to you for reading!

 

Carowinds coming up next

Here you can see pretty much the entire layout.

I think we ended up riding about four times, give or take

So to finish up this TR here are some more pictures of The Cannon Ball

It also goes right over the Boat Chute

You can check out most of the park from up here

We did the chairlift that takes you over the lake and back

Shannon and Scott on the slide.

 

Joe didn't know what sort of fire he was going up against, I took him down dispite my bad start.

We didn't ride this today.

 

But neither did anybody at Magic Mountain.

For all of you oldschool fans out there...

Well at least Shannon has the right idea

Come on you guys, we're going to be on this thing for a while, look more excited!!

We rode this.

It was fun.

Moving on.

Goodbye Boat Chute....

The drop for the boat chute

Wake me up when we get to the other side...

In case you didn't notice, the boat chute is built into the lake

It makes a decent sized splash, but you don't get that wet which is a plus

The loading platform feeds right into the tunnel of boredom

Unless you count the awesome Boat Chute!

We're heading back over to the other side of the lake which doesn't have any coasters

Ok, moving on....

We rode it four or five times, by the end of the day it wasn't *that* bad

Much better.

No, No, this is all wrong...

As Scott mentioned in his TR, I'm really not fond of drop towers.

 

*Shudders*

Now check out that yellow plane, remember that it's spinning, and then realize that there are no OTSR's.

 

Sweet ride, but a little bit uncomfortable.

This is what you use to make your plane get out of control

Your Fly-O-Plane awaits...

These planes spin around in a pretty standard fashion

This has to be one of the strangest/coolest flats ever.

Their swings are placed right up against the lake which was pretty cool.

I haven't done bumber cars in the longest time, but man did we get a little bit competitive in there.

 

I kind of wish I could drive like this all the time

Nevertheless, we were really scared...

Next up was CASTLE!! This dark ride features random areas of prolonged darkness, a gangster skeleton, a spinning sewer tunnel, and a drunk driver.

 

So I'm not really sure what anything in there has to do with a castle....

Woohoo! Whorin it up!

Ok, so maybe not so much "bigger" or "better", but certainly another credit!

We rode it once, and then moved on to bigger and better things

Next up was the mouse. I thought it was pretty average, but apparently I got lucky enough to catch it on a good day

This was really enjoyable coaster, it's worth the trip to Lake Winnie if you're ever in the area

Some lift hill porn...

Now presenting the best wooden coaster in Georgia

 

(besides Cheetah of course)

So naturally I headed to the back of the park to get all my credits.

So yeah, I think I've established that this post will be about Lake Winnie...

I left Clemson around 9:30 and got to Lake Winnie around 12:30, so it wasn't that bad of a drive.

I always pass this billboard on I-85 in between Clemson and Atlanta. It bugs me because that's the Gainesville area code, and there are only two of these.

 

Just strange placement I guess

[BeemerBoy]

If you hate Goliath, then you hate America.

If you hate America, then you are a terrorist.

 

Nice work, my friend. I'd tell you I was anxiously awaiting Carowinds, but then I'd be lying to you. Instead I'll say I'm anxiously awaiting your take on Carowinds.

[Team Thriller]

The bad smelling swamp I know what thats like..cough...cough...Walibi Belgium.

 

Wild Adventures looks like a Walibi Belgium of North America.

They are both Vekomalands, have smelly swamps, and have crappy shirts.

 

--James

[cinciDAWGS12]

Lake Winnie looks like a fun little park. I might have to head that way in the future. Nice TR!

[Swimace]

Thanks for the comments guys, and I will try not to disappoint you Scott with this Carowinds TR.

 

 

For the past two years I have lived about 2 hours away from Carowinds and just haven't made the trip over there to check it out, when you live about an equal drive away from SFOG and Dollywood it's just hard to get excited to go visit a Cedar Fair park. Well I had a couple of free days between the end of my final exams and my move to Florida, so I decided to go and check out this North/South Carolina park. I was originally going to do Ghost Town in the Sky on this day because it was their first day of the season, but since Cliffhanger was still going to be closed I decided to put off that trip for the fall.

 

Carowinds has to be one of the most annoying parks I've ever been to; the operations sort of reminded me of Six Flags America's. Every single ride was stacking like crazy (except for BorgHawk which was only running one train) and the teens were just out of control. I think Six Flag's approach of attracting families rather than just a bunch of teens has been a really good move in making their parks more enjoyable, because Carowinds was just overrun with all these kids who had this "I can do whatever I want" attitude. The park was plagued with line jumpers and just overall obnoxious behaving guests that seemed to be ripping the park apart.

 

Oh... and this was on a Friday when school was supposed to be in session. I would hate to see this place on a weekend or in the summer.

 

Before adding anything major, I think this park could really do with taking out a few attractions to make the place less cluttered and improving operations to make the park more efficient. They should also take some money out of their annual trash can budget to clean up their queues and put some shade into the ones that don't have any.

 

Anyways, I'll continue my whining in the form of photos....

Thanks for reading!

 

...one more park still to come, and it blows all these other parks out of the water!!

Well that's it for my day at Carowinds!

It was sort of rough, but if I was ten years younger I would think it was fun...

The line for this was really long when I passed by earlier, but I got "lucky" enough to get a walk-on ride on the last train of the day

I'm not a big fan of shooting dark rides. Scooby Doo is supposed to be about solving mysteries, but the ride was just a bunch of random monsters and targets.

Two front row rides and a back row ride in about 30 minutes.

 

 

Niiiiice.

The park was going to close in less than an hour so I decided to get some walk-on Afterburn rides

I have to admit that I've never been on a purple woodie before...

Next I did the Fairly Odd Coaster. It was really fun for a family coaster!

Batwing was closed when I went to SFA, so this was my first Vekoma flyer credit. The loop was awesome, but I still prefer the B&M flyers...

Here's a shot of the aquatrax site from Nighthawk's line

The GP goes crazy for flyers, so the line got really long in a really short period of time.

 

Running one train on a really popular ride that has a slower than normal loading time makes no sense to me.

It was a four train wait for me, which was still about 20+ minutes.

However, the ride broke down for a couple hours and they emptied the queue. Right as I was walking by they re-opened the ride, so I essentially got a free pass on the line

I got extremely lucky with Nighthawk. They were only running one train, plus dispatch time was really slow, so the line looked to be about 2+ hours all day.

Ok, next coaster...

The ride had some fun moments though.

 

The corkscrew not being one of them...

The fact that the queue is built in direct sunlight, kids were running through the grassy area to line jump, and they were dispatching a train about once every five minutes kind of got on my nerves after a while.

 

Plus, they were stacking the trains like crazy. So after standing in the sun to wait to get on the ride, you had to stand in the sun to wait to get off the ride....

First of all, this was easily the worst B&M I've ever been on, but that's not the point.

Ugh. The epitome of what was wrong with this park.

Didn't ride Drooop Tower.

 

Moving on...

Hurler wasn't great by any stretch of the imagination, but it did surprise me with how fun it turned out to be.

The first drop was pretty fun, and the ride had some decent airtime.

The queue in in the middle of the ride's structure. I had no idea, but apparently the rafters around the queue are made for kids to climb up and down when they get bored from waiting.

It was rough, but it was pretty fun at the same time.

Hurler came up next

This is from a series of air gate POV shots I was taking while waiting for them to start moving the trains.

 

The cyclone ops thought they were in an action movie or something, they kept moving in slow motion.

Thank God they had plenty of trash cans in the station, I was really worried that there weren't going to be enough...

Yeah, it was pretty rough...

Cyclone was up next.

 

ouch

There's some cunstruction going on in between Nighthawk and Goldrusher.

 

I'm going to assume it's an aquatrax until proven otherwise.

This helix/tunnel section was fairly intense for a family coaster

I think this is my new favorite Arrow mine train, it was a pretty fun ride

I think they should put this sign in the Vortex station.

I did Goldrusher next.

I missed the one up at Hershey too. I guess Setpoint rides just don't like me, although I wasn't really expecting this to be open.

Closed.

 

A lot of the park is pretty well landscaped, they should get rid of this thing and put in something that looks nice

Closed.

 

It looked like they were doing some work on the lift.

In case you forgot, this is now a Cedar Fair park

B&M inverts are just so good it's unfair.

I think this is my 3rd favorite invert behind Montu and DD-Fire.

Who am I kidding though? They can stack the trains all they want, but Afterburn is still awesome.

The station was kind of a mad house with line jumpers and stacked trains. When I came back at the end of the day the crew was running the ride without stacking though, so props to them.

The line wasn't very long, but I would really be ok with the idea of covering the queue. I'm not sure what those little umbrella things are supposed to do, but I can't imagine this is a fun line to wait in during the crowded summer season.

I decided to get my AfterDeck: The Jet Coaster credit first.

 

I could fill up a book with all of the dumb things people around the park were saying about the name changes btw.

I guess there was some big golf tournament going on in Charlotte. The parking lot seemed to be almost at capacity and there were lots of busses that were taking people from the park to to tournament.

 

They parked me back by Afterburn, but they didn't have the back gate open for whatever reason, so I was in for a long hike before I even got into the park.

After a couple years of avoiding it, I finally made it over to Carowinds

Wait, I'm heading away from Georgia and I see this. What is up with people in the south and peaches???

[VivaLaVibora]

No Orbiter. Oh, well. Thanks for showing the pics.

 

For stacking on Vortex, I blame the fact that it's a stand up coaster. People don't like to stand a particular way, or even stand period.