Theme Parks

Today was a day that I had been looking forward to for well over a year. It had been rumored for quite some time that Worlds of Fun was going to be getting a new wooden roller coaster for the 2009 operating season. Clues gradually started showing up last year with survey flags, construction materials, and labels indicating the manufacturer. On Labor Day last year the press announcement was made confirming that Worlds of Fun was going to be getting a new world-class wooden coaster. I lieu of doing a full on report of the event, I would rather show you everything that was going on. Click on through to see my photo report.

Since we knew the weather was going to be nasty in the morning, but nice in the afternoon Valerie and I decided to sleep in and planned on going to the park later in the day. We weren't planning on making a full day out of our visit. Mainly we just wanted to ride some of the coasters, see some of the off-season improvements, and get as good of a look at Prowler as we could without treading in to forbidden areas. We ended up arriving at the park around 3:30 pm, and our first stop was Patriot The wait for the front row was about 20 minutes, and the rest of the rows seemed to be no more than 10 minutes. One thing that always bugs me is when they don't have the front line open. When they don't open up that line it usually ends up blocking the turnstile for the entrance to the rest of rows. Because it was blocking the view of rows 2-4 more folks were getting in line for rows 5-7, and as a result we saw several trains leave with a much lower capacity than it could have handled causing longer than necessary waits for rows 2-7. As to the coaster itself, it is still just as fun as the first time I rode it. It was running really well, and I heard very little of the clanking that I noticed during some of my rides last season. I have always tried to compare Patriot to Silver Bullet because my first rides on both occurred within a week of each other. I used to think I liked Silver Bullet a little more, but after my most recent ride on Silver Bullet a few weeks ago I can safely say I think we have the better coaster.

Valerie and I's plan for this visit was to get to the turnstiles a few minutes before park opening. We left the hotel around 7:30, but ran in to traffic on our way in. Since I was on vacation I forgot it was Monday and I would have to deal with rush hour traffic. Between traffic, parking, and riding the tram to the entrance we didn't arrive at the gates until 8:30. When we got to the turnstiles we handed the cast member our Walt Disney World Park Hopper tickets with the no expiration option on them. The cast member called someone else over and that person took our tickets and said he would be back in a few minutes. Ten minutes later he came back with our original tickets and a set of Disneyland/Disney's California Adventure 1 day Hopper tickets. This was a tip I found on MouseSavers.com. The difference in cost between what we had paid for our WDW tickets and what the 1 Day Disneyland Hopper tickets would have cost saved us around $100.

Ever since my last visit to Knott's Berry Farm in 2006 I have wanted to make a return visit. Over the last couple years I have wanted to go to their Coaster Solace event for coaster enthusiasts. Mainly, I have wanted to go so that I can get an early start to my seasonal riding. If you live in Kansas and want to ride coasters December-March you choices boil down to going to California, Florida, or Texas. Unfortunately, flying to Southern California is expensive where I live. It doesn't seem to matter whether I try to fly in to Long Beach, John Wayne, or LAX. Most of the time round trip tickets usually run about $300 a person. However, this year we have this great thing called a recession/depression and Valerie and I were able to fly out to John Wayne for less than $400 round trip. We also already had Cedar Fair Platinum passes so our tickets to the event were only $25 a person.

I just finished adding over 250 files to my Gallery from my trip to Walt Disney World last week. It is a smaller update than I usually have for 4 theme park visits, but since I have visited WDW 3 times in the last 5 years I focused primarily on taking pictures of parts of the parks I didn't have already. I should have the first of 5 trip reports up in a couple of days.

Valerie and I had been meaning to go out to Worlds of Fun for Halloween Haunt this year, but we hadn't had a chance because we had been busy with our own Halloween festivities. We also needed to go out there to renew our season passes for 2009 while they were still discounted. We got to the park around 3pm and our first stop was to pay for our renewals and get them processed. This took less than 5 minutes and it was much easier than having to deal with it at the beginning of next season. Once the administrative part of the visit was taken care of we headed over to Lore of the Vampire. Lore is the only "Extreme Haunt" open on Sundays. In the past this had been one of my favorites, but I was a little disappointed with it this year.