Winterfestguy

Carowinds quietly removed the parade from their Winterfest line up, changed to daytime hours, and rumors of no ice skating there as well. Wonder when or if KI will make the same announcement? The puzzle pieces start coming into focus for KI as no Tinkers means one less show and maybe an empty theater as well. Enjoy what’s left as KI Winterfest 3.0 as it likely comes to a sudden end this season.

Six Flags does not like winter events as evidenced by cutting 4 holiday events this year from parks. Definitely sadly looking like this will be the last year for KI Winterfest especially given Carowinds has just cut their nighttime hours from their original calendar this season. Hopefully, KI doesn’t follow this budget hourly cutting trend.

Both KI and CP have had sleepovers in the park after hours before with proceeds benefiting charity - KI in 2019 and CP in 2021

Since the parade used many characters from Tinkers, especially Santa, wonder if that means the Winterfest parade has been cut too? Guess we will have to watch if the floats start appearing out of storage this fall behind The Racer.

This will make a lot of families with kids sad. Tinkers (in several forms) has been a tradition since Winterfest 1.0 - Six Flags doesn’t like winter events and with budget cuts everywhere this may be the end of Winterfest 3.0 after this season. Wonder where the tombstone will be for Tinkers Toy Factory at Haunt this year?

In the spirit of nickel and dime, they do list a gold pass parking add-on for $87 Canadian dollars. Also the fine print says you have to purchase pass at your home park and may actually enforce that this year with such a cheap gold pass $99 Canadian dollars (about $75 USD)

The MVP sale on Canada Wonderland site indicates the Gold 2026 pass will be good for all 40 Six Flags parks. Looks like they might be having away the gate. Waiting to see what and when KI announces.

Not sure if Island Smokehouse and Coconut Cove Cafe have heat (know they have AC but not sure about the heating capability - and then there also has to be heat in a few sets of restrooms). Think building heating may be the biggest investment cost issue with trying to expand Winterfest into Soak City. The tubing hill currently in Action Zone could be relocated to the wave pool similar to how Kentucky Kingdom has their sledding hill in their wave pool. Move the vendor booths around the Tower over to Soak City to create the village (which opens up the very congested area currently around the Tower) and perhaps move Santa from Rivertown over to Soak City, maybe in a temporary heated “tent”. Add some lights in the trees and a few large garland trees to complete the village. It would be exciting if the park could pull this off, but very doubtful considering budget and personnel cutbacks happening in the new Six Flags environment. My biggest wish is that KI would bring back the KI singing penguin puppets to Winterfest 3.0 which were part of Santa’s Toy Factory at the original Winterfest as well as in Winterfest 2.0 (then got dropped when Tinker’s Toy Factory took over for the now Winterfest 3.0) - they were always a hit with all the kids and even adults. They still may be around someplace in the theater in deep storage and their soundtrack is likely in the archives.

Coastermania fans today were disappointed with this announcement to them early this morning and additional disappointment that TTD2 would not operate at all today for the event.

The Food and Wine festival misses the mark in my opinion and will be surprised if it returns as a profitable event. We were at the park Friday, Saturday, and Sunday and had a few observations - Forget about hearing any of the music since with both Food and Wine stages playing their music at the same time while the Grand Carousel belts out its music at the same time and all three being all overpowered by the loud sound of Hot Rhythm nights when it plays at the scheduled times, not the most pleasant enjoyment of the music - many people did not have any wine or food from the festival in the new circus tent (most brought food and drinks from other park locations or were just there to hear the music) - the food was overpriced for the portion size and rather limited in selections offered. The wine flight was probably the best alcohol deal. Nobody seemed to be playing the festival games but did like how they used all the empty wine bottles for a ring toss game for the kids. After seeing this how this festival was ran, I don’t have high hopes for Carnival in July.

Likely they have been rehearsing the new fountain show late at night and don’t want to spoil the premiere this weekend. The same thing happened last season with Icam being down as they rehearsed and fine tuned the show a week before its debut.

Materials arrive via FedEx in a nice box. If you are a season pass holder, drink wristband ticket, meal tickets, and fun pic ticket are in your season pass account. So excited for Coasterstock this year.

Since the vast majority of professional firework displays are made in China (and with increasing China tariffs), I wonder how the overall seasonal cost of the fireworks will fit into the 2025 park budget allotted for show. Or it may be the show goes on with the drones and only with fireworks added on the weekend.

I find it amusing that they turned on the I street cam for just a moment to capture a new shot of there being no snow and a sunny day (just after the dismantling of the ice rink, they turned off the I street cam to likely block construction view progress of the new gift shop and bar). The new still shot may fool some when thinking the I street cam is on when it’s not, especially since all snow has melted from the former still shot. Note in the new I street cam shot (likely taken a few weeks ago) still shows the Winterfest sign out front and you can see all the building construction over on the right.

Reading the notes on the blueprint in the upper right, the fabric roof cannot withstand a heavy wet snow weight, so would expect the fabric roof to be removed for Winterfest (which then the question becomes will this area be utilized for Winterfest at all?) The other 115 mph wind note is highly unlikely and even with climate change and more frequent thunderstorms with straight line winds, still likely a very slight risk for the structure (remember the Kings Island sign out front getting hit by a severe thunderstorm years back and having to be rebuilt?)