XGatorHead 8904

I broke the news to the Gatorettes last night. I started by saying "Conneaut Lake", paused until they were both looking at me, and told them. GatorGirl got sad and said, "That's what I thought you were going to say," and Mrs. Gator said, "But we were supposed to go there with Chris!" Hopefully they do operate this summer. We'll hold out hope! Blue Streak was running great last year.

Thanks for posting the videos! I have Charles Jacques' wonderful book on the park, but I haven't seen video of the park before. The firetrucks at 2:11 in the first video have been restored and are now at Conneaut Lake Park, but with the uncertain future of that park, who knows what will happen to them now. When we went to CLP last August, they weren't operating, but Mrs. Gator fondly reminisced about riding those as a kid.

Rango's Wild West? Did they learn nothing from Wayne's World? I mean, I love Wayne's World (the skits and movies), but c'mon, even I saw how ridiculous it was to theme a whole section of the park to it when I visited Carowinds in 1995.

So sad to hear this. It's a nice little park. I was hoping to maybe go there again this summer, I'm glad I got to go last year for the first (and now possibly only) time. Hopefully someone willing to operate the park steps in and buys all 40 parcels. If this closes, then both of Mrs. Gator's childhood home parks will be history (the other being Idora Park).

Italian Chef as graduated from being a Padawan to a full-blown Jedi. Congratulations on the promotion!

You have hereby lost all rights to use the name VortexBFForever until this issue is resolved!

Is that the one near EnterTRAINment Junction? If so, that's the same one I went to with the group back on our meetup on the 1st of the month. That's the one!

When I worked at the park in Admissions, we would go to Waffle House on Mason Montgomery at least once a week after the park closed. Not so much anymore since I only work at the park a month and a half each year now. My post-KI tradition now is to go to the Speedway at the corner of Fields Ertel & Mason Montgomery and get a large frozen drink (mix of Mountain Dew and cherry for me). If I had blue ice cream at the park that day, I skip Speedway since I already had a frozen treat. After Cedar Point Halloweekends, we would go to Steak 'n Shake. However, Steak 'n Shake has made its way onto my boycott list after a situation with the Fields Ertel location this past September. I haven't decided yet if my boycott will extend to the Sandusky location or remain solely with Fields Ertel. After OSU day last year, we went to Chet & Matt's... pretty darn good pizza there! There's a Panda Express on Tylersville Rd. Just go 4 miles past that Penn Station and it's on the left.

That's why I love the arcade at CP. Lots of old video games, pinball machines and mechanical games in the back! I stop in during every trip up there, and I can keep myself occupied in there for quite some time.

Rotation? What's that mean? MeTV plays the episodes in order, for the most part. They show four episodes each Sunday from 12pm-2pm. Last weekend, they aired Season 3 Episodes 18, 19, 20 & 21. The Cincinnati Kids is Season 5 Episode 11. I projected out and it looks like "The Cincinnati Kids" should air on April 13th as long as they don't skip episodes, which occasionally they do. GatorGirl watches The Brady Brunch (as MeTV calls that two hour block of time on Sundays) every week, even though we have every season on DVD.

^Then there are those of us that love Haunt, and anticipate it just as much as some people (myself included) look forward to riding Banshee. To each their own. -Gator, loving the idea of Banshee and Haunt equally and welcoming discussion on both!

I strongly doubt I'll be around in 2079, since I would be 106. GatorGirl would be 74 though, and hopefully still able to ride!

I posted this a few years ago, here's my story:

Why a German village, when Banshees are from Irish folklore?

I know I'm not the only one that predicted this, but I'm not digging around for their posts, only ones that prove my power of prognostication! http://www.KICentral.com/forums/index.php/topic/23493-something-big-announced-3-18-11/?p=420403 and

All three of us rated it a 1. What can I say, it's a guilty pleasure. On the flip side, Stitch's Great Escape and Swiss Family Treehouse both received an X from each of us.

I actually like the challenge. I prefer vacations where I'm actively doing things instead of just laying there. Mrs. Gator's ideal vacation before she met me was laying next to a pool sunbathing. Boring! I need to be doing something, but we do set aside days to relax too. For WDW, we prioritize what we want to do, and make sure we have time for hitting our top attractions first. Last year I even made lists of the attractions, and before we left, each person in the family gave each attraction a rating: 1 = definitely have to do, 2 = do it if we have time, 3 = don't mind skipping, X = Absolutely do NOT want to do. I tallied the votes, and came out with an average for each attraction. Those with an average of 1 we made sure we did, average of 2 had a lower priority and so on. If we miss out on a 2.7 or 3, oh well. At DHS, we missed out on Lights, Motors, Action (a 1.7 which only had two showings, one of which was canceled due to rain). Gatorgirl wasn't too upset about that though since she gave it a 3. Some people may not like this, being too much planning, etc., but it gave the family something to do and helped build up anticipation to our visit (as if we weren't excited enough anyway). When we go back to Universal, I plan to do the rankings sheets again, for a different reason: there's less to do in a day than some WDW parks, but no Fastpass, so I know we're going to be standing in line for over an hour for some things (which I am willing to do for my favorite dark rides, Harry Potter and the Forbidden Journey & The Amazing Adventures of Spider-Man). I don't do this for any other park we visit, just the Orlando parks. If I'm spending such a big chunk of change to get down there and stay there and get in, I'm going to make sure we get our money's worth. Sure, when we go to other parks such as Kennywood, Waldemeer, HersheyPark, etc., we have an idea of what attractions we want to do more than others, but we don't go to the lengths that we do for Orlando because they're smaller, closer and less expensive.

The current Fastpass+ setup would significantly alter the way we do WDW. I had the old Fastpass down to a science. This past July, as soon as we got into MK, we headed straight to Under the Sea to get a Fastpass, then went to Enchanted Tales with Belle to enjoy that with only about a 10 minute queue wait. As soon as we were done with that, our window for Under the Sea had opened. Throughout the day, we had used Fastpass for 6 attractions: Under the Sea, Peter Pan's Flight, Space Mountain, Splash Mountain, Big Thunder Mountain Railroad and Jungle Cruise. If we were only able to get one Fastpass+ for only one of those attractions, we wouldn't be able to do everything we wanted. Before our first trip to Disney in the Fastpass era in 2006, I did a lot of research into Fastpass and how to make it work to our benefit (along with parent swap, which we needed at the time due to GatorGirl only being a year and a half old). One thing I didn't know until years later that the Fastpass could be used after the hour window had expired, so we always stuck to the hour assigned. That's one of the reasons I have yet to ride Test Track... when it was my hour, a storm blew in and the ride was closed and reopened about a half hour before park close. We visited again in 2007, 2008, 2011 & 2013. Having used it in 2006, I got much better in 2007 and considered myself an expert by 2008. By 2011 I had learned about the end time not being enforced, but we never found ourselves in a situation where we had to do that. So when it was announced that they were enforcing end times by our trip last year, it had no effect on us. I agree that it's best to go when crowds are light, but for those of us with children in school, our options are limited. We're not the type to pull her out of school for a week for a vacation. Out for one day maybe, but not a week. As of now we're not planning on a trip there this year and by the sound of this new system, I'm glad we're not (although some friends are trying to convince us to go down with them for New Year's). I can't imagine waiting in line 90 minutes for Space Mountain (that was the standby time when we used Fastpass for it last year) or any other ride there. It was bad enough at Universal when we waited 90 minutes for The Simpsons and Harry Potter and the Forbidden Journey, where there seems to be less to do at each of Universal's parks than there is at MK. Hopefully guest feedback will prompt changes by our next visit there (2015?).

I enjoyed the Epic Mickeys. The first one was a lot of fun and it took me quite a while to get through the entire game with all the side missions. EP2 though, I finished in under 24 hours. We stayed up almost all night, we got to what turned out to be the final battle and the person I was playing with said "this must be the end." I said "No, it can't be, we haven't been playing long enough," but as soon as we defeated the doctor, the closing scenes started playing and then the credits. I liked the addition of the voices and being able to play as Oswald, but it was just too similar to the first game and too short.

^I'm guessing rooster.

Superman? Really? (Sorry folks, inside joke. Carry on!)

I could have sworn that at one time Song 2 by Blur was played at Delirium.

Methinks your Jersey friends never listened fully to the lyrics: "Well we're waiting here in Allentown, for the Pennsylvania we never found."

Thanks, I'll have to check that out. It would be nice to be able to share those great thick fries with GatorGirl!

Unfortunately not. As much as I would have liked to have lived off-campus with any number of friends with a side benefit of being able to use nice, fluffy toilet paper, financially it worked out best for me to be an RA my junior and senior years, even if it meant subjecting my rear to the thin stuff. Also, since the university TP had to be doubled over roughly (yup, double meaning to that word) 5 to 6 times to equal one sheet of the cushy-tushy stuff that you apparently used, in my estimation it could have actually caused more paper to be used than if we had had the good stuff. This off-season has officially reached a new low with this tangential toilet tissue talk.