A Crowded Saturday Night: 7-25

[Voicetek]

My wife and I decided to make a trip out to the park Saturday evening and we brought my sister-in-law with us. She hadn't been to the park in a while and decided it would be fun to ride out with us for the evening.

 

First thing's first: The park was extremely crowded.  I knew we were in trouble when I got the first glance at the parking lot, then looking up at the sign I saw "Welcome Amazon" and "Welcome Family Dollar (or one of those dollar stores)."  First, it was a Saturday and Saturday's are busy enough.  Second, it's a midnight closing night, which tends to bring out even more people than a normal Saturday might.  Third, there were a couple businesses there with all their employees.  Great.  3 individual factors that make the park crowded, and they were all happening at the same time!  I knew we were in for quite a bit of waiting when we entered the park!

 

As I mentioned above, we brought my wife's sister with us. It was her first time at the park in a few years or so, and she hadn't gotten to ride Banshee yet.  Of course that was the first ride we chose to do.  The line for Banshee moved rather quick despite the line's appearance. The ride ops on that ride are really in the groove and do a great time moving people through. One thing we noticed while in line though, the flame on top of the "Son of Beast" memorial wasn't lit.  Is it supposed to be on all the time or just at night? Has anyone else noticed that the flame has been out this season? Anyway, amazing ride, as usual and my sister-in-law absolutely loved her first ride on Banshee.

 

Next we decided to hit up The Bat since we were so close.  My sister-in-law hadn't ridden it since it had been re-themed and was asking some questions about it.  I got to explain what The Bat originally was and why the new name was so important to the re-theme.  A great ride and and great park history lesson lol.  The line was a little longer than usual, but moved pretty quick.

 

After The Bat, we had an awesome night ride on Adventure Express.  It was only about a ten minute wait and was definitely worth it!  Even though this coaster isn't huge, it is so fun.  It's definitely one of my favorites and I consider it a classic.  It's a nice little mine train coaster, but I wish the theming was kept up on!

 

By this time it was pushing 10, and we decided we'd better go get in line for Diamondback since this is my sister-in-law's favorite coaster in the park.  Fun TV was calculating a 60 minute wait, but when I saw the actual line, this didn't seem to add up.  It looked quite a bit longer than just 60 minutes.  We decided to get in line anyway since all the lines were long.  After about an hour and 35 minutes, we were finally loading on the ride!  Yep, quite a bit more than the projected 60 minutes by Fun TV (we even saw Fun TV show two other 60 minute projections for Diamondback while waiting in line).

 

One thing I want to mention: While waiting to be assigned our seat at the loading station, we noticed the Fastlane line.  The guy working that night was pretty much opening the gate for all Fastlane riders as soon as they got there.  He wasn't making them wait at all.  One time he let 20 people through at once.  Then he'd let one or two people from the regular line go through, then as soon as more people got up to the gate in the Fastlane side, he'd immediately jump over there and let them through.  We were a little frustrated since it seemed like the worker didn't want the people with Fastlane to wait at all.  It's called Fastlane not Instantlane.  Heck, even having to wait 10-15 minutes for a seat would be faster than the 90 minutes everyone else was having to wait.  There was really no sense in holding up the regular line for 10 minutes at a time while letting a stream of Fastlane people through.  It was just frustrating.

 

Oh well, we had an awesome night ride though with some amazing air time!  Diamondback is a great ride!

 

After riding, we were very hot and pretty tired so we decided to head over to Planet Snoopy and get some blue ice cream.  Gosh do I love this stuff!

 

Now it was about 11:45, and we managed to catch a final ride on Boo Blasters.  The three of us loaded into one car, and I was the unlucky one to get a non-working gun.  However, I did get some compliments on my Phantom Theater t-shirt by a couple of the ride ops!  Yep that's right...representing for one of the best dark rides in that building!  Like always, it was a mediocre ride, but nice to sit down and cool off a bit at the end of the night.

 

After blasting some Boos, we decided it was time to leave.  We exited the park and headed to our car.  Despite all the crowds and only having 4 hours, we did get to ride a decent amount of stuff so all in all, it was a pretty nice trip to the park and we had a lot of fun!

[TheBEASTunchained]

Nice trip report! Sounds like you enjoyed your visit, even with heavy crowds.

 

In response to your Son of Beast flame question......

 

From what I've observed during my visits to the park this year, the flame has only really been turned on at night, excluding pass-preview night, when it was on in the afternoon / early evening hours. Periodically, I have noticed though that it wont be on at all on certain nights.

[jcgoble3]

Cool! Sorry you didn't run into us (the meetup group). I was wearing my KICentral shirt, so would have been easy to spot.

 

Speaking of companies hosting events at the park Saturday, another one was Big Ass Fans. Yes, seriously, that's their name: http://www.bigassfans.com/

[Voicetek]

Yeah, I was keeping an eye out for people wearing KI Central t-shirts, but didn't see any.  It was so crowded that night and we spent so much time in lines, that I pretty much didn't expect to see anyone from here.  Oh well, maybe next time!