Six Flags Great Adventure

Our second Six Flags park of the trip was one of their biggest, Great Adventure. On the last trip to the U.S. Magic Mountain was the biggest park of the trip, and GA would have been it on this trip if we hadn't included Cedar Point on the itinerary. Having been given a great welcome by the New England park it would be interesting to see if we'd get the same from this one.

The park had expanded with two huge rides in the last couple of years. Kingda Ka is the biggest and fastest coaster on the planet and was the main reason for coming to this park. Following a recent spell of downtime it was reported to be up and running. The other coaster and new for this year was El Toro, which we weren't going to get to ride because it was still undergoing testing.

Well here was SFGAs welcome to the club, a security vehicle in hot pursuit of the two coaches. This didn't bode too well. Perhaps SFNE was a fluke! Clearly our early arrival for the exclusive ride session on Kingda Ka hadn't been communicated to everyone.

This had the potential to be the high point of the trip, quite literally. At 128 miles an hour and 450+ feet high, nothing was going to top this for speed or height. To be honest the ERS went really really well and we all got plenty of goes on the ride. I deliberately waited for the front row to see the car in front launched and then get launched soon after it.

The Simms boys seem excited and reticent before being launched. You can tell this is their first go.

It's all a little too much for Bart! The ride is great but my God, that launch is something else. Although my glasses had a strap I really thought they were going to destruct. If you don't ride this in the front row the car vibrates quite heavily. Also rather surprisingly I felt the launch on the smaller rides such as Stealth at Thorpe Park was more punchier. I guess because it has to get you up to a reasonable speed in less time than this has to. With the ERS over, it was time to explore the rest of the park whilst the public flocked to queue for this one.

Great American Scream Machine is a copy of Viper at Magic Mountain with the same layout and probably the same roughness. It was still undergoing morning warm up at this point so I would be returning later to see if that was the case.

Once again the park was deserted, partly because it was still early but also because with Kingda Ka running, the crowds were making their way to that. This was one of the advantages to getting the big rides exclusively before the park opens.

The park did had little touches of theming but not all them were well thought through. How did this boat sink into the grass for instance? QuickGrass?

Before Kingda Ka was built, Nitro was this park's big steel coaster and having loved Silverstar in Germany was quite looking forward to riding this one. The ride this year has been sponsored by "Driving Force" a fly-on-the-wall reality show featuring John Force and his racing daughters Ashley, Britney and Courtney. Sounds made up by the people responsible for Smash Hits but apparently they're real people.

The ride had a great ride-ops team who would poke fun at Kingda Ka. The guy on despatch was called Adrian and from the UK. He took time to talk to the riders, without impacting the despatch time and was really friendly. He was accompanied by a young lad with pink manga hair. Something we didn't see again until Kentucky Kingdom.

Viper gives the ride the thumbs up. Relishing having the row to himself he shouted "Billy no-mates" to us as the ride left. Getting a ride this good to yourself should be considered a good thing! Hurrah for empty parks.

Its fair to say that a lot of people on the trip liked this ride. There were one or two that didn't but what do they know ;) In hindsight this was one of the best rides on the trip, in my opinion. Kingda may have been faster and taller, but this was longer and was more fun to ride.

The Batman ride is the same as every other batman, except the one at SFNE. It's a really fun ride and quite intense in places. However the operations here were the complete opposite to Nitro, with staff that were disinterested in doing their job. I was close to jumping out of my seat and checking everyone's restraints myself they were that bad.

I first rode this kind of drop tower in the 90s at Magic Mountain and although the blow to my head failed to put me off riding them in future I had learnt to keep my head back. However I was so focused on doing that on this occasion I fail to remember what the ride was like.

The Chiller ride is notorious for only running one half, usually the red at any one time. People in the club had visited this park on a number of occasions and never seen the black train running. Something to do with the amount of power required to run both rides, or something. Why invest in the ride if you're not going to run it? So it came as a nice surprise to hear that they were going to switch rides part way through the day from the red, to the black.

A word to the wise, when you're about to be launched its advised not to heckle the people in the queue line. Doing so may result in your head being thrown into the headrest without you being quite prepared for it...............Martin.

The park has one indoor coaster, Skull Mountain, that was an alright ride but a good respite from the sun. Rather strangely there are signs in the queue line warning people susceptible to strobes not to ride, quite odd when you realise there weren't any, unless they had been turned off on the occasion we were there.

For me the most amazing ride in the park was the big wheel. Rather interestingly I said the same thing about Clementon. This didn't have the same problematic ride operators as the other park but offered some stunning views of the park, and it was for this reason that I liked this.
Here is Nitro and Batman at one end of the park. It was the other side of the park that was to blow me away however.

Rides everywhere! Just creeping into the left is Superman, then the Great American Scream Machine, Kingda Ka standing quite majestically over everything else, Rolling Thunder dwarfed by El Toro and Medusa in the far right corner of the park.

Here's El Toro, the new ride for this year. It did look very impressive.

A rather strange name for a ride I thought. If you could have a fantasy fling who would it be with? Angelina Jolie, Jennifer Connelly or Madchen Amick for me! Alas this was just one of those rides where you're stuck to the inner wall of a spinning cage.

Another stupid name for a ride. This is Blackbeard's Lost Treasure Train, one of the smaller coasters for kiddies. We didn't have to look too hard to find the train however.

There it was coming into the station, just as we got to it. Perhaps the ride should be renamed "Blackbeard's Found Treasure Train".

Another place to escape the heat was in this take on the Madhouse rides such as Hex, which we have at Alton Towers. This is themed around Houdini and him helping you to escape from a spinning room. SFNE had the same ride but didn't have half the effects running that this one did. This was actually pretty decent! For a country that doesn't appear to do Dark Rides, SFGA had surprised me with this one.

Prior to coming on this trip I had ridden 2 flying coasters: Stealth that used to be in California and Air at Alton Towers. Superman was the same system as the latter using a neoprene vest and ankle clips to keep you restrained during the ride. The ride itself is much longer than Air, which is great but was much more intense going through the pretzel loop, and actually quite unforgiving on the chest. A big boo to the park for having us queue in the heat with insufficient shelter and then having the cheek to send staff up the queue line selling frozen drinks. If you're killing us because you can't shade your queue lines properly at least give us water for free, we might not think of you as money grabbers then.

Interesting Sign #9
"For your riding comfort it is recommended that earrings are removed before riding".
Another earring warning, can only mean I was about to ride one ride in this park.

The Great American Scream Machine. Yes there was a lot of screaming on the ride, coupled with several Ows and Ouches. Like the drop tower, if you kept your head pushed back you could through this relatively unscathed.

Fancying a break from riding (are you mad? you all cry). I thought I'd check out the new bit of the park around Kingda Ka and El Toro. Kingda Ka takes its name after one of the tigers that the park look after. The animal show wasn't too bad, they don't have the tigers doing circus style tricks. Instead they do stuff such as chasing balloons, the kind of thing tigers are famous for doing in the wild. As you can see you are encouraged to get close to the animals, just as long as you keep that 20 high foot wall of perspex between you and them.

This is the shot that everyone took of El Toro. My only hope would be that the ride would open before I left the country and that I would have a chance to get back. I don't know if it was part of the testing or not but a few rides around this part of the park were closed, including the mine train type ride on the right and the wooden racer Rolling Thunder visible just behind El Toro. This did annoy a lot of people in the club as a sign of the Six Flags we know and hate.

Medusa had also been closed but when I got to it it had just opened up, so a walk onto the front row ensued and I was able to enjoy what is a really good ride, but then its hard to get bad versions of these.

Interesting Sign #10
"2 weeks til El Toro is unleashed".
This sign had apparently been up for a couple of weeks already.
You could however buy the El Toro T-Shirt today, if you so wanted. Cynical marketing? Nah, surely not.

El Toro had featured in a documentary on new wooden coasters along with The Voyage and Kentucky Rumbler. In that program the ride builders of El Toro made a big deal about how quick it would be to build El Toro due to its world class manufacturing techniques. So it seemed a bit strange that this was the last to open as the other two had already been up and running for a few weeks.

Leaving the "Ghost Town Coaster" part of the park where very little was running. I thought I'd check another bit of the park. Along the lakes edge they were trying out a new sports stunt show. Before it started we were warned that at any time a director may call "cut" and ask for bits to be redone. I thought this was a much better way to test things, admittedly a stunt show is a different beast to a new coaster, but you ask anyone if they'd like to be a test dummy and I'm sure they'll say "yes". (How prophetic that assumption was as I'd come to find out in Holiday World).

The stunt show featured skateboards and BMXs in the foreground and a whole array of waterborne vehicles on the lake. The strangest had to be this inflatable raft thing that they could jump and catch the wind with, at which point they were flying it like a kite.

Interesting Sign #11
"Warning Underground Flammable Storage - No Smoking"
Now I'm sorry, but if you don't want people to smoke just say so. Don't try and trick them by saying that there's a slight chance of them blowing themselves up if they do. If there was really something flammable beneath the sign wouldn't you fence it off rather than cover it with wood chips?

Here's proof that the true to their word, the park did indeed open up the other side of the Chiller Ride. To be honest I preferred this side, it was like a baby Kingda Ka where you go under the top rather than over it.

All in all, I have to say that I did like SFGA although there were some usual Six Flags habits that detracted from the day. Having to pay for cold drinks in scorching hot queue lines and the closure of a significant number of rides for example. But the park does have a great array of rides and I'm gutted that with all our red tape we will never have a park like this in the UK.

I've had enough of the east coast lets head inland to Pennsylvania and Dorney Park.