Jackson, New Jersey – Monday, June 9th, 2008

I hadn’t pre-booked any of the hotels before leaving on the trip because in all my traveling experience the only hotel booking website I’ve found to offer any real deals and not just those imaginary ‘promotionals’ is Hotwire. For those of you that have never used Hotwire for your coaster trips, it’s definitely worth at least checking out, since the way their deals work is you buy your room only a day or two before the actual date, and they don’t tell you the exact name and location (but give you enough information that you could easily guess which it is if you compare on other website), the purpose of this all being that you fill rooms that otherwise would have gone empty at extremely reduced prices (doesn’t work if you know the name of the hotel… hello supply-side economics!). Case in point, the night before at Dorney Park we got a very spacious, high-quality hotel in Allentown for I think around $45. It was quite the deal, the hotel had about everything I’d expect from a hotel (which isn’t much, mind you; my idea of ‘traveling cheap’ if I’m by myself would be a couple hours in a commuter lot with a blanket and pillow in a car), the only thing it didn’t have was wireless internet connection in the rooms, and of course I forgot to bring my ethernet connection.

I mention all this in my SFGAdv review because the night before I was only able to get a weak connection in the hotel lobby, and all my searches for hotels near the Great Adventure area turned up in vain, though I figured it was because of the poor connection was causing things to time-out since the pages were rarely loading properly anyway. So we decided it would probably be better to just drive the way to Six Flags Great Adventure for our two days of stay there and find a decent looking hotel ourselves for that night. So as soon as we enter NJ we start looking for exits with some decent hotels. There’s one, but I think we’re still too far away and we should try to get a bit closer. So we keep on driving, and driving… and driving. Nothing. No hotels anywhere along I-95/195 at all. Not even the most run-down looking roadside motel that would look as if it belongs in a Hitchcock thriller. We finally get to, and then pass Great Adventure, and keep on driving, looking for some hotel anywhere, and finally decide to turn around when we realize we’re already approaching the ocean. We stopped at a gas station and asked the attendant if he knew where the hotels that people going to SFGAdv stayed at were, and he had almost no clue where one might stay that didn’t involve crossing state lines. After passing back and forth the area a few times, taking various side roads in the hope that they might lead to somewhere, I think we finally found a hotel, nothing particularly nice and prices closer to $90, and were finally able to call it a night.

We left the next morning for Great Adventure as late as possible to still be ‘early’. So we make our way to the entrance only to find that the road is packed. About a fifteen minute wait in a sea of traffic to get our parking tickets, then another good twenty minute wait at the main gate to get my season pass, and it’s very apparent that today is going to packed. I get to the window and ask if the season pass still has the Bring-a-Friend for free on weekdays through June. She replies that she’s pretty sure they’ve stopped doing that. Huh? Have they stopped offering that on newly sold season passes or have they cut perks from all passes? Either way didn’t make a whole lot of sense, but with that information in mind I realized it would now be cheaper to each buy an individual ticket with a promotion I found in a brochure in the hotel the night before and happened to think to bring along, just in case. So we finally get into the park, and the midways are pretty well choked, although I suppose it could have been worse. Still, for an early June Monday, when just the weekend before all our parks were visited with considerably small crowds, this was not what I was expecting.

So we make our way to the first ride of the day, I figure Batman: The Ride is a good one to start off with. The queue is indoors at least, which I figure given the rising heat that morning would at least offer that escape, if only the queue were air-conditioned (or ventilated…), that is. I never really think of myself as liking Batman the Ride, but then just before visiting a park that has one I remember the tighter, more intense layout and figure that I actually like this design much more than I remember. But then I always get to the ride, which so far has invariably been at an over-crowded Six Flags park on a miserably hot day and the whole thing becomes and ordeal for a just one ride that’s too short and then when all said and done I’m still no closer to figuring out if I like this design in relation to other B&M inverts or not. Maybe some other year I’ll finally be able to figure that one out, but all I can say is my light fantasy leading up to that visit of hitting Batman first, getting a bunch of re-rides before the (minor) crowds hit was not going to come true. While in the queue and trying to assess the somewhat grim looking situation I figure that it might be worth it on the second day to get a Fast-Pass.

After Batman it seemed appropriate to get the other, newer Batman next door out of the way. The wait for the Dark Knight was I think around forty-five minutes total, at least twenty of those spent outdoors with all the televisions blasting out non-stop promotions and others sorts of Six Flags attitude. I suppose Six Flags execs are patting each other on the back for being so cutting edge in commercial synergies and in-park media, and I hope they keep it to themselves because the day my local Cedar Fair parks start pumping advertisements and other self-promotional into their queue lines is the day a season pass will no longer be necessary for me. It used to be that you could spend the time in line enjoying a nice conversation, people watch, or watch the ride you’re about to try in quiet awe, but Six Flags has figured out that when you put television screens in front of people with nothing better to do, they’ll be drawn to them like a bug to a zapper, no matter how awful their programming is. Here everyone just paid attention to the TV screens, the perfect little consumers we all are whenever there’s a LCD screen around, and most would make sarcastic quips to their friends every time the “More Flags More Fun” commercial came on that this right now qualified for one flag although by the end of the line we’d heard that joke enough that it just became dispiriting how artificial it all was, I’d swear this ride is far better themed to Soylent Green or some other dystopian-consumerism film than The Dark Knight [mmm… maybe Dawn of the Dead? I’d love an amusement area themed to that].

Anyway thankfully we were the very last ones to be let into the air-conditioned anti-chambers, which as it happens is the best part of the ride. For the most part it seemed that the ride’s creative designers missed a memo from Warner Brothers that Tim Burton and Joel Schumaker were no longer directing the franchise since that still seemed to be where they wanted to pull a lot of the scenery elements from for most of the attraction, although at least they managed to get Aaron Eckhart to do some contractually obligated work for an intro video. I even partly admire the intro scene since it a bit more ambiguous and requires more close attention to figure out exactly what the set-up is, but given the average SFGAdv patron the competing noise level in the room made it impossible to decipher any of the back story. Then we were let into the next chamber which we got to spend at least another twenty minutes in, the best feature of which is that it’s air conditioned. They’ve even got some pretty decent themeing throughout so that by the time you get in the ride vehicle you think you could be in for something fairly decent. Then you take the first turn and are greeted with a wild mouse in a box, effectively killing all the build-up from the pre-show. There are a couple partially enclosed tunnels on the top couple of switchbacks, complete with a strobelight flashing on a Batman figurine in one section, which turned out to be about as technical as they were willing to go for on-ride effects. The rest of the wild mouse takes place without nearly any themeing and plenty of light, although the nice thing was they weren’t braking it at all. On the exit even the pathway takes you right underneath the ride area, with the exit door being inside the main building, letting in large amounts of light into the ride area every time someone opened the door. Especially compared to the wonderful Exterminator this ride just screamed ‘incompetent’ at every level, and overall the whole experience, from the barrage of queue-mmercials to the overwhelmingly cheap ride experience, was just plain embarrassing in its blatantly artless commercialism, even going so far as to detract from the cinematic experience a month later when, for all that films layered interpretations about the dualistic nature of heroism and the like, I’d think back on my experience with the coaster and remember how the film was still just part of the corporate franchise machine.

Moving on to Nitro. The line for Nitro wasn’t too bad, still pretty long but at least they got it to move faster than any others for that day. Noticed some people were collapsing from heat exhaustion while in the unshaded line, at least the Six Flags staff were adequately taking care of them. As onlookers watched them get a free bottled water and a ride in a shaded golf cart back to a medical center, I mused if that would all be worth self-inducing a heat stroke. In the end I figured you have to give up your place in line, so probably better off not to. That’s how desperate we all were for some shade. We got a front seat row for the ride itself.

I like Nitro better than I want to, which is weird because I don’t like Apollo’s Chariot as much as I want to. If my opinion of each could switch, then I’d be happy. Nitro for some reason I really like even though it’s just large, separate elements plugged in to one another while taking place over the beautiful surrounding New Jersey cesspool, something I normally would critique the hell out of today, but I still came back with my high opinion of it from 2003 virtually unchanged. Meanwhile Apollo’s Chariot (which I rode for the first time the previous year), despite actually having terrain, unique shaping, strategically placed flat sections to give it some actual pacing and character (on a B&M? Unheard of!), in fact from off-ride I’d say AC is B&M’s best designed ride in my eyes, yet I didn’t like it when I actually got the chance to ride it. I figure it must be that Nitro has the extra speed and height to make the whole speed coaster concept work for me, but still I just can’t figure out my own opinions on this ride. It would help if I could ever ride any Six Flags coaster more than just once a visit, though.

After Nitro we tried getting a free complementary ice water after waiting in line for about eight minutes at a small food corral. If it wasn’t already obvious my opinion of Six Flags up to this point was not very high and it wouldn’t have surprised me to be turned down. But thankfully, no, they did in fact offer complementary ice water, in a Dixie cup size somewhere between “Shot Glass” and “Baby’s First Tippy Cup”.

We wandered along the wooded backside of the park which was not crowded at all (I guess because there’s nothing back there), and got in a quick ride on Blackbeard’s Lost Treasure Train, which had no line, mostly to boost our Rides-per-Hour ratio somewhat. This is partly what surprises me about Great Adventure, there actually is some decent terrain and lakefront property here that they could work with, but instead any nice views or anything are all closed off by a thin layer of trees and other buildings, leaving the main scenic views of the outside world from major attractions to be only the parking lot from Ka/Superman, or the waste containment area (whatever it is) next to Nitro. If they could just cut the tree layers back and utilize that large lake system they have behind the park it might actually feel kind of nice, but instead the entire infrastructure is entirely inward facing on large concrete midways clogged with tastelessly styled rides and building (the eastern part of the park has thankfully improved over the past few years).

That rides-per-hour ratio I just mentioned was going to quickly plummet after this. From there we moved over to do Great American Scream Machine, one of the rides I skipped back in 2003 on the premise that it should be dismissed because it’s ‘too rough’ (unfortunately Viper was also overlooked then for the same reason). However the heat was playing with the lift engine causing the ride to be down when we got over there. Superman had far too long of a wait, so we did the Parachute Tower which didn’t have much of a line, although the fact that they were only running two of the parachutes didn’t necessarily mean the wait was short. I am still glad I did this one because A): it’s a classic, and B): I got to savor the views of El Toro for the first time from up there, and marveled at how ridiculous that first drop looked in real life. While up there, I also couldn’t help but suppress the suspicion that ET was not currently in operation. When we got over there to check it out, those suspicions were confirmed. “It’s down because of the heat” seemed to be the reason why. From there looked at the wait for the Mine Train (too long), the Log Flume (down), Medusa (too long), Rolling Thunder (left side, the side I hadn’t been on, closed, right side, too long). That left us with the only intermittently down Kingda Ka, or… um. Well I wanted to save Ka for Day 2, have something new to try for then, especially if we’re getting a Fast Pass. In the end we decided to just camp out by El Toro’s entrance since it looked like they had some people working on it and I think a test train was even sent out, while I frequented La Cocina filling up on ice waters.

It sure takes a lot of work to have fun at Six Flags.

Good news. A small line started forming around El Toro‘s entrance, and workers looked like they were about ready to send someone down to open it up. We quickly made it in, and the line opened. We made our way to the back of the train, and were able to be the second people in for the very back row. Now even though we were only one train away from riding it still took a good fifteen minutes to actually ride. The test train they sent out just before letting the first load of people on before us became stopped at the top of the lift hill. Not that it was viewable from the station, but my suspicions were aroused when it went up but never came down. The trainees running things never noticed as they took their sweet time to make sure their first trainload was loaded properly, until it came time to dispatch when it was obvious that the first block had never cleared. Well, they sent someone up there, came back down, they finally got it working, and dispatched the first train. We were loaded in, had to check restraints twice (fine by me since my lapbar came down a bit too tight the first time), and finally we were off. First ride on El Toro was definitely something, although I’ll admit, maybe it was just being tired from the heat and waiting and everything, but when I actually got to my first experience with El Toro, rather than have a heightened sense of reality as is normal with the first ride on a record-breaking coaster like this, I felt curiously removed from the whole experience, especially from the first series of camelback hills.

Regardless by the time we got to the brakes (and I had plenty of time to reflect there as well as we waited for the next train to clear the station) I realized just how different this was from any other wooden coaster I had tried before. I wasn’t ready to commit to say ‘better’, but most definitely different. (Random note, but for some reason the exit path requires you to make a bee-line through a series of tables if you want to get back to the ride entrance, which is where we were clearly headed after that first ride). The line was mercifully still very short, given it’s such a high-profile attraction I figured everyone in the park would be there upon news of its reopening but the line was only to the middle of the stairs that lead directly into the loading platform. Second time around we decided to wait for the front row. I counted about fifteen groups ahead of us for the wait, not too bad considering that was all the line would entail. Still the wait took close to 50 minutes, thanks to said trainees taking forever (I was mildly irked that the ‘supervisor’-type personalities standing watch over the trainees at the control panel didn’t expedite things and help the restraint checkers speed things up). It occurred to my dad what probably was the result of all these large crowds and trainees present everywhere were, it was most likely the first weekday of summer vacation for all the New Jersey schools, thus leading it to be the case for every youth in the state that if they weren’t already starting work at Great Adventure today, there were going to be there to ride coasters anyway. If there was one silver lining to having trainees check restraints, it’s that the girl on the right side of the train was still very cautious not to invade anyone’s personal space which meant an extremely comfortable lapbar position on my second go-round.

Second ride: This time I was much more into it. While everyone else seems to be talking about the back seat on this ride being the place to be, I found the front seat to be the superior placement. Only real advantage the back had was the extra strong ejector on the first drop, but compared to Maverick’s ultra-tight, 95 degree drop in the back seat, El Toro could only close to comparison, far from exceeding. The front, however, was a far more visceral experience on the first half of the ride, having no obstructions and with the first series of hills setting a powerful if not slightly 1-note opener. The first turnaround I didn’t care for as much as I hoped, after the first few hills it was clear the ride was going to use all its speed and smoothness to focus on raw power rather than a more colorfully characterized, uniquely profiled experience, and the first turn-around seemed to be lacking that power as well as it just flew through the element with an impressive if not slightly languid gracefulness in it’s high banked turns.

Now here’s where El Toro really started to work for me. The shallow hill on the return run, while without the strong airtime present in the first maneuvers, startled me when I realized that for what almost appeared to be a straight-away there actually was still some noticeable airtime present. Consider also the wind felt in the front seat and the wooden support structure built around it and impression that we were actually gaining speed into the much more tightly plotted second half of the ride was mild cause for alarm and anticipation. The left-hand turn, with it’s moment of sudden headchoppers, is the perfect set-up to the sudden, and incredibly violent change of pace for the twister section of the ride. Everyone that’s been on El Toro I know of has talked about the viciousness of the Rolling Thunder hill. It’s far more intense than the previous hills in every possible way, in both psychological lead-up, fleetness in the transitions and relative rotation change, and, of course, the raw intensity of the ‘uplift’ itself.

The tightened pacing for the second half does not let a millisecond go wasted as it’s into a series of tight switchbacks at ground level, an awesome experience partly just because it’s so contrary to the entire first half of the ride. I was a bit worried that the return series of hilly curves would be taken too slowly as I had seen in all the videos, but the extreme heat meant the wheels were running fast and I was quite surprised when these final hills also offered some strong spurts of air, mixed in with the ‘dancing’ of the train from right to left.

Overall I was a bit worried El Toro, with it’s plug-and-play technology and train design, might have been a bit over-hyped by the masses that would prefer the most straight-forward Intamin Hyper coaster over any authentic wooden coaster any day. Thankfully El Toro works well on both levels, and while I can’t even call it the best wooden coaster from 2006 (that distinction belongs to the Voyage) I was pleased to find at the end of the trip that I was still able to place it firmly in my top ten list, just above Hades (similar size and pacing structures, although Hades is interesting in that it’s progression is actually the opposite of ET, although Hades’ amazing tunnels just barely got edged out by ET’s raw power).

After this ride the sky was starting to turn a dusty red/purple, indicating the sun was heading west and we only had about an hour until the park’s 7:00 close. While heading over to the now opened Great American Scream Machine I got a call from my mom wanting to know how things were going. While the rides here were great, I had to be honest that being back on the hot, crowded midways was miserable (thankfully though the crowds were starting to thin and it wasn’t quite as hot as that afternoon). It seemed like all that I really had left that I really wanted to accomplish while at Great Adventure was get a ride in on both GASM and Kingda Ka, and if the wait for GASM was short enough that seemed entirely do-able for the day. As it happened, GASM was walk-on.

Great American Scream Machine was of particular interest to my dad, since his first experience with a large-scale, intense coaster was when he was director of a school marching band, taking his band to play at Six Flags Great America back in 1990, and rode the Shockwave while there. Of course now we go on much bigger and more intense all the time, but, with that original Shockwave gone, he was finally able to compare that original experience 18 years ago with today. We got the second-to back row, generally a preferred seat for the Arrow multi-loopers. The ride itself was perfectly smooth and tolerable, the design is odd because of how quickly it seems to shrink throughout the ride experience. Tremendous first drop and loop, the next two loops are still very fast but feel a bit smaller scale due to the elevation. The midcourse practically bringing it to a halt, the twist down into the batwing has some neat dynamics, and by the time it gets to the final corkscrew and turn the scale of things has pretty much been reduced to remind me of Michigan’s Adventure’s model. Still they don’t quite make multi-loopers like this anymore, and I still managed to come off the ride thoroughly impressed by what is normally an overlooked coaster.

Last ride of the day: Kingda Ka. Got in line about a half-hour to park’s close. It quickly became apparent that things were very start and go. It would launch a couple trains in fast succession, and then there’d be a 10 minute wait for the next batch to go. A couple times it closed down altogether for at least a half hour. While in line someone recognized my CoasterSims t-shirt, and introduced himself as vandelay.corp. We had a quick conversation about CS and the park before the line started moving again. After about an hour and a half of waiting we got into the station. While I would have liked to have tried the front row there was already quite a line for it and it was obvious they were probably going to have to ask some of the people waiting for it to move to other rows once the maybe 2 or 3 trainloads worth of people behind us were accommodated, so we got the second-to-front row instead. A mechanic/supervisor running the ride from the operator’s booth let us know that the heat was causing the sensors to fail so he was going to have to manually oversee every launch, but they were sure to make sure everyone in line got a ride no matter how long after park closing it was.

Kingda Ka is even more like Top Thrill Dragster than I would have expected. That’s probably a good thing. The anticipation of the launch is about the same, the launch itself is about the same. The tower feels about the same. The only thing Kingda Ka really does that Dragster doesn’t is offer the camelback hill, but even that’s not as notable as I would have guessed. Speed and height feel pretty similar, perhaps a bit more in Ka’s case, and that difference probably would have been even more notable had I gone in the very front. TTD I think is still the superior ride for a few reasons. First, the use of only lapbars on that one does make the experience a whole lot more precarious feeling, although I will admit the OTSRs on Ka were not as intrusive as I thought they would be. Well, they have the same type on Maverick so I shouldn’t have been surprised, although as I recall there was a moment as I was going up and over the tower that there was a moment that I felt like I couldn’t feel any restraints and I had a split-second of panic at thinking they had maybe come undone before I realized they were still there. Also, Six Flags did not utilize the ride’s location very well. Dragster is right at midway level, and the sensation of speed is increased by having all the midway and rides and everything tearing away in the background, while Ka just sits above an even lining of trees the entire way down, and the parking lot on the other side. But overall it’s still quite the ride experience, and I’m quite glad I managed to get a ride in.

After the ride was over we waited around on the exit platform that overlooks the ride, watching a few other launches go and took some pictures, while discussing what we wanted to do the next day. As great as the rides were, that unfortunately represented only less than 1% of the actual time spent in the park, the rest of which, the heat and crowds just made it miserable. We could have splashed a lot of money down on a Flash Pass, but given I had now done everything I really wanted to get out of my visit (El Toro front and back, Kingda Ka, Dark Knight, Great American Scream Machine, a ride on Nitro to compare to AC from last year… plus a ‘bonus’ ride on Batman and the Parachute tower, wish I had done Medusa instead, though) it seemed that the money and effort put into a second day’s visit would be pointless, especially considering the season pass w/ bring-a-friend deal didn’t work out. Given the number of smaller parks along the Jersey coastline, that seemed a much more pleasant way to spend the day. Back at the hotel, showered, I checked online to find a good alternative. There was Bowcraft park and it’s interesting looking Crossbow, but that was inland, isolated, and farther north than I expected. Expensive too. Morey’s Piers were too far south, plus I had an offer through Amusement Today from them for a free VIP visit to their park to all Golden Tickets Award voters, in an effort to boost up their rankings in certain areas. Since I left that promotion at home I would have felt rather silly not using it now. A much better alternative seemed to be the Casino Pier and Funtown Pier, only 23 miles due east, each with an interesting looking collection of compact steel coasters over the water. Except both were closed on Tuesday. Some other small parks, nothing noteworthy. Finally I found something that would work as an alternative plan. Ocean City. 60-some miles south-east of us. Two competing amusement zones with at least three ‘adult-sized’ coasters between them. A full boardwalk and beach. Sounds great. Let’s do that.

Since we had not had anything to eat at the park we went out to get a good meal, and ended up at a Longhorn Steakhouse. The restaurant was pretty quiet in those late hours, and the meal itself was enormous, juicy and delicious, exactly what I needed. The real winner however was an item that caught my attention on the dessert menu: Golden Nugget Fried Cheesecake. Creamy cheesecake lightly breaded, flash-fried to crisp perfection and served over ice cream with strawberry sauce and a raspberry-caramel swirl. Topped with real whipped cream and served in a chilled goblet.

That is how you end a day. 🙂

(P.S.- I appologize for the relative lack of photos for this review since I went through most of the day planning to get my shots the next day, which then never ended up happening)

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