Then my family and I went to Six Flags Great Adventure. I regret not doing more research before I went, because I probably wouldn’t have found out about some of the…worse parts of the park on site.

First off, the park layout. This is the single worst pathing structure I have ever seen in any park. Most parks have either circular structures (IOA, Busch Gardens Williamsburg) or midway-and-loop structures (Cedar Point, Disneyland). Six Flags threw aside both of these option in favor of the “small midway, then five long, offshooting paths, only two of which connect to each other in a way that is not visible on the park map” method. Each offshoot has one or two coasters, usually situated at the end of the path, so that moving from one coaster to another involves a lot of backtracking. Probably the worst example is Rolling Thunder, which is literally next to Kingda Ka, but you have to walk nearly to the front gate and back to get from Point A to Point B. This isn’t professional park design; it’s what happens when I stop caring in Roller Coaster Tycoon.



But alas, Six Flags doesn’t care either. That walk from Ka to Rolling Thunder goes past the boardwalk games, a profitable enterprise. The more walking, the longer guests are in the park, and the more money they’ll spend. Such is the reasoning that also explains the advertisements on everything, defiling any theming the park had to begin with. I can understand a little advertising from a broke company like Six Flags, but defiling one of El Toro’s trains to advertise Kia takes it a bit far.

Anyway, the fact that I believe that park to be run by machines that think it’s a challenge on RCT 3 aside, my day here started with arriving an hour and a half early, the extra time for in case we got lost on the way over. Luckily, the park is well-signed from the interstate (Another note: This would have been helpful in finding Coney Island, hint hint Brooklyn management.) and we found it easily. So after an hour of sitting by the entrance listening to ads and awful pop music, they finally opened the park to let us go to…wait with 200 other people that wish to ride Kingda Ka for the other 30 minutes.



Finally they opened the gates, and made us walk over to Kingda Ka to get a first ride on the tallest coaster on Earth. I waited a station wait, and then was about to get into my row…then the Flashpassers came in and made me wait another train. I tried to satisfy myself with the fact that these people paid out the wazoo for those things, but it is still irritating. After that, I strapped myself in, ready to launch, and…I’ll post my ride reviews in another blog to try and cut down on the length of this blog and make things easier for the skimmers (You know who you are, mainly because if you are, you won’t read this). I will say that my train spent about two minutes too long waiting on the launch track, probably the most terrifying place possible to get E-stopped, possibly barring the top of a drop tower.



It was threatening to rain later, and I wished to ride as many coasters as possible, so my dad and I moved on to ride Superman: Ultimate Flight. The queue for this was quite long due to slow loading times and, presumably, Flashpassers. Once again my row was taken by a group of them. But first, I had my first experience with Six Flags TV, the queue line videos. They are approximately 35% Six Flags advertisements, 50% outside advertisements, and 15% videos to crappy pop songs. Six Flags, if you want a pre-ride movie, how about taking a lesson from IOA and making it about Superman. Even if I have to see it 18 times on loop, it would still be better than the programming that currently occupies the space.



The next ride was right next door, in the form of Green Lantern. Unfortunately, it started raining as I entered the queue. The rain quickly progressed to dumping buckets on all the unlucky park patrons, including the hopeful Green Lantern riders, who collectively set up a bizarre and hilarious social phenomenon. The GL queue is about half covered, utilizing an about 30 ft. long roof before 30 ft. of exposed queue. The waiting guests congregated underneath the roofs in order to stay dry, with the front people running up to the next cover whenever that one seemed a bit empty. The ride ops kept the ride going in the rain, thankfully, until I got into the station. Unfortunately, people took advantage of this in order to line jump.

So I made it to my seat, strapped myself in, and situated myself perfectly. I was in the back row with some Hispanic people and we were ready to go, when…to my utter horror, the harnesses unlocked and we were all sent back to the queue. So I am literally the first person in line for a train that isn’t going to move ‘till the rain completely stops. Also, SFGAdv, your rain policy seems to entail that ops can run the rides until the rain gets too heavy, then the rides have to stop until not a drop or drizzle is coming from the sky. How does that work?

So I’m stuck in line, by myself because my parents passed on a standing coaster, waiting for the rain to stop. Meanwhile, the pre-recorded message periodically tells us that the ride is closed for inclement weather, more mockingly each time. Between the messages of our collective dismay, they played, of course, more bad pop music. I don’t know what it is about this park, but I heard precisely two (2) good songs all day. In this line, I got to hear the Jersey Boys soundtrack (Basically Grease sung by Alvin and the Chipmunks) and Disney Musical songs. It was awful.

But alas, nothing else was open in the park (Barring Dark Knight and Skull Mountain, but I didn’t want to imagine the lines on those), so I just hung out in the Green Lantern station, chatting with the aerospace engineer next to me (Did you know that jet engines are held on by two bolts?), watching the poor ride ops, and trying to console myself with the thought that I will have a really fast ride because the track is all lubed from the rain.

So finally, a more chipper message came on saying that the ride will reopen shortly, and everyone in the station cheered. The gates opened, and I climbed into my, well, stand, and…wait, aren’t they going to run a test train through to see if it still runs properly? Well, apparently not, because they sent the first train out with passengers. I think this experience might have colored my perception of the ride a bit.



It was in total a two hour wait, and when I came off, my family went to lunch. This is some of the worst overpricing I’ve seen at a park. 12$ will get you chicken nuggets and fries or two entrees and Panda Express. (Bizarrely, the best deal we found was two slices of pizza for 9$. It was decent pizza, as well). Following this, my sister and I rode the Parachute Drop, since there aren’t many around anymore, and my sister going on anything in a park makes it worth riding in itself.


This was followed by the looong walk over the El Toro and Rolling Thunder. We managed to get lost three times just trying to find our way over, since the park map doesn’t exactly correspond to reality, and my Dad is not as good at navigating as he thinks.



But finally we made it. We arrived at the pinnacle of wooden design, the peak of all forces and intensity, the absolute summit of everything roller coasters have been able to offer since 1887…Rolling Thunder. I rode Rolling Thunder first to give me a better perspective on El Toro by contrasting the infamous Rotting Lumber’s roughness and banality with El Toro’s absolute craziness. Unfortunately, I found Rolling Thunder to actually be quite smooth and fun, ruining my plans. Such is the price of quality. Also, the ride ops were operating both sides, but refused to race them. This made me sad.

Then my dad and I actually rode El Toro. But first, let me comment on the station. Maybe I’m just spoiled on BGE always taking the care to have a fairly large space for the station and to enter from the center so people can access every row easily. Six Flags, however, often has people enter from the back or, in El Toro’s case the front of the station. This makes people fight to get through the front row waiters just to enter the station. They also don’t leave enough space between the rows and the wall, making riders who wish to ride in the back fight their way against the hordes.



Anyway, the threat of rain still hung over us, so my Mom finally rode a coaster, Bizarro. I opted to skip Runaway Mine Train because it is fairly insignificant compared to the Batman-Nitro punch on the other side of the park. My dad and I rode Skull Mountain on the way over there, it being on the way and having no line and all.
For some reason, when I got over there, I chose to ride Dark Knight first, once again with Mom. This was followed by the much more neaseating Batman, and because none of the past three coasters had a line for anything except the front row, I got straight into the back seat with some Europeans. (Apparently, in August, all of Europe takes that month-long vacation and just dumps itself in the New York City area. Half the tourists spoke some foreign language.)



This was followed by Nitro, which I had to walk around Batman’s lift hill to reach because the vague “Superhero-thingy” area is yet another peninsula. Nitro had a bizarrely long line, longer than Kingda Ka, Green Lantern, and El Toro. The only comparable line is Superman, and that’s only because that takes a forever to load. Why is Nitro the most popular ride? I mean, it’s fun and all, but El Toro is over there being all world-class and stuff and Kingda Ka is off doing its “being the tallest coaster ever” thing. Why is Nitro the popular one?



A raft ride with no line was just across the path, so my dad and I rode it, since the temperature was nice. I got off bone dry and felt a little gypped.
It approached dinner, and everyone else got Panda Express while I waited for pizza. I bit the bullet and rode Blackbeard’s Treasure Train while they were eating. I got a strange look from the ride op, but the back was occupied with middle schoolers riding the coaster to try and touch the supports, so I didn’t feel too out of place. Also, you can totally touch the track over the ride exit.



My sister, who rode Griffon once and had never ridden anything since, was able to be coerced onto BTT. I had to accompany her, however. They cycle the train through twice, so this means I circled the BTT track more than any other coaster that day. Ack.

My sister also dragged me on SkyScreamer, their low-budget Windseeker knock off, which I won’t even bother covering in the reviews, since it is just Parachute Drop with some rotation.



There was only one coaster left to ride, that being Runaway Mine Train. There was a log flume that didn’t look that interesting, my mom and I stopped by Houdini’s Great Escape, whose delightful strangeness will be described in the reviews. So I was off to ride El Toro twice more and the other side of Rolling Thunder. I wanted to get one more ride on Kingda Ka, so my sister and my mom split to reride BTT. Because the station loaded from the back, we pushed our way to the second-to-front seat and only had to wait one train. We met outside Kingda Ka’s entrance and headed over to Nitro for one last ride in the dark. After my dad and I got off, we just called it quits. There was still 30 minutes of operating hours, but I was bushed.



And that was my day at Six Flags Great Adventure. I will be posting the ride reviews in the next blog in this series, as well as a summary of the park and some more weirdness.