Friday, May 9, 2008

Things That Piss Me Off: Rides Opening Mid-Season

I have decided to start a new part of the blog were I ramble on about things related to Amusement Parks that just piss me off. This week I am gonna banter on:

Rides Opening Mid-Season

This always angers me. I think most parks have there additions planned years in advance and how they don't start construction at the proper time is beyond me. I hate when a park opens it season in March/April/May and there new ride isn't scheduled to open until June/July.

Two examples of this here in the 2008 season are Evel Knevel @ SFStl and Steel Hawg @ Indiana Beach. Evel is scheduled to open June 20th according to the Six Flags St.Louis Website even though the park has been open since April 5th. This one really pisses me off, because I will be in the area Memorial Day Weekend, but Evel Knevel will not be. The other one that has me going is the very slow going Steel Hawg, which just hung its first piece of track:



ON MAY 7th yes thats right four days after the park opened they finally got around to getting track on the new ride. I mean when is this thing going to open, late July or August??!? C'mon just because your a smaller park you can still plan your additions correctly.

Just typing this blog angers me.

Two exceptions I give are to year round parks that start construction and finish construction whenever. The other are for things like Maximum RPM when a park takes a chance by building a cool looking prototype, but has some trouble getting it working correctly. I give parks some more leeway when doing things like this, but I got my limits like the 8 year odyssey that is building the flying turns.

Anyway I think a lot of parks can learn from Cedar Fair when it comes to this issue, a lot of their parks recentely have there new rides planned out well in advance and start construction very early and open right near the beginning of the season. I mean look how early constructed on Maverick (not my fav but get to ride it tomorrow) or the 2009 project at Kings Island.

Rides Opening Mid-Season Piss Me Off

1 comment:

milst1 said...

I'm with you on this Pat. I've been to several parks this year with new coasters still in process. The Tony Hawk at Six Flags Over Texas wasn't ready last month, and this month our trip to California revealed no Tony Hawk yet at SFDK, no X2 at Magic Mountain, and no Pony Express at Knott's. In fact, we couldn't even ride an existing coaster (admittedly a kiddie) because Thomas Town at Magic Mountain isn't open yet and the coaster is being rethemed for that area. What a drag.