davidm
Strata Poster
So I've been away for a bit of a trip...
The original plan was to fly into Salt Lake City (in order to visit Lagoon) and fly out of LA (in order to revisit SFMM and their
new RMC), the time between doing some tourist-trekking around the big sights (the national parks of Utah, Arizona and California
rather than just amusement parks you understand) - however as I came to look at 'where' I'd be 'when', the wild-fires in Northern
CA and the Halloween-attractions of some the amusement-parks (notably HHN at Universal) got the better of me and I diverted some
time goon-wards instead of national-park-wards as hopefully you shall see...
--
Day 1 : Saturday 3rd October
3AM start, fly to Amsterdam to get the flight to SLC (how many times did that airport code make me smile?), but a bit of a delay
at AMS meant I don't get to Salt Lake until the evening (the idea was to get their early afternoon and then go and have a look at
the big lake), so just grab some food and go to sleep.
Awesome view from hotel near the airport;
Day 2 : Sunday 4th October
As is the way when travelling to the US from Europe, stupid tired when you get there so you sleep, but then wake up stupid early
because of the time difference that you haven't adjusted to yet - but that was OK because the trip to see the lake that I hadn't
managed to do when I arrived, I could just do in the morning instead. Almost didn't go to plan as the spot on the lake (a marina)
that I'd scoped out as a place to park didn't seem to open until 9AM, but by ignoring the closed gate and driving through the
exit instead of the entrance I ended up where I planned to be.
(was confident it was OK to go there as there was a tourist bus parked up there - full of Asian tourists)
Tripod and remote trigger with me on the trip, so you might get some selfies for a change...
So yeah, not that exciting to be honest, pleasant enough, but its just a lake. Tick.
Lagoon didn't open until 11am, so get some fast-food breakfast and head up to Farmington (about 20mies North of SLC), drive
up a hill to see if there is any decent views - there are to be honest, could see the Great Lake and mountains from there
too, but more importantly;
Get to the car park and take some pics (Lagoon's big coasters being mostly visible from the car park rather than just the
park) and eventually its 11 and time to head in and via a mini-running of the bulls / controlled walkback affair I'm near the
head of the Q for the big new ride Cannibal
Dunno whether its normal operating procedure, but they held the (by now rather full, but I was near the front) line of people
up outside the ride Q itself for a while - perhaps they were just doing it that day for effect because that "Bert the
Conqueror" chap was there filming for the Travel Channel and he was doing some "look at all these people waiting to ride"
links with us in the background.
Anyway, they didn't hold us up long and we are in - back row first ride and lets see what this is all about then...
And its pretty good really ; interesting lift section inside the tower (one of those dual-lift-tracks things that gets wider
in the middle so the two lift sections can pass each other ; like the Intamin water rides?) and a great beyond-vertical first
drop into a couple of big huge inversions and whatnot. I wasn't overly keen on the funny heartline inversion (which starts
out twisting you, then reverses direction back again - think I'd just prefer it to keep going) and the waterfall finale was
pretty cool - especially as you don't even see the waterfall from the park itself so it could come as a bit of a surprise!
All in all a really good ride then, probably the best eurofighter-ish (obviously its not a eurofighter, but has similar small
capacity trains; thats what I mean) I've ridden. Dunno what "Bert the Conqueror" thought of it, saw them filming various bits
in the morning but they had vanished after a couple of hours.
Oddly Cannibal is kind-of built outside the park (feel sure they must be going to do something about that in the off-season)
because you exit the ride into a section that you can't get directly back to the ride-entrance from, you have to come back
'into' the park past some upcharge gokarts and do a little circuit of a few rides to get back to the entrance. Hmmm.
After a couple of rides (utilising a pretty efficient single-rider queue) I head off looking for the next coaster, but come
across a different one first, being the Vekoma family-inverted ride The Bat, so I +1 that - its got nothing that any
other Vekoma-family-inverted hasn't apart from a nice purple colour-scheme
oh, and a zombie-cage outside it, but more of that later...
I find the coaster that I was looking for then, the venerable old Schwartzkopf Jet Star 2 model, imaginatively named as
Jet Star 2, but whats this burdensome sign...
Yep, indeed, you can't ride this alone - so I head onto it anyway and hang around for a while until I find some other lonely
person to pair up with to get the ride in (so "Thanks" to the young-chap who I accosted in the Q and made sit in my lap - that
all sounds a bit wrong now doesn't it, but was all above-board and in the name of goondom).
Nearby is another (as well as Cannibal) in-park creation, the family-coaster Bombora, which is kinda roller-skater-esque
but with some onboard audio too - fun enough, but not exactly earth-shattering.
They have a kiddie-area and with that comes a kiddie-coaster too, a mini-tivoli thing Puff the Little Fire Dragon which
apart from its awesome name, has little else going for it for me (but at least they let me ride it!)
Wow thats only half the coaster's that this park has got done, another 5 to go - happy times!
Next up was a fairly standard spinning Maurer ; Spider, but what it lacked in originality it made up in themeing with
a lovely huge spider as the entrance way, and the ride entrance itself was tucked back in a wooded section in a cool little
building
the ride itself though was a bit stuck-out-in-the-car-park
In the same area are the other coasters, the stock Wild Mouse (thankfully not a spinning one though, so thats OK)
and another old Schwartzkpof, the rather cool Colossus the Fire Dragon, which was a lot of fun
I was planning on leaving the woody until last, but the other significant ride was broken for a while, so did the woody next -
some confusion about its name ; Roller Coaster seems to be the consensus but also 'White Coaster' it seems.
Anyway was pretty good in a "blimey thats almost 100 years old" way - enjoyed that a lot so had a couple of rides
(pics from the car park earlier!)
Some of the other rides at the park were all fairly standard (thats not a criticism by the way), shot tower (only 2 of the 3
legs had rides on them though)
Waterpark was closed for the season, but looked reasonable - I'd expect that this was a big draw in the summer months
This dark-ride was useless though (in fact I don't remember anything about it now, apart from remembering that it was just useless)
The last coaster eventually reopened, and this was the other eurofighter-ish ride (again, I know its not a eurofighter!), the
launched Zierer tower-coaster Wicked.
SRQ was in effect for this (useful because the main Q had built up significantly due to the earlier down-time), but still took a
fair while to get on - I was much amused watching them load the train to see that when a small child close to the height limit
turned up, they just added a booster-seat to the train for them to ride upon ; never seen that before!
This was a lot better than I expected it was going to be, actually really good ride, nice double-launch (towards and then up
the tower) nice overbank, twisty bit and some riding around afterwards ; if I was being critical the restraints tightened a lot
mid-ride and there where shin-guards that annoyed me, but otherwise yeah another really good ride.
The park was only open until 8pm (Sunday hours - go figure!), so their evening Halloween event started a bit early (3pm) in
broad daylight, which kinda affected the atmosphere quite a bit, but it was included in admission so couldn't really complain...
So yes, after all the coasters done and I had ridden a few other rides (there is a log flume and a rapids ride off in a somewhat
separate western-themed area which I rode but failed to take any pics of), their Halloween event Frightmares had started up
and I made my way into their mazes (only one of which had any maze-like elements, them being the standard haunt-walkthru affair)
It wasn't the most expansive event - couple of scare zones, 4 mazes and a show or two, but 'for free' not going to complain too
much.
First maze I hit was easily the best, billed as the scariest - Nightwalk - there was pretty big, slow
moving Q for this that I endured - some scare-actors entertaining the Q - these ones all vampired-up - some of the
female-vampires were a bit distracting I'll admit - pretty well done. The maze itself was all nasty-serial killers and monsters
and had a big set piece evil-shrine sort of thing, all not too bad.
The maze-etiquette here was that they batched you into small groups at the start each maze - say 6/7 or you - then sent you thru
in these batches every couple of minutes - hence why the Qs were so slow moving, nothing like the continual throughput of HHN
(which it this point was the only real-reference I had of a US-scare event) - this worked OK once you were in the maze but did
really make it slow to get in. You did potentially catch up with the previous group, but not often.
The Qs for the other mazes were similarly burdensome, so I picked the one with the least Q next, which was the scary-clown
themed Fun House of Fear, the Q-line actors were OK on this one as well - good scary-clown make-up and
the like, not too irritating at all. The maze itself had 3D (chroma) glasses and was the expected scary fun-house/circus affair.
Next up was their zombie maze - I do like zombie's, but this wasn't great. Zombie Lockdown was themed as
a prison full of zombies, who seemingly kept trying to escape so needed to be recaptured by the evil-looking military guards.
First trouble was that the Q-line actors were a bit useless, the same bored looking zombie escaping all the time, just to be
chased down and recaptured by the same guards - all got very repetitive very quickly. Maze itself was OK, lots of prison theming,
fair amount of zombies. Only OK though.
More scary was waiting for this maze, the young couple behind me chatting away, the lad (late-teens I guess) was all casually
matter-of-fact talking about what would be really scary would be if he turned up at the theme park with his licensed gun (because
apparently there was nothing "they" could do to stop him from doing that) and started brandishing it about. Really weird, he was
not being all brash and bragging about it, just casually chatting to his date - 'MURICA!?!
Last maze was the somewhat confused themed 20 Years of Terror - a mishmash of different monsters and
themes, which was OK in bits but the overall lack-of-theme made it a bit nonsensical. Oh and the Q-line actors were awful for
this one, couple of kids in horrible-injury make-up trying to entertain the crowd and failing miserably - when you see the same
useless kid in the same make-up for the ages it took to Q to get into the maze (most of an hour) its just really depressing.
This was the Q for that last maze
At least it had started to get dark-ish by the time I exited that last maze, I went off in search of a scare-zone, only to
find that they had closed by then (like 7pm - thats pretty useless isn't it, just closing as it gets dark?), so just wandered
around the park for a while before getting a last night ride or two on Cannibal - which were nice.
So a pretty good day - the Halloween event wasn't great, but wasn't awful, nice enough park, couple of great coasters, nice
atmosphere (gun-toting teenagers aside) - I'd expect if this were your local park you'd be happy enough, well you'd have to
be as there is nothing else bar a couple of alpine-coasters nearby. Good work the Mormons then.
The original plan was to fly into Salt Lake City (in order to visit Lagoon) and fly out of LA (in order to revisit SFMM and their
new RMC), the time between doing some tourist-trekking around the big sights (the national parks of Utah, Arizona and California
rather than just amusement parks you understand) - however as I came to look at 'where' I'd be 'when', the wild-fires in Northern
CA and the Halloween-attractions of some the amusement-parks (notably HHN at Universal) got the better of me and I diverted some
time goon-wards instead of national-park-wards as hopefully you shall see...
--
Day 1 : Saturday 3rd October
3AM start, fly to Amsterdam to get the flight to SLC (how many times did that airport code make me smile?), but a bit of a delay
at AMS meant I don't get to Salt Lake until the evening (the idea was to get their early afternoon and then go and have a look at
the big lake), so just grab some food and go to sleep.
Awesome view from hotel near the airport;
Day 2 : Sunday 4th October
As is the way when travelling to the US from Europe, stupid tired when you get there so you sleep, but then wake up stupid early
because of the time difference that you haven't adjusted to yet - but that was OK because the trip to see the lake that I hadn't
managed to do when I arrived, I could just do in the morning instead. Almost didn't go to plan as the spot on the lake (a marina)
that I'd scoped out as a place to park didn't seem to open until 9AM, but by ignoring the closed gate and driving through the
exit instead of the entrance I ended up where I planned to be.
(was confident it was OK to go there as there was a tourist bus parked up there - full of Asian tourists)
Tripod and remote trigger with me on the trip, so you might get some selfies for a change...
So yeah, not that exciting to be honest, pleasant enough, but its just a lake. Tick.
Lagoon didn't open until 11am, so get some fast-food breakfast and head up to Farmington (about 20mies North of SLC), drive
up a hill to see if there is any decent views - there are to be honest, could see the Great Lake and mountains from there
too, but more importantly;
Get to the car park and take some pics (Lagoon's big coasters being mostly visible from the car park rather than just the
park) and eventually its 11 and time to head in and via a mini-running of the bulls / controlled walkback affair I'm near the
head of the Q for the big new ride Cannibal
Dunno whether its normal operating procedure, but they held the (by now rather full, but I was near the front) line of people
up outside the ride Q itself for a while - perhaps they were just doing it that day for effect because that "Bert the
Conqueror" chap was there filming for the Travel Channel and he was doing some "look at all these people waiting to ride"
links with us in the background.
Anyway, they didn't hold us up long and we are in - back row first ride and lets see what this is all about then...
And its pretty good really ; interesting lift section inside the tower (one of those dual-lift-tracks things that gets wider
in the middle so the two lift sections can pass each other ; like the Intamin water rides?) and a great beyond-vertical first
drop into a couple of big huge inversions and whatnot. I wasn't overly keen on the funny heartline inversion (which starts
out twisting you, then reverses direction back again - think I'd just prefer it to keep going) and the waterfall finale was
pretty cool - especially as you don't even see the waterfall from the park itself so it could come as a bit of a surprise!
All in all a really good ride then, probably the best eurofighter-ish (obviously its not a eurofighter, but has similar small
capacity trains; thats what I mean) I've ridden. Dunno what "Bert the Conqueror" thought of it, saw them filming various bits
in the morning but they had vanished after a couple of hours.
Oddly Cannibal is kind-of built outside the park (feel sure they must be going to do something about that in the off-season)
because you exit the ride into a section that you can't get directly back to the ride-entrance from, you have to come back
'into' the park past some upcharge gokarts and do a little circuit of a few rides to get back to the entrance. Hmmm.
After a couple of rides (utilising a pretty efficient single-rider queue) I head off looking for the next coaster, but come
across a different one first, being the Vekoma family-inverted ride The Bat, so I +1 that - its got nothing that any
other Vekoma-family-inverted hasn't apart from a nice purple colour-scheme
oh, and a zombie-cage outside it, but more of that later...
I find the coaster that I was looking for then, the venerable old Schwartzkopf Jet Star 2 model, imaginatively named as
Jet Star 2, but whats this burdensome sign...
Yep, indeed, you can't ride this alone - so I head onto it anyway and hang around for a while until I find some other lonely
person to pair up with to get the ride in (so "Thanks" to the young-chap who I accosted in the Q and made sit in my lap - that
all sounds a bit wrong now doesn't it, but was all above-board and in the name of goondom).
Nearby is another (as well as Cannibal) in-park creation, the family-coaster Bombora, which is kinda roller-skater-esque
but with some onboard audio too - fun enough, but not exactly earth-shattering.
They have a kiddie-area and with that comes a kiddie-coaster too, a mini-tivoli thing Puff the Little Fire Dragon which
apart from its awesome name, has little else going for it for me (but at least they let me ride it!)
Wow thats only half the coaster's that this park has got done, another 5 to go - happy times!
Next up was a fairly standard spinning Maurer ; Spider, but what it lacked in originality it made up in themeing with
a lovely huge spider as the entrance way, and the ride entrance itself was tucked back in a wooded section in a cool little
building
the ride itself though was a bit stuck-out-in-the-car-park
In the same area are the other coasters, the stock Wild Mouse (thankfully not a spinning one though, so thats OK)
and another old Schwartzkpof, the rather cool Colossus the Fire Dragon, which was a lot of fun
I was planning on leaving the woody until last, but the other significant ride was broken for a while, so did the woody next -
some confusion about its name ; Roller Coaster seems to be the consensus but also 'White Coaster' it seems.
Anyway was pretty good in a "blimey thats almost 100 years old" way - enjoyed that a lot so had a couple of rides
(pics from the car park earlier!)
Some of the other rides at the park were all fairly standard (thats not a criticism by the way), shot tower (only 2 of the 3
legs had rides on them though)
Waterpark was closed for the season, but looked reasonable - I'd expect that this was a big draw in the summer months
This dark-ride was useless though (in fact I don't remember anything about it now, apart from remembering that it was just useless)
The last coaster eventually reopened, and this was the other eurofighter-ish ride (again, I know its not a eurofighter!), the
launched Zierer tower-coaster Wicked.
SRQ was in effect for this (useful because the main Q had built up significantly due to the earlier down-time), but still took a
fair while to get on - I was much amused watching them load the train to see that when a small child close to the height limit
turned up, they just added a booster-seat to the train for them to ride upon ; never seen that before!
This was a lot better than I expected it was going to be, actually really good ride, nice double-launch (towards and then up
the tower) nice overbank, twisty bit and some riding around afterwards ; if I was being critical the restraints tightened a lot
mid-ride and there where shin-guards that annoyed me, but otherwise yeah another really good ride.
The park was only open until 8pm (Sunday hours - go figure!), so their evening Halloween event started a bit early (3pm) in
broad daylight, which kinda affected the atmosphere quite a bit, but it was included in admission so couldn't really complain...
So yes, after all the coasters done and I had ridden a few other rides (there is a log flume and a rapids ride off in a somewhat
separate western-themed area which I rode but failed to take any pics of), their Halloween event Frightmares had started up
and I made my way into their mazes (only one of which had any maze-like elements, them being the standard haunt-walkthru affair)
It wasn't the most expansive event - couple of scare zones, 4 mazes and a show or two, but 'for free' not going to complain too
much.
First maze I hit was easily the best, billed as the scariest - Nightwalk - there was pretty big, slow
moving Q for this that I endured - some scare-actors entertaining the Q - these ones all vampired-up - some of the
female-vampires were a bit distracting I'll admit - pretty well done. The maze itself was all nasty-serial killers and monsters
and had a big set piece evil-shrine sort of thing, all not too bad.
The maze-etiquette here was that they batched you into small groups at the start each maze - say 6/7 or you - then sent you thru
in these batches every couple of minutes - hence why the Qs were so slow moving, nothing like the continual throughput of HHN
(which it this point was the only real-reference I had of a US-scare event) - this worked OK once you were in the maze but did
really make it slow to get in. You did potentially catch up with the previous group, but not often.
The Qs for the other mazes were similarly burdensome, so I picked the one with the least Q next, which was the scary-clown
themed Fun House of Fear, the Q-line actors were OK on this one as well - good scary-clown make-up and
the like, not too irritating at all. The maze itself had 3D (chroma) glasses and was the expected scary fun-house/circus affair.
Next up was their zombie maze - I do like zombie's, but this wasn't great. Zombie Lockdown was themed as
a prison full of zombies, who seemingly kept trying to escape so needed to be recaptured by the evil-looking military guards.
First trouble was that the Q-line actors were a bit useless, the same bored looking zombie escaping all the time, just to be
chased down and recaptured by the same guards - all got very repetitive very quickly. Maze itself was OK, lots of prison theming,
fair amount of zombies. Only OK though.
More scary was waiting for this maze, the young couple behind me chatting away, the lad (late-teens I guess) was all casually
matter-of-fact talking about what would be really scary would be if he turned up at the theme park with his licensed gun (because
apparently there was nothing "they" could do to stop him from doing that) and started brandishing it about. Really weird, he was
not being all brash and bragging about it, just casually chatting to his date - 'MURICA!?!
Last maze was the somewhat confused themed 20 Years of Terror - a mishmash of different monsters and
themes, which was OK in bits but the overall lack-of-theme made it a bit nonsensical. Oh and the Q-line actors were awful for
this one, couple of kids in horrible-injury make-up trying to entertain the crowd and failing miserably - when you see the same
useless kid in the same make-up for the ages it took to Q to get into the maze (most of an hour) its just really depressing.
This was the Q for that last maze
At least it had started to get dark-ish by the time I exited that last maze, I went off in search of a scare-zone, only to
find that they had closed by then (like 7pm - thats pretty useless isn't it, just closing as it gets dark?), so just wandered
around the park for a while before getting a last night ride or two on Cannibal - which were nice.
So a pretty good day - the Halloween event wasn't great, but wasn't awful, nice enough park, couple of great coasters, nice
atmosphere (gun-toting teenagers aside) - I'd expect if this were your local park you'd be happy enough, well you'd have to
be as there is nothing else bar a couple of alpine-coasters nearby. Good work the Mormons then.
). Most surprising thing for me was the view of the smog you get in L.A. Not meaning to hijack your topic, but this picture I took showed it off the best (worst!).
