Part 1: Six Flags Magic Mountain
Part 2: Universal Studios Hollywood
Part 1: Six Flags Magic Mountain, 9th July 2011
If you didn't know already, at the moment I'm at the University of California, Riverside, as part of Disney World's International College Programme (I go over to Florida on the 19th). As I'm over here, and probably not coming back here for quite a while, I managed to get in contact with a couple of TPR people (well, I would've tried to find CF people that live 10 minutes away from Riverside, CA, but it would've been pointless) who could give me a lift to Six Flags Magic Mountain and back. Obviously I took this offer up, and despite one of them having a helicopter pilot exam in the morning, we eventually got to SFMM at about 3pm, giving us still an alright 7 hours in the park...
I was rather scared that we were going to pull in and have a day at the **** that is Scandia instead, but thankfully we continued driving!
X2 is the first thing you see as you drive into the park.
The view from the car park. How many coasters [creds] can you count here?!
We weren't the only people arriving to the park late, as we entered with a decent stream of other cars and the road train thing was still full up to get to the entrance.
The classic park entrance.
Annoyingly, one of the park's best coasters and one of the main reasons I wanted to go back to the park was closed today.
I was going to buy myself a Q-Bot once we got into the park, but most of the rides it had on I wasn't really bothered about doing.
First coaster, and first credit of the day was the new for 2011 Green Lantern.
The Green Lantern's full sign.
The queue was about 80 minutes long and the ride was pretty brutal, really throwing you against the restraints on the drops. Oddly, as you joined the queue a ride attendant gives you a little raffle ticket thing with the word "boarding pass" written on it. Apparently, this is designed to stop queue jumping, but it really didn't work as people were just getting a ticket, leaving the queue and pushing in later, and then the ride ops didn't seem to take note of these tickets anyway! All rather pointless really.
After Green Lantern, we made our way over to Colossus. Luckily, the opposite side was running to the last time I came here, so new credit #2 for me.
The ride's ok and rather smooth, but is really lacking in airtime.
Credit number 3 and new for 2011 number 2, Road Runner Express. +1
Look how good Tatsu looks.
The revamped Superman is excellent. Both sides are now running, which meant I could pick up my final credit of the day. The launch isn't too forceful, but you really feel it when it does get up to speed. It could do with doing more, but I still liked it.
We were going to ride X2 next, but found it was down. We also noticed that Goliath was stuck on the MCBR, so instead we made our way over to Apocalypse, only to find that it was running 1 train and the queue was over an hour long! I noticed someone eating a huuge turkey-leg so decided to get some for myself...
I decided to eat it whilst walking back over to X2 and must have heard at least 10 comments by people wondering where I got it from and how big it was. SFMM would make a ton of sales if they actually advertised that they have this!
It gets dark so quickly in California, and after about a 90 minute wait we got off X2 at about 9:45pm. The audio wasn't working, which detracts A LOT from the ride, and the ride was extremely bouncy in the final part. It really didn't feel as good as it was riding in 2009, but the first half of the ride is still very good.
After a quick dash, we managed to get over to goliath for the last train of the day. Again, this didn't feel as good as 2009 as it felt less forceful and it didn't feel as fast.
And that was the end of the day. Overall it was a decent day but was really let down by X2's broken audio, Tatsu being down and Apocalypse only running one train. I would have liked to have a full day there to get on some of the other rides, but apart from Apocalypse and Tatsu I got on everything I wanted to. The day could have been better, but it could also have been a whole lot worse.
So that's that. An extremely rare trip report from me, and hope you enjoyed it!
Part 2: Universal Studios Hollywood
Part 1: Six Flags Magic Mountain, 9th July 2011
If you didn't know already, at the moment I'm at the University of California, Riverside, as part of Disney World's International College Programme (I go over to Florida on the 19th). As I'm over here, and probably not coming back here for quite a while, I managed to get in contact with a couple of TPR people (well, I would've tried to find CF people that live 10 minutes away from Riverside, CA, but it would've been pointless) who could give me a lift to Six Flags Magic Mountain and back. Obviously I took this offer up, and despite one of them having a helicopter pilot exam in the morning, we eventually got to SFMM at about 3pm, giving us still an alright 7 hours in the park...
I was rather scared that we were going to pull in and have a day at the **** that is Scandia instead, but thankfully we continued driving!
X2 is the first thing you see as you drive into the park.
The view from the car park. How many coasters [creds] can you count here?!
We weren't the only people arriving to the park late, as we entered with a decent stream of other cars and the road train thing was still full up to get to the entrance.
The classic park entrance.
Annoyingly, one of the park's best coasters and one of the main reasons I wanted to go back to the park was closed today.
I was going to buy myself a Q-Bot once we got into the park, but most of the rides it had on I wasn't really bothered about doing.
First coaster, and first credit of the day was the new for 2011 Green Lantern.
The Green Lantern's full sign.
The queue was about 80 minutes long and the ride was pretty brutal, really throwing you against the restraints on the drops. Oddly, as you joined the queue a ride attendant gives you a little raffle ticket thing with the word "boarding pass" written on it. Apparently, this is designed to stop queue jumping, but it really didn't work as people were just getting a ticket, leaving the queue and pushing in later, and then the ride ops didn't seem to take note of these tickets anyway! All rather pointless really.
After Green Lantern, we made our way over to Colossus. Luckily, the opposite side was running to the last time I came here, so new credit #2 for me.
The ride's ok and rather smooth, but is really lacking in airtime.
Credit number 3 and new for 2011 number 2, Road Runner Express. +1
Look how good Tatsu looks.
The revamped Superman is excellent. Both sides are now running, which meant I could pick up my final credit of the day. The launch isn't too forceful, but you really feel it when it does get up to speed. It could do with doing more, but I still liked it.
We were going to ride X2 next, but found it was down. We also noticed that Goliath was stuck on the MCBR, so instead we made our way over to Apocalypse, only to find that it was running 1 train and the queue was over an hour long! I noticed someone eating a huuge turkey-leg so decided to get some for myself...
I decided to eat it whilst walking back over to X2 and must have heard at least 10 comments by people wondering where I got it from and how big it was. SFMM would make a ton of sales if they actually advertised that they have this!
It gets dark so quickly in California, and after about a 90 minute wait we got off X2 at about 9:45pm. The audio wasn't working, which detracts A LOT from the ride, and the ride was extremely bouncy in the final part. It really didn't feel as good as it was riding in 2009, but the first half of the ride is still very good.
After a quick dash, we managed to get over to goliath for the last train of the day. Again, this didn't feel as good as 2009 as it felt less forceful and it didn't feel as fast.
And that was the end of the day. Overall it was a decent day but was really let down by X2's broken audio, Tatsu being down and Apocalypse only running one train. I would have liked to have a full day there to get on some of the other rides, but apart from Apocalypse and Tatsu I got on everything I wanted to. The day could have been better, but it could also have been a whole lot worse.
So that's that. An extremely rare trip report from me, and hope you enjoyed it!
