Menu
What's new
By:
Filters

Your most disproportionately long wait for a ride?

Before "becoming an enthusiast" I used to wait a lot longer for rides. I remember doing a 2 hour wait for Lisebergsbanan in 2010. I was with friends and it didnt bother me back then. Nowadays, I always have a strategy when visiting theme parks. Firstly, I always try to visit on the least busy days/times and secondly I make a plan on what to ride, when to ride and multiple plan B and C if whatever I had planned to ride is too busy or shut down. Except for waiting 1 hour for Taron in 2020, I have never waited more than 30 min to ride a ride. If necessary, I get a fast pass and have a strategy for that too.

Even with a 1 hour wait, Taron is totally worth it.
 
Probably waiting over 2 hours for Jumanji - The Adventure at Gardaland. Granted, it was opening day, but it was seriously not worthwhile. Feel free to read about the experience here https://coasterforce.com/forums/threads/italy-2022-tagliacreddi-pt-3-mirabilandia.45506/

Other than that, the scare mazes at Traumatica were all 60+ minutes and they're all pretty weak. The 90+ minute wait for Rocky Top Mountain Coaster in Pigeon Forge was a pretty grueling one. 150+ minutes for Saw: The Ride also stands out.

From the sounds of it, I've got off pretty lightly compared to many on here! I'm sure I've blocked out some from my memory too 😅 I know that @Serena has some pretty good ones to add to this!
 
4 hours for Wicker Man on the Saturday after it had opened (it kept going down)

4 hours for The Smiler on a bank holiday Monday the year it opened (it kept going down)

3.5 hours for Saw The Ride on opening day, which also happened to be a Saturday. (it kept going down)

There's a few themes here:

- New rides go down, who'd have guessed?!
- Back in my younger enthusiast days I was naive enough to visit parks on weekends and bank holidays, desperate to ride a new ride sooner rather than later.

I've since learned, and I look forward to queuing a sensible 20 mins for Chessingtons new B+M on a Tuesday in September.

But the WORST, way worse than all of these, was queuing for a night ride on Rocky Mountain Coaster, the alpine coaster in Pigeon Force. Spending an hour crammed into a tight cattle pen with music blaring at full volume and noisy groups of teenagers shouting at the tops of their lungs in boiling Tennessee summer heat is something I would never do again. And the coaster sucked.
 
The Smiler on opening day. Got to the park at around 8am, stood at the turnstiles for an hour and a half until they opened the gates at 0930, then stood outside the queue, watching testing and then a few cars with actual, real people in them went round. Managers and other people with lanyards & walkie-talkies kept saying it "probably isn't going to open today, you should go ride other things", until either 1330 or 1430 when they said we could make our way through the actual queue.

So, all in, I waited somewhere between 5 and a half & 6 and a half hours for The Smiler. At least I got on the first train, so I got to experience it as smooth as it was ever going to be.

Easily the dumbest, stupidest, riskiest waste of my time. It wasn't confirmed to open that day, all we had were whispers and rumours from people that worked at Towers. I didn't have a car at the time either, so I had to get up stupid early to get the stupid train to stupid Stoke to catch my lift to wait hours to potentially not even ride the thing.
 
- 2.5 Hours for Thirteen a few weeks after opening. Didn't feel like much of a "psychoaster" as a glorified roller skater. (I like it now I only have to wait 20 mins)

- 40 Minutes for Winnie The Pooh Adventures in Magic Kingdom.

- 70 Minutes waiting for The Big One on one train with @Slamming Coastercore on that disastrous opening weekend.

To be honest, I have been pretty lucky, call me GP but unless it's something really outstanding I wouldn't wait more than 2 hours for it.
 
Last edited:
The mentions of Saw remind me of perhaps my most disproportionate wait of all time, which I had somehow cast from my mind when I started this thread…

I was once on a school trip at Thorpe Park, and I waited over 2 hours for Saw (I can’t remember exactly how long, but it was certainly over 2 hours)… only for it to break down at the very end of the queue.

Waiting over 2 hours for a ride I never rode certainly felt disproportionately long to me…
 
I waited ninety minutes for that stupid flying theater at Ferrari Land after the sign outside said it’d only be twenty. Pretty sure it sometimes took like ten minutes for the line to even move, because apparently they couldn’t load more than one group into the 10 minute-plus worth of pre-shows at a time because the whole thing is so horrendously designed.

I left Ferrari Land shortly after that. Garbage park. This was a day when half the coasters at PA were walk-ons, btw.
 
Last edited:
I think my worst is four hours for The Smiler on the day is surprise opened! Kept breaking down for long periods of time, I think all my dreams for weeks involved The Smiler's Soundtrack...

Not that it was a bad ride or anything, just four hours in the baking sunlight was a long commitment even for such a lengthy coaster.
 
3.5 hours for Nemesis opening year... Wasn't even opening day. Then I think it was the next year, but may have been the year after, had to leave the queue after 4 hours on a Fireworks night because others in the group wanted to go home!!!

Since then I've never done an opening day / weekend for any coaster other than F.L.Y and that was great because we stayed in the CL hotel, so we just walked on.

I don't like queueing these days, so I avoid weekends, opening days, holidays etc. But I absoloutely will be there on Nemesis opening day, have to, right?
 
I think the worst I've had is 40 minutes for the Wild Mouse at Dorney, which really isn't that bad. But it did make me question "what am I doing with my life" a bit..

I've had a couple of 2.5 hour queues at Thorpe in the past for headline rides (Saw and Swarm when they were new), but that's not exactly disproportionate in context I guess.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Top