SFA Status Report (10/16/04)

SFA Status Report (10/16/04)

Weather-Conditions: mostly cloudy, followed by a short but strong rainstorm around 5pm, followed by clear skies the rest of the night; temperatures: 61* when I arrived at 3pm, down to 46* by the time I left at 10pm.

Crowds-moderate with most wait times for coasters at about 15-20 minutes; most flat rides were a walk on or at most a one-cycle wait.

Two Face: Still closed (of course); the seats have been completely removed from the wheel assemblies and are now sitting on the exit platform; it seems that they are starting the off-season preparations on the ride.

I didn’t ride Mind Eraser or Batwing (which was running one train every time I could see). Superman was running fine but seemed to have slow load times. However, the night rides more than make up for the slow load times in my opinion at least. Roar had reasonable load times, though I really didn’t find it appropriate that the ride operator was replacing “Roar” and “Six Flags America” in the little ride speech thing, with other coasters and other parks. Not very professional or funny. Wild One had GREAT load times with the second train waiting on the brake run for under a minute every time. Joker’s Jinx was running with respectable load times, but the important part was that it was running at all. Usually, by this time of the year Joker’s Jinx is down for the season. Maybe they feel that since Two Face is down, they need to keep up the Jinx as long as possible to make up.

Around the park there were a lot of interesting things that I hadn’t seen before. There was a juggler who would juggle knives and balls and flaming torches and what not. They also had this girl in wedding dress in this Plexiglas coffin surrounded by rats. (Well, the rats around her were all stuffed, and you could see the Plexiglas divider that separated her from the live rats, but it was still a neat idea.) They also had a few new signs up for the newly opened path to Wild One from Gotham City. The one sign says ”Shortcut to Wild One-Enter If You Dare!”…Or something to that degree. Coming from the other direction, they have yellow road signs that say “Walking Dead.”

Other than that…not much else has changed since I was there two weeks ago. There’s a sign up on the gate to Paradise Island hinting at the 2005 project (there’s a link to the pic on the third page of the “SFA 2005 web page hint…” in the General Buzz forum.) The park seemed clean...no overflowing trashcans…the lady at guest relations was really nice and helpful solving my problem with my 2005 parking pass…not much else to say…

Look for my final TR for SFA when I go to the park for Season Pass holder day on Oct 31st…

From what I've been hearing on other sites it sounds like the new HH might just be more of a re-theme & small expansion rather than a large scale project....I'd expect maybe one or two new slides at most & some paint(most likely a proslide tornado) but that's pretty much gonna be it.

I hope to make it down to the park one last time this season on the 30th,now I may be out of town later this week(VA Beach to be exact) but if that doesn't work out then maybe I'll hit the park again on the 23rd & again on the 30th.

I think the reson JJ has been actually running this fall is more due to the weather & the trees in the back of the park than anything else....I mean with Two face down it doesn't really mean they have to open a ride that is normally closed at this time of year to make up for the other one being down due to maintenance issues.