Six Flags Great Adventure 6/13/08

Friday the 13th at GADV!!!! I got there quite early and this must have been senior trip day because there were thousands of high school students and middle school people, which made it kind of annoying, no offense. However the park was running extremely well. The place was packed but every coaster was at full capacity it seemed. Nitro opened with 3 trains and didnt have more than a 25 minute all day. El Toro was dispatching the first train before the second was back near the station, that line didnt get past 25 minutes all day. But what impressed me more was the efficiancy of Kingda Ka. It was running four trains flawlessly, the left station was dispatching when the right one hit the brakes on the hill, it was going at machine gun pace and I didnt witness a breakdown, i didnt wait more than 30 minutes for the front and by the end of the day it was a walk on. The only bad point was TDK because the line was an hour and a half and it was good but not great, it didnt seem like a coaster to me but more of a dark ride, i would wait 20 minutes but not over a half hour. The parks operations were top notch this friday, better than ive ever seen before. Also Nitro has definatly become my favorite ride in the park, its so reliable and you can always count on it for a good ride. Nitro at night can not be beat by anything in this world.

Ride count:
Kingda Ka:5 (3 in the front)
El Toro:4
Nitro:8
Medusa:1
GASM:1
TDK:1
Skull Mountain:1
Batman: 1

Devins3 - - -> Nice TR!

From your trip report it looks as if Great Adv. was able to address some of it's problems. I hope they can keep it up through the summer. That seems to be a problem...employee apathy. (No, not all of course, but enough of them seem to care less as the summer progresses)

Question From your point of view, how was the security, line-cutting, family atmosphere and cleanliness of the park? How was the quality and speed of the food service departments. (I konw the prices were high.) These are the other issues I have always hoped they would address on a CONSTANT basis throught the summer.

Well the security was very present at every ride and from what i saw there was no line cutting at all, especially compared to earlier this year. I wouldn't know about the food service I went to WaWa because i was on a limited budget. As far as the atmosphere seemed to be great, the park was spotless, they seemed to have added some foliage since last time i was there. Out of the about 15-20 times ive gone there in the past 3 years this was by far the best that I have seen the park. But if I had to choose one thing I would like them to do it is add more shade to the lines, but I and everyone else can deal with the heat for a little while.

Just to echo Devins3,
I attended spur of the moment from 4pm - close tonight, Sunday 6/15.

I was stunned how well Kingda Ka was being run. The four train operation was very efficient and sort of shocking how quickly you could get on.

To comment on the food service, I thought it was sort of poor. At the Nathan's hot dog shop they had one register open and people would try to get in line over and over and would give up because it was being handled at a snail's pace.

My only other complaint, with regards to Nitro is how in the world can you stack all 3 trains over and over and not even have seatbelts on the ride?! That was the only thing that really bothered me and was identically the same as my last visit 4 or 5 years ago.

In about 6 hours I managed:
2 rides on Kingda Ka (one front seat!), 1 ride on El Toro, 1 ride on Batman, 1 ride on Rolling Thunder (a bit painful), 1 ride on the mine train, 3 rides on Nitro, and a ride on Dark Flight.

I thought the park was cleaner than I remembered it and it was quite noticeable there was always a quasi security person/cleaning sweep person in sight and they definitely were trying to keep things clean.

I didn't see Medusa run at all while I was there.

I definitely will be back it was more fun than I thought it would be!

Edit: To comment on the $15 for parking - that seems outrageous but I guess I wasn't too bothered because I only paid like $45 bucks for my season pass renewal from SFMM when they had that one day internet promotion back in December... *** Edited 6/16/2008 3:54:57 AM UTC by JasonPSU20***