Six Flags Great Adventure May 26, 2013

I could not have picked a worse day to go to SFGA. I ended up there by default due to a glitch in my original plans for the holiday weekend. (I had booked a trip to New England in order to do Lake Compounce on Saturday and SFNE on Sunday, but at the last minute the airline changed my return flight out of Hartford and this wasn't doable, so I had to cancel the flight, motel and rental car although it was probably a blessing in disguise because the weather forecast for Connecticut on Saturday was 54F and rainy, not a promising forecast for a trip to a park.)

Although I made it to exit 16A of 195 East in an hour flat, it took another hour to go the extra mile or so to the park. This was the worst traffic jam I've encountered in quite some time and the largest crowd I've ever seen at this park. The purpose of my trip was to go on the new safari off road adventure and write an article about it for a theme park website. Well, this never happened because there was a three-hour wait to get on the safari! I checked back later and there was still a three-hour wait plus the line was closed.

I managed to get on Nitro within 30 minutes but figured that that was a fluke so I went to Guest Relations and got a disability pass because of my inability to stand for prolonged periods. At El Toro they gave me a ride time of 3:45pm so in the meantime I headed to Bizarro, figuring that the queue to get on was shorter, and indeed it was, so I did Bizarro and then El Toro. Kingda Ka was out of the question due to the 90-minute wait and the fact that my disability pass was not valid for this ride, so for once I didn't ride it. The way Guest Relations explained it to me, Kingda Ka, The Dark Knight and Sky Screamer are not included in the disability pass because these rides are A.D.A. accessible. I tried to explain that that didn't matter because I simply could not stand for very long, but they would not budge from their position. I would have had to rent a wheelchair in order to wait for this ride.

I got a 6:08pm ride time for Batman, which was about an hour wait, during which I rode The Dark Knight because the staff person at the entrance said that it would be only about a 20-minute wait and she was right. I sat in the front of a car by myself with a young couple in the back; the woman threw up as soon as she got off the ride.

Wanting one more ride on Nitro, I went over there to see how long the queue was and the wait time was about an hour. Guest Relations had mistakenly marked this ride off in yellow on my special access pass; rides marked in yellow are not included. When I saw someone else get on Nitro with a disability pass, I went back to Guest Relations and asked why this other person was able to do so and I was not. They told me that Nitro had been marked off in error so I went back to the ride and the ride attendant with whom I'd spoken earlier cut me a break and let me get on in 10 minutes.

At this point I decided that it was a good idea to get the hell out of the park. The earlier I left, the less chance there would be of getting into another traffic jam such as the one I had encountered while trying to get into the park. Thank goodness, it was smooth sailing. That's about the only thing that went right. I vividly remember going to SFGA on the Sunday of Memorial Day weekend last year and it wasn't anything like this; my companion and I had managed to get in 13 rides so I was totally unprepared for the crowd that showed up this year. And I don't think that the high attendance was all due to the new safari, as a lot of people seemed to be there only to ride coasters.