Zoombezi Bay and Jungle Jack's Landing Update

Ah okay, my mistake. Sorry about that!

Indeed, it sounds like Danielle has not yet learned the fine arts of convincing, persuading, deflecting, and (dare I say!) spinning that tend to be the M.O. for most emails of this nature.

If you check out my latest construction video on YouTube
(http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DIprxN0U-JU)some of the user comments are:

"I work here and I have already tested out all the slides. It is going to be amazing. On May 17 & 18, the park is open only to people with special connections. Then there is a sneak peak one day before it opens on Memorial Day."

"I just went today. It was pretty sweet. The lazy river is actually very fun when you go with a bunch of friends like I did today. The cyclone (funnel) and the twister are bad@@@."

And from Facebook group:
"The place is done. I was over there yesterday since I work on the dry park rides. It looks amazing and you would never want to put down a place like this with calling it Wyandot Lake."

Some good pictures up here:
http://whispers.smugmug.com/gallery/5002857_NmbAv#300050176_Rd4TP

I think they did a horrible job picking out the colors of the slides because they are all almost exactly the same.

Im hoping they are planning on doing some type of theming with "Jungle River Falls?" That looks pretty terrible, to be blunt.

Those were some really good pics. I have to agree w/ OhioStater that the JRF look pretty naked without some type of theming. But what is cool is that it's a double flume, (something Hafema seems to do on a lot of their flumes according to past pics on their site). The photographer said he believes it's one of the few, if not only Hafemas in North America, but for anyone familar with Wild Adventure down in Valdosta, GA, isn't their raft ride a Hafema? I know it always seemed so cool because it goes underground, and that's what I was hoping for at the zoo, but, oh well.

Me and the wife went up to Columbus for our anniversary last week, and stopped by the zoo to see what was up, (by the way, just a sidenote, Ruth's Chris Steakhouse has got the most incredible steak ever, IMO!). Zoombezi Bay looked pretty awesome, all that was missing was the laying of sod, and some trees/bushes. And as we sat in the lot we counted 15-20 workers still working their butts off at 8:30pm still planting foliage, and tidying things up, and making final preparations. Despite how hard it is to figure out their pricing, I can't wait to experience this place someday soon.

About the boat ride inside the park though. It's needs some serious help. That ride never gets any more interesting. The claim is that you'll be able to see all kinds of wildlife. And with the exception of an occasional monkey or otter, you don't see anything. It would be nice if they could re-work that ride, (tear down some walls, relocate some animal enclosures, and just generally make it easier to see some of these animals. That ride has some serious potential to be enjoyable, it just needs some work.

There are now several admission packages available now according to the website:

Zoo and Zoombezi Bay water park admission- $29.99 Zoo, water park, and all rides all day $39.99
Zoo Admission $10.00
Zoo and all rides for the day- $22.99

So I guess $40 for zoo, water park, and all rides combined isn't too bad of a deal at all. Plus you can get discount tickets like AAA is $23.75 savings of 6.24 for the zoo and water park.

I just saw this too: Get zoo admission and all Zoo rides, including Jungle Jack's Landing, for only $6, Monday through Thursday 4 p.m. until close.

Wow. I may have to go down some night after work. $6 for a few rides on Sea Dragon and a walk through the zoo is a really good deal. IMO

I made it out to Zoombezi Bay this weekend. The water park is fun but has some flaws. The thing that water parks suck at is capacity so when building a new park why would they not plan for huge capacity? Example: Dolphin Dash has only six lanes when they could've built eight or ten. They also need more mats. I don't think the wave pool is big enough either. The action river is awesome (although a little shallow). And raft rentals? Come on. The lines for the slides are really screwed up too. There will be one line starting out and then at the very end branches out to a few different slides. You end up having to wait a long time for the slide nobody is going on because everybody is waiting for the same one or two slides.

Overall it was a good time and we had fun. What wasn't fun was after walking around the entire zoo, standing in lines, being sun burnt and wet, trying to drive home to take a shower and having the car not start because of a dead battery. That was not fun, but the water slides were.