10/3-10/4 HalloWeekend Visit

Boy, this was a COLD freaking weekend.

We've done this now three years In a row, and every year so far, we've hit rain. This year, we got rain on Friday... but the real culprit was WIND. This was the first time I've ever been to the park that several awesome rides were shut down due to wind.

On Friday night, we rode Gatekeeper a couple times, but they were only running one train... so the wait was longer than it should have been. Rode Millennium four times, and the last two they didn't even make us leave the station. Nice! Also rode Maverick several times without much of a wait.

However, Raptor, TTD, Power Tower and Windseeker were all closed... and they (along with Gatekeeper and Gemini) were closed all day Saturday as well. The Weather.com app showed winds to be 17-20 mph on the ground, but the Raptor attendant said they have a gauge up on top of the first hill that measures the wind at that altitude, and they open or close the ride based on that reading. Bummer, though.

If you're ever basing your decision on whether or not to come to CP on the wind forecast, I'd say stay home if the winds are above 15 mph.

All in all, we got to ride MF 8 times in two days (and holy crap... riding MF when it's 45 degrees outside with 20 mph winds and lightly raining... thank God we had hoodies, hats and gloves!), and we also got 3-4 rides on Maverick, two on GK, two on MaxAir, two on Skyhawk, one on Magnum (gave my wife a headache, btw), one on WT (fun, but shorter ride cycle than usual), and one on Mean Streak. Special note on MS... that ride actually frightens me. It sounds like it's about to break at any moment... so the fear isn't the kind you really want. It needs to go. Even the station attendants don't seem to give a damn... as there's no pre-talk or instructions, and no "how was your ride?" upon returning. It's like they've all been punished and sentenced to work there, so the whole energy is lousy, boring and dead.

I should mention that we had FL (not Plus) on Saturday, and although it sucked that so many rides were closed, it saved us a ton of time in line, particularly on MF. Because so many rides were closed, the lines at MF and Mav were pretty long, especially considering how empty the park was due to the weather. MF was about a 45-minute wait without FL, and with it we waited 15-25 minutes. I have to say we were all pleasantly surprised than MF stayed open both days while so many other, smaller rides remained closed. MF really saved our weekend :)

Hopefully, next year we will have better luck with the weather. But the HalloWeekend theming, along with the screamsters and scare zones, made this a very fun weekend anyway.

Good times :)