6/3 - Coastermania

Coastermania was a very mixed bag for us this year. We’ve done most Coastermania for the past 10 years or so. I’ll try and break it up into sections.

Registration:
This was a slow unorganized mess. We waited about 40 minutes in line. I think the biggest bottle neck here is people trying to find their tickets on their phone, paper is definitely faster, but I don’t think that’s coming back. The fact that the t-shirts weren’t given at registration was odd.

Morning ERT:

We got 1 ride on Corkscrew and Steel Vengeance. We also got a few front row rides on Gemini. In all cases the line was definitely longer than what it would have been as soon as the park opened. We waited 20 minutes in line for Magnum, then it went down, no ride there. Maverick was lined up to the pop stations, so we went and waited for SV to open. Which did so at about 10:20. I think the biggest issue was ride availability. Having Maverick and SV on separate ERT times made it so everyone flooded those rides at the same time. If it weren’t for the after hours event, SV likely would have been at night, to avoid the delay of carpenters work.

Cruise:

Great as always. This is always a fantastic time to relax for 40 minutes. Only negative is that some were given conflicting cruise times. Such as, cruise during SV ERT, or lunch overlapping with the cruise. This wasn’t an issue in the past, so it was surprising to hear of these issues.

Lunch:

No complaints here. Pulled pork, Mac and cheese, etc were all good. The food lines were quick. I will note that we spent 30 minutes in line for the shirts, because again they wanted to verify your ticket, and apparently navigating the ticket website is cumbersome for people.

Q&A:

I’m sure my enthusiast is showing with these, but I think these have taken a downturn since Jason moved up in the chain. The current management seemed more reluctant to answer questions without a PR answer then the days that Jason was at the Q&A. Overall it was fine, we did get to meet Carrie and Tony afterwards both of which were very nice.

Night ERT:

Night ERT was much better in my opinion, MF still had a long line, but there was a good line up of options that didn’t have a line. I posted in the CM thread on my thoughts on MF, s*** happens and we didn’t leave upset with what happened.

I think overall (minus the disorganization) we enjoyed the event. It was definitely watered down compared to previous years, but our family isn’t really looking to marathon stuff these days, so a bit of a wait was no big deal.

I do want to mention something about the after hours event. We completely forgot about it when we got our food around 7:50 and as soon as we sat down with our food at the farmhouse, we were promptly told by security that we needed to be out of the area in 5 minutes. I get that they have a job, but put up some signage, make an announcement, or maybe stop selling food a few minutes early if you’re going to kick everyone out.

The icing on the cake is that they wouldn’t let the our kids 12, 7, 7, and 5 get back to us from thunder canyon. Only a few of us were doing Coastermania, so we needed to get the rest back to The cabin. I get it, but we had to walk all the way back around from thunder canyon up to power tower, and back to the resort gate to get to our cabin. I wouldn’t care if security was nice about it (that guy needs some people skills). Making the resort guests walk forever for no reason, left a sour taste in my mouth, and was seemed like a crap way to end the “best day”. Some signage back by MF could have prevented this, as we wouldn’t have walked all the way back there in the first place (especially with tired, ornery kiddos).

Those security actions are obnoxious. I've never been in any park at close where they're rushing people out, precisely because of the reasons you observed. CP in particular used to not be like this. I would have complained if my kids were put in that situation, which is extra stupid because it's faster to go through Frontier Town to get to the resort gate from there.

Agreed, some signage out by Millennium or even the Frontier Trail entrance would've been helpful.

Two of the people in our group happened to be out on the boardwalk earlier in the day when an employee was handing out free tickets for Wild Frontier Nights. We bailed on Millennium ERT after the train was stopped on the lift and the little carriage started going up, so we decided to walk back to Frontiertown with our friends just on the off chance there were more free tickets available.

We got all the way past the Snake River bridge, and there was a wall of straw bales and a security officer. Apparently, you couldn't get into the event this way, even with a ticket! By this point, we weren't about to walk all the way back around the other way, so we just called it a night. On the way out, we saw a table set up near the resort entrance where you were supposed to check in for WFN. The person told our friends the coupon was actually good this weekend and next, so they might still be able to use it.