Is this weekend really the most crowded weekend?

Sounds like the second and third Saturdays in August back in the early 80s.

I remember when there would be cars parked on the grass during the regular summer season but that doesn't seem to happen anymore. Now those days happen in October, which I never would have guessed ten years ago.

Went all three days. Drove from just west of Cleveland each day.

Friday was more crowded than the usual HW Friday. The line were still manageable for the most part. The extra people made the scare zones better.

Saturday. We knew the stars were lined up for a huge crowd and went with those expectations. We just went to be part of the action, to take advantage of the perfect weather and for the crowded scare zones. We knew we wouldn't be riding much. It is usually a 1 hour drive. It took 3 hours. Two hours from the Rye Beach exit and 90 minutes from Sandusky airport. Arrived at the lot at 3pm. Parking was into the over flow grass and a good portion of the marina side was full. I purposely went to the Soak City lot, chancing that it wasn't full and not having to drive back up front. It was about half full so the move paid off. Inside it was crazy jammed. I will say that to me the crowd was not a big as that Saturday about 7-8 years ago. That was one for the ages, but Saturday may have been as close to that as I've seen.

I few obsevations from Saturday. Rode Space Spiral about 4pm to checked things out. Cars still backed up on both roads leading in as far as you could see.

Pinks and Midway Market maybe 50 feet out the door at 3:30. Panda out the door and across the porch to the smoking area at about 9pm. Even the popcorn/Icee stand next to Dodgem was 20 deep at about 9pm. Most ride beyond their queues. Blood on the Bayou had a line that stretched to the Corkscrew turnaround, then wrapped bad towards Power Tower. CornStalkers and the Asylum back towards Mine Ride. Screamworks was devided by cones and tape under the tunnel to keep traffic flowing. It was jammed in there. Magnum, Iron Dragon and Max Air were down at times.

We left at about 10pm to beat the traffic out. We sat in stop and go traffic from the Soak City lot. They did keep thing moving pretty good at that time. We saw cars parked on the grass next to the causeway almost to the bridge.

Sunday was much more crowded than usual. The main lot was full. Still things weren't too bad inside. Shoot the Rapids was running and atracted a decent amount of riders. The Asylum(Eternity Infirmary) had a 15 minute wait which suprised me Talked to an employee at a counter that said they were working until 3:30am the night before.

So has anyone figured out why they raise the price for Halloweekends?

RAPTOR MANIAC said:
^I was wondering that also, anyone know an estimate of how many people were there because I was and every rides Q looked packed and was going out on to the midways

When I asked some of the employees, I got a wide variety of ranges. One said as little as 60000 people and one said as high as 75000. Saturday was supposedly a record breaking attendance day for the park though.

I have never seen this before: Cars were parked on the causeway, in the grass. CP staff were putting up extra flood lights in these "temporary parking lots" in the evening. At 3:00 PM there was traffic for CP backed up to the Sandusky Mall.

One thing that everyone is surprised about is how CP doesn't have a park occupancy limit. Even though CP wants to not turn customers away, maybe an occupancy limit is what is needed to avoid complaints.

I'm not exactly sure how turning people away with "we're full" is going to eliminate complaints. I'm pretty sure that will just increase them. Exponentially.

I live in Sandusky, and I had a bet with a full-time employee. He said 50K were expected, and I said it'd be 60K. I'm expecting a glass of beer. :)

Traffic was unbelievable in town. Took me 45 minutes using preplanned detours to get home from lunch downtown, a trip that's usally 10 minutes max. I wouldn't even have bothered going out except I had to go to a funeral Sat. am. Glad I didn't have to go to the cemetary.

Sandusky Register said the trip up 250 took two hours. I believe it: I've seen it like that (same weekend 2007).

Did I go to the park? No way, let the visitors have the rides!

Roz

JuggaLotus said:
I'm not exactly sure how turning people away with "we're full" is going to eliminate complaints. I'm pretty sure that will just increase them. Exponentially.

I have wondered what that would be like to find out that I can't get into the park. How does Disney handle it? Seems like a few days a year they close their doors to people coming in.

Shades said:

JuggaLotus said:I'm not exactly sure how turning people away with "we're full" is going to eliminate complaints. I'm pretty sure that will just increase them. Exponentially.

I have wondered what that would be like to find out that I can't get into the park. How does Disney handle it? Seems like a few days a year they close their doors to people coming in.

Disney will first close to the general public and allow only resort guests then close altogether if a certain point is reached. The Magic Kingdom used to have a shut down capacity of 55,000, but I have no idea if that is still accurate.

The biggest difference is that generally people are at Disney for a collection of days and are staying nearby, thusly their whole trip isn't ruined if they can't get into one of the parks on a particular day. There are also many more things to do in Orlando to fill the day if you cant make it into one of the parks; other than Cedar Point, the only other fun thing to do in Sandusky is the $2 Tequila specials at Louie's.

Plus if you have a hopper, you could potentially go to one of the other parks.

Jason Hammond said:
Plus if you have a hopper, you could potentially go to one of the other parks.

Hoppers are well worth the little extra money that they cost. We were at Disney this past December. We were staying on property at the Grand Floridian. We were turned away. We hopped to Epcot and came back later in the day. They were filming the Christmas Day parade at the Magic Kingdom that morning. We are coming up this Friday and Saturday, first time for Halloweekends. Im praying for no rain, forecast doesnt look to promising.

Went Friday & Sunday,crowd & lines were what was to be expected. Even under the high crowd condition,got 4 MF & 11 TTD rides over the 2 days. Friday was there 5pm-12:30am,Sunday was there 10am-10:30pm.

Hello all, I was there Saturday. Unfortunately, that's the only time during Halloweekends that my long-distance boyfriend could come out for a visit and I did really want to take him there. Believe me, I would not have chosen Columbus Day weekend if I had had any other option. My plan was to drive over on Friday, check into the Breakers and do Friday night on the Point, spend the first part of the day Saturday making my annual visit to the Merry-Go-Round Museum in Sandusky, go to the park Saturday night with starlight admission, and then make Sunday our main day at the park. I knew Saturday would be packed, so that's why I thought we should do a whole day Sunday and just go in Saturday evening for the atmosphere. "Packed," however, turned out to be an underestimate of the craziness. I was expecting it to be really bad -- along the lines of an extremely busy Saturday I experienced last year -- but this exceeded even my pessimistic expectations.

In retrospect, I think we're very lucky that we got back into the Point at all Saturday after we left to go to the Museum. It took us somewhere around half an hour to make the short trip from downtown Sandusky back to the Causeway around 5 p.m., and when we got there I saw that it looked like they were starting to run out of the room on the grass to park people, and I wondered what they would do next. As we crept up the Causeway, a guy rolled down his window from a car that was heading out and yelled "Save your money!" at the cars going in.

We had a tag put on our car which was supposed to signal the traffic directors to send us to the Breakers, but it didn't work so well. The first time we got close, the guy waved us into the Soak City lot. I would have been fine with parking there but there did not appear to be any spaces. I got out and made another pass, intending to stop and point out to him that I was trying to get to the Breakers. He waved me back into the Soak City lot. I held my ground. He waved more frenetically. I gave up and went into the Soak City lot, drove around a while, failed to find anything. I gave it a third try, and this time a new traffic director was out, and she started to wave us into Soak City again but then noticed the tag and went, "Oh, the Breakers? Go ahead" and we finally made it into the Breakers lot where there were several parking spots. It was all pretty stressful.

We actually didn't have such a terrible night on Saturday once we got in because we adjusted our expectations. We watched a show, "Sideshow," which we enjoyed a lot, and at the end of the night we had two Gemini walk-ons with a really enthusiastic, hand-slapping crowd.

Anyway, this wasn't supposed to be a trip report so I should stop there. I was really writing because I wondered about some rumors I heard (garnered through Facebook and Twitter). One was that they did actually start turning people away around 6 p.m. as they ran out of places to park people. The other is that they were parking people somewhere on the Chaussee. Any truth to these claims? Or does anyone know what they did when they ran out of room to park people on the Causeway?

I know Busch Gardens Europe has turned people away a couple weekends in a row. Parks are getting swarmed this time of year!