Weekend of Oct 22,23,24

Spent the weekend camping and visiting the area -

Friday - Cold, and busy - got 6 rides in, saw two shows.

Saturday - FUBAR!!!! had to be over 60K there... all lots were full - overflow full - 2-3 hr wait for Millenium, Dragster and Maverick. 60 minute wait for Blue streak, Magnum, and Powertower. Packed up and caught a late eve fishing charter.

Sunday -
Light crowds - warm temps - Rode Raptor, Millenium, Maverick and Skyhawk all within the first hour. George Roose was out of the engine house and running!!! For steam engine buffs, this was a big deal. Big George rarely comes out of the engine house, due to his weight and size. I rode two circuits and headed home...

I'm sure the financials will be good for them this fall.

Thanks for the report. The weather was great yesterday and I thought it would be super packed again. Thanks for confirming. :)

You're welcome - I could have written a ten page report - but hey - I'm a concise kinda guy!

Thanks for the TR! How crowded was it on Friday? I watched the webcams and compared to Saturday, Friday looked like nothing. It looked like Dragster had about a 30 min wait. A few of us are driving to DC for the Stewart/Colbert rally and we plan on stopping at the park on Friday. The weather report doesn't look great but that won't scare me away! I'll have a bunch of park virgins with me so I hope we can take in all of the good rides.

30-45 min wait for Dragster on Friday - same for Millenium

I also went Saturday and Sunday. Saturday was oh my gosh busy, I have never seen a theme park so busy everything had a ridiculous wait up until about 10-11. But the crews really were running amazing, i waited in Mavericks line, it was stretched out of the queue line and down around the corner, it had to be at least 1/4 mile outside the queue and the line was only about an hour and a half. Every ride line was spilled out into the midway, but it was still a great day. Riding dragster at 1230 AM in heavy fog was an amazing experience. So despite the busyness i got 12 rides in throughout the day so i was happy.

Sunday was the best day Ive ever had at a theme park, the longest line was about 45 min for maverick in the middle of the day. MF was only 20 min early in the day, it was amazing weather and the park was dead. Then to make things even better it rained from like 630-730 so for the last hour and a half everything was a walk on. Dragster would have been a walk on but they were only filling the first 3 rows so i said screw it and went to magnum and then maverick in the last 20 minutes as opposed to waiting for Dragster, which would have taken forever with a full station.

Overall this weekend was one of the best I have ever had at an amusement park, and I got many more rides than I was expecting when I saw the weather forecast. CP has convinced me to get a platinum pass next year, and not get a SF season pass. I would rather drive 8 hrs to CP than my usual 4 to SFGadv. Especially with all the cutbacks at SFGadv with the new management. Now all CP needs to do is build a Intamin woodie and i wont ever have a reason to go back to SFGadv.

Edit: Why do they only fill up the first three rows on TTD? They were doing this Saturday morning also, it turned what would have been an hour wait into a 2 hour wait, because they kept adding people one row at a time till it was full and it took like an hour for them to finally have full trains. Is it because it will rollback? It just seems strange for them to do that, when on Kingda Ka they wont send the train out if it isn't full because of rollbacks.

I know on heavy wind days, or in the morning when it is cold they only load the front half of the trains for weight to roll over the top hat. I might be geussing here, but i thought for sure I read that on here somewhere.

You are correct Erik, it's a weight issue. During these colder months, Dragster tends to rollback more frequently due to the effect cold has on the track and various other parts. It's sucks that they only load the first 2-4 rows for sometimes hours on end but, in the long run, it's better than waiting 10 min to reset launch after a rollback.

We were there all 3 days as well. Friday, we had fun, it wasn't dead, but it was ok. The cold may have kept some people from coming out. Saturday, we got in at noon but ended up leaving around 9pm and headed to Sonic for some burgers. Saturday was ridiculous........we just wandered around for the most part taking pictures. We saw the Overlord, that was cool. Sunday was much better. I thought it would be more crowded because the weather was perfect, but it stayed rather quiet. Lucky us, we got caught in a weather delay on Iron Dragon for 10-15 minutes, then later, we were next in line for MaxAir and the rain came down. We thought it would pass over sooner, but it didn't. My husband wanted to leave, but I was like No Way! If it finally stops raining, the park will be even emptier! Which is exactly what happened. Our last hour got us on Magnum, Maverick, a walk through Cornstalkers (I am terrifed of scarecrows, which my husband finds cruelly amusing!), and Millennium. Perfect ending to a perfect day. I, too, am getting a Platinum Pass for 2011. Even though we live 4 hours away, it's still cheaper to get the pass (for two 3-day visits)., plus, we can go to Canada's Wonderland as well. We haven't been there since the 1990's!