The first park was a short drive from the hotel and it looked like it was celebrating a birthday. In amusement park terms though 20 years is still quite young.
Time at this park was pretty tight but to help us get nail everything quickly (the rides I mean, anything else would have got us arrested) the park had given us a morning ERS on their hypercoaster Steel Eel.
and the ride was really good. Made by the same company who built Superman in Mexico City, this was much longer, smoother and overall better.
and one of the reasons why I liked this was that it looked like a good coaster; lots of big hills that went on and on and on.
See! Its a classic out and back design that you could see for miles, how a coaster should be IMO.
Its also worth mentioning that the ride ops were having a great time running our ERS and kept us entertained for the hour we had been allowed to ride it.
This is the water coaster ride Journey to Atlantis, which we discovered was going to open fairly late. Seaworld is one of those parks that has staggered openings, and this ride is the last to open.
Instead we made do with the other rides, the first being Shamu Express. It's one of those little kiddy rides that is like having sex with a big woman. Its a lot of fun but not the sort of thing you want your friends to catch you doing. A little tricky when there's 50 of you with nothing to do because the park isn't really open yet.
Suffering another tomato attack I made way to the toilets where I was surprised to see this. Now either the park gets a lot of diabetics visiting or they're happy to have drug addicts attend. I'm hoping its the former. Even so it's not good to spell "disposal" incorrectly, unless this park also gets a lot of Italians visiting too! Not feeling too good at all I got an exclusive session in one of the parks medical centres. Medicine was prescribed, which sort of did the trick. Thanks nurse!
Great White is the park's B&M Batman clone. After Eel and Shamu this was the next coaster to open. With most of the track lying outside the park I'm sure the photographers ended up taking the same shots.
A crowd had gathered waiting for it to open, most of them club members. The ride was good but just another clone (I hate saying stuff like that)
With time running out I had a choice of Atlantis of the Shamu show. I chose the former and with a few other members hung around in the heat waiting for the ride to open. Fortune was smiling upon us today as the park opened the ride a little earlier than planned. Perhaps there is an advantage to turning up in a group!
Anyway, we got the first boat and got totally soaked, completely expected I might add but an added bonus was that I had time to run over to the stadium and catch some of the show.
It was standard Seaworld schmaltz with one of the trainers telling us about how she had a dream to work with marine animals and now her dreams had come true.
Then the killer whales come out and jump around for fish.
Then the audience partake in a mass blessing by carrying their little ones into the splash zone. Funnily enough most of the kids end up crying.
In some more audience participation they picked on a poor kid and had him tell the entire audience what his dreams were. His answer? To become a professional ten pin bowler. Now that's aspirational and I hope he makes it. Had I been pulled up and seeing some of the girls running around in their wetsuits I'm sure my answer would have been a bit more unsuitable.
With the show over it was time to head on out of the park. Now everyone thinks dolphins are happy because they smile. I can assure you in the Texan heat the people inside probably wouldn't have been.
A hopscotch game outside the park, commonly used for teaching kids how to count whilst hopping. But at this park you'd skip 5 and replace it with another 6. Not sure why it has been set up like that.
After a lengthy drive, where I might add we should have stopped for a toilet break but didn't, we arrived a little later than planned at Six Flags Over Texas. The park had been amazingly hospitable to us, giving us 3 rides for the evening but before we could do any of that there was a mass exodus to the toilet.
First up was La Vibora, the park's bobsleigh coaster.
Now with all the coaster riding I've done getting injured is bound to happen. On the last trip to the US I thought I'd broken my neck on Kennywood's Thunderbolt and the injury on this trip was picked up here. I have no idea how it happened but when I came off it I had a double cut in my arm. Nothing major but it looked like I'd been shanked in prison where they put two blades in a toothbrush so the healing take a bit longer than a single blade would. As for the ride it was OK but in the sections where the car is straightened up you'd come in with a bit of a bang.
Next up was Texas Giant, which when it first opened was a landmark wooden coaster, massive in size and an exciting ride to boot. But the ride had aged very badly and was now really rough. We'd been told not to ride it in the back, so that's where I rode. It was horrible, enough to put me off riding it again. The park would be wise to open a dentists next to this. I'm sure there's money to be made from replacing lost fillings.
As you can see the ride wasn't overly popular with the group, which is a shame. So where were they all?
They were riding Titan, a massive steel monster which had a great mix of positive and negative Gs. We spent a few rides seeing if we could lift our feet from the floor of the car during the helices; we couldn't. At 255ft, I think this was the tallest coaster on the trip, and for me one of the best.So we'd been welcomed to the park with 3 ERSs. Tomorrow we'd get to do the rest of the park.
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