We went to this theme park on our Summer holiday this year, expecting it to be one of the highlights. Having dropped it into a conversation with a few of my friends, I got a few exclamations from them telling me that it was the 'best theme park in the world' and was the basis of the game 'Rollercoaster typhoon'. As you can imagine, I was pretty excited and my expectations were high.
I'll hand it to the park, the rollercoasters were INCREDIBLE...the best in the world. The ride 'X2' was amazing, and I would have loved to go on it again - it was not only well designed but thrilling as well, and as you can imagine from a massive American theme park, it pulled out all of the stops in terms of 'Fear Factor'!
Now for the downside... prepare yourself- full on rant coming up!
At almost $50 a ticket, you expect to go on a lot of rides in a day. We were at the theme park from about 10.00 until about 4.00 and went on four rides. Four.
Why? Because the park is greedy. They let too many people in and didn't bother to warn us about the vast queues we would have to wait through. On our first ride, we waited 2 hours to get on. This was in the burning Californian heat in cramped conditions with no shade and no water. After the first ride, we were already exhausted but pleased because the ride, X2 was brilliant, so we persevered and queued for a second ride. This was another rollercoaster that we waited about and hour and a half for and was disappointing. We then queued 30 minutes for another ride which literally took about a minute from buckling up to getting off. By this time, we were struggling to find reasons to stay at the park.
We went to find somewhere to sit and have a drink however unfortunately, everybody else had the same idea and we ended up paying $15 and queuing for 45 minutes to get a refillable cup, and then queuing for another 45 minutes to fill it up. Within 45 seconds it was devoured. Why didn't you save your money and use a water fountain you wonder? The few water fountains that actually worked had 20 minute queues in the exposed sun, the same with every toilet facility. We found that it wasn't just us struggling with this busy, over populated park, everybody was.
With little tolerance left, we got into a short looking queue for a water ride. It had no indication of how long it would take but we reluctantly guessed we would be waiting for about half an hour. An hour later we were still in the queue. Completely cramped and unable to move, not only because of the heat and our severe exhaustion, but because hundreds of people were surrounding us. As we waited, people around us started to get agitated - by this time, my parents had gone to the information desk and there were 4 of our group (all teenagers) left in the queue. Okay, understatement...people were shouting and swearing at the attendants, almost causing a riot! Every time a carriage for the next lot of people came, the fast track queue would be moved onto it and the rest of the queue would remain stationary. ...theoretically stationary -a lot of people behind us were giving a lot of abuse to these 'fast track arseholes who thought they were better than us'. After another hour, we finally got on the ride. The ride was terrible. We were so tired and in such a bad mood by this time that we could not be bothered to enjoy the 3 minute up-the-rail-and-underwhelming-drop ride.
After the ride, we were all extremely fed up and the 4 of us went to find our parents. They were making a complaint at the information desk, of which we never received any feedback or compensation. We had waited so long in the final queue that we missed our plans for the evening and were late home. I know I sound like a bratty teenager saying all of this, but it is the truth. In fact, as my parents were queuing at the information desk, they spoke to another unhappy customer who was disabled. Apparently they had been sold the ticket for the park, told they would be allowed on the ride and queued up (having an hour long wait) for a ride, only to be told that their disability meant they could not go on the ride. What's more, the attendants then failed to tell them that this would be the case for every other ride.
The park is greedy and overpriced, only caring about visitors and profit, not the welfare of their guests. If you ever plan to go to Six Flags, I thoroughly recommend saving your money.
