The beautiful, but mediocre park.

In Santa Clara, California a nice small park called Great America is bustling with locals. Most everyone that attends the park has an season pass because of its great location and family atmosphere. While the park is a good place to go every once in a while for a few hours, the name is misleading because this park is far from great.  On my latest trip, I realized and discovered many things about the park and why it isn’t more popular.  However, I did also find some great elements this park has to offer.

You can tell all the effort the landscaping team puts into the park.

A patriotic flower garden.

The park is truly beautiful.  Everywhere you look the park is nicely landscaped.  In the entrance plaza (pictures above) you can see all the detail and effort that the gardening team puts in to the park.  The rapids area was covered with greenery and made it for a very enjoyable expierence.

Going thru the Zero G Roll

However guest don’t come for the landscaping, guest come for the ride selection, and quite frankly Caifornia’s Okay America doesn’t have much to offer.   Flight Deck is the parks signature coaster, a 1993, B&M Invert with a custom layout.  The layout begins with a 91′ drop into a loop, helix, zero g roll, a few curves, corkscrew, turns; nothing to exciting.  The layout is short, and only forceful at certain parts.  To be honest, I prefer the Batman clones any day over this ride.

Vortex's turn around near a garden

Vortex is so bad I forgot to take a decent picture of it!  Opened in 1991, this stand up B&M really doesn’t have much to offer besides some pain.  Tere is lots of head banging, airtime (not a good thing on a stand up coaster!), and your feet begin to hurt from the forces found on the ride.  The park would be much better off with just seated cars.

Then we have Grizzly.  This is the worst coaster in California.  Not only is it rough, but rough without purpose.  If a coaster is too be rough, it should have airtime, and an amazing layout, but not Grizzly.  Built in 1986, this park made wooden coaster really doesn’t do it for me.   A slow layout, one of the roughest rides you can imagine, and loud.  The park recently did retracking to the turnaround which used to be extremely slow, is now just very slow and much more painful.

Demon, again, your typical head banging arrow.  The layout is nice, the theming is pathetic, but the restraints, oh the restraints.  They become your murderer during the double corkscrews.   Totally not worth any wait.

Invertigo and all its glory

The saving grace of this park is Invertigo.  The ride is actually quite unique as many have been removed in the U.S. and there isn’t another one on the West Coast.   The ride is as smooth as new glass.  The over the shoulder, extra padded, restraints are just there to scare you.  Not once did my head move to hit either side of the restraint.  With back to back seating, it is also fun to see strangers faces when they first drop or see there faces when I first drop.

Sorry, its having technical difficulties and closed

Closed

The only problem with Invertigo is, it wasn’t open!  Infact, several rides weren’t open!  Fire Fall was not open,  Flight Deck broke down mid day, the rapids broke down for quite some time, and Grizzly didn’t even open until 12:00.  The park needs to clean up their act because I heard a ton of complaints when the rapids broke down while I was in line.

Part 2 coming soon….

New Freestyle Music Park Website

To me, theme park website redesigns are always exciting, and a good one is even better.  Freestyle Music Park has launched their new, more perminate website. The previous design, while nice looking, only had the basics, a blog, a ticket store, and a map, but no real information about the park and what it had to offer.

The new website changes all of that, with an amazing new design (probably one of the best in the industry), an “Inside The Park” section, which was much-needed to show off the parks collection of rides and attractions,  a new more interactive and animated park map, and a much more complete ticket/season pass store.

http://freestylemusicpark.com/

Plus, an intresting note, the new website announces that the park will be launching an iPhone app, they don’t give much information yet, but I can definitely see uses for this at a theme park, such as a checklist of attractions or maybe even an interactive park map for use in the park, either way I can defintiely see this making to other parks.

Freestyle Music Park iPhone App Coming Soon!

Recently, RCTLounge member Awesomedude137 made a trip to Morey’s Pier and brought back some great pictures of the very interesting park.  The park is made up of several piers on the Jersey shore and is home to some very unique rides.

The Entrance to one of the piers.

The park has a rich history and has had a grand total of 9 coasters in the past, some dating back to as early as the 1950′s!  Now of days, the park consist of 6 coasters, all of which were designed with space in mind.  For example, the SLC and Boomerang were both installed to minimize the amount of room each took up to give space for further expansion.

Surfside Pier

Here we have a beautiful picture of one of the three piers found at Morey’s Piers.  This picture shows Surfside Pier that has a Vekoma SLC called the Great Nor’ Easter.  Interestingly enough, the Great Nor’ Easter features dramatic lighting at night as well as custom designed seats that minimize the typical head banging found on Vekoma Suspended Loopers.   This also shows the vast amount of water slides the pier offers.

Sea Serpent

Sea Serpent is the parks Vekoma Boomerang coaster.  Notice how the buildings below come as close as possible to the track to leave all available space.  This does give this very ugly, (white on white, really?) boomerang a nice bit of uniqueness to it.  In this picture you can also take notice of parts of the midway, which doesn’t seem to be too crowded on this June day.

Coming down the midway

A tram full of passengers drives down the cement, dirty midway.  Yes, I know that the park is old but don’t you think they would clean up the park a little more?  I would also like to note, how tacky all of the signs look.  It is very common now among the East Coast boardwalks I believe but still, this is a bad habit I would like to see come to an end.

Waterslides and more!

Clearly, the park does a good job of packing everything on top of each other!  It is pretty amazing that the park can get waterslides, a massive ferris wheel, coasters, and more all in such a small place.

If you want to check out the rest of this trip report be sure to check out Awesomedude137′s full photo trip report here in the Park Thoughts section of the forums.

A thrilling new attraction at Europa Park

Shortly after the blog’s iSpeed post, a debate came upabout which coaster is better, Blue Fire, or iSpeed.  Now we should take a look at the other new launch coaster that recently opened in Europe, Blue Fire at Europa Park.

Source: Theme Park Review

Blue Fire is a new type of coaster that Mack has created...

Well actually, the Son of Beast is now under the weather after an alleged heading injuring on a woman following her ride in late May.   Unfortunately, the woman did not report her injury until June 16th, and therefore the park did a voluntary shut down to ensure the safety of future riders and further inspections.  No law suite has been...

Source: The Theme Park Guy

If you are on the forums, than you probably know that I am not only a roller coaster enthusiast, but a 100% Disney freak.  And at Tokyo DisneySea, you get a thrill ride that will sure give you the scare of your life.

Source: The Theme Park Guy

With so many rides out there, a person can only...

Intamin’s latest creation, iSpeed, at the Italian park Mirabilandia is open and looks phenomenal!

Originally I thought the layout was very weird and didn’t look good.  But now that I have seen more completed pictures of the ride, I think it looks great.  It seems like a combination of  Maverick (Cedar Point) and Rita: Queen of Speed (Alton Towers).  Some of...