Six Flags Great Adventure: It's raining creds!

With a spring in my step, I woke up bright eyed and bushy tailed for the first amusement park of the trip: Six Flags Great Adventure, near Jackson, New Jersey. However, as the Crowded House song goes, I took the weather with me, all the way from from Manchester, and I ended up at a overcast and drizzly skyline of impressive looking rollercoasters.

As a result, my first park report doesn't include many photos, but I will be going back to Great Adventure later on this trip to re-ride a few of the coasters which are worth it, and to do a better trip report in nicer weather. Oh, and to try and ride Kingda Ka. The tallest rollercoaster in the world.

Because today, it was closed. Very closed. And as disappointing as it was, you simply can't run a ride which launches its riders at nearly 130 miles per hour into even a light rain, because it will be seriously uncomfortable, let alone numerous other issues that the other elements could have on such a complex ride.

Kingda Ka. At 456 feet, the tallest closed rollercoaster in the world.

So Kingda Ka became Kingda Kan't. And to add insult to injury, Zumanjaro, the world's tallest drop tower at 415 feet tall, which is built on to the tower of the rollercoaster was closed for maintenance that day - but it should be ready in good time before I revisit. But fortunately, all the other rides were able to operate. So in order, here's the rest of Six Flags Great Adventure.

First up was Superman: Ultimate Flight. A flying rollercoaster like Air at Alton Towers (and built by the same company), which has one great loop in the shape of a pretzel (where you enter at the top, go through it on your back and come out at the top again), but not much else round the rest of the course to hold my interest. But the flying position still gets people excited, the pretzel loop is extremely forceful, and the lines are always long for it. Even more so today, as the park were only running one train out of the two they can use, so I was glad to ride it before the queue became excessive.

Next door to Superman was Green Lantern. This is a stand up rollercoaster, 154 feet tall, with 5 inversions, including a 121 foot vertical loop. I'd already ridden this rollercoaster a few years ago when it existed at another park in Kentucky (which I'll be checking out later this trip), and despite losing a bit of its smoothness in the 8 years since my last rides, it still had a kick to it.

The next rollercoaster was El Toro. A monstrous wooden coaster 181 feet tall, and one of my most anticipated rides of the whole trip. The company who designed it, Intamin, are renowned in the coaster fraternity for making some of the most extreme and thrilling rides going, so I had high hopes as I jumped on the back row. Sadly, and as much as it pains me to say it, the ride fell short of my expectations. It was very fast and had some great airtime, but the train was very bouncy through the course, and this detracted a lot from everything else. But I'm not giving up on El Toro, and I'll be giving it a few more rides later this summer, and I'll reserve final judgement after a few more goes.

El Toro (pictured front). Lots of airtime, but a bouncy ride.

After a quick ride on the Runaway Mine Train (the end of which you can see at the bottom right of the picture above), I hit up Bizarro, the park's floorless coaster. This was the first floorless coaster ever built in 1999, and was previously called Medusa, until a recent retheme to tie in with the Superman franchise transformed the ride into Bizarro, one of Superman's many foes. The ride itself is showing its age and is a bit rough around the edges, but it's still forceful and has 7 great inversions, including a vertical loop, dive loop, zero-G roll, cobra roll and interlocking corkscrews.

Bizarro's Cobra Roll.

After Bizarro, the weather got worse. So I quickly went over a couple of the smaller rides which would stay open. Blackbeard's Lost Treasure Train is a small double figure of eight coaster, today being operated by Pitbull's Dad. He was by far and away the best ride op of the day!

 It's about to go down with Mr Worldwide Sr!

With even more rain happening, I ran to the Skull Mountain coaster next door, and got out of the rain to ride an indoor coaster with twists, turns and a skull with flashing eyes. There's not really much more to say about it, but at least it was protected against the elements.

After that, it was a race against time to get the other rides in before I ended up looking like a drowned rat. There was a Batman: The Ride clone nearby, which was very forceful (they all are), Nitro, a 200+ foot tall hyper coaster similar in scale to the Big One at Blackpool (but much, much better!), and then the Dark Knight Coaster (not like Batman: The Ride, but under cover with a great pre-show section with the Joker taking over a TV broadcast before you board subway train themed cars and are sent through a well themed wild mouse style ride). The whole ride was well themed, which marked a departure from a lot of Six Flags rides which don't rely on theming and a story line. I'll get more pictures on a brighter day, and a few more rides on Nitro, which was probably my favourite ride of the day.

The final ride was a tiny kids coaster called Road Runner Railway, which some basic theming to the Warner Bros. character of the same name.By now, it was like a typical day in Manchester, so I asked for just one lap so I could get the cred, and get off  so I could get dry again.

Sadly, I couldn't take the umbrella home because it belonged a staff member.

Overall, the park has a good selection of coasters, with Nitro being my personal favourite. But by now, the time was 3pm, and I was bored of getting wet, so I called it a day, and went back to my lodging to dry off and get some rest before the next day, which involved a 3.30am start for a flight to Chicago, and a meeting with an old friend...

...more to come very soon!