Six Flags Magic Mountain

Today started off in a very poor fashion. Not only did it start early at 6am but once we got outside we found that a) it was spitting, b) that the forecast was for rain, and c) our bus was driving away from us despite us being on time. It felt too early to put on the problem solving hat but sometimes that’s the way it goes.

First step was to try and get a cab to beat the bus to the next major collection point. This would have worked had the cab shown up but no such luck. After looking at replacement options we delayed the day by an hour and caught the next bus, which was only 30 minutes away by this point.

We finally got back to LAX and off to Hertz to pick up our next bit of transport, a Ford Mustang convertible. Being on the American part of our trip we had to have a big American car and what better than the modern version of an American classic. There was quite a bit of rain around at this point so it was great to get into the car underway on our own steam.

Our first stop was out to T-Mobile to pick up a new sim card, and then we were on our way out to the thrill factory that is Six Flags Magic Mountain.  Six Flags is a fair way north of LA, most of the way on the huge interstate freeways which crisscross the city. It was quite an introduction to driving in the states but I was having a great time pushing the Mustang around (safely of course) and pretty soon had the hang of it. The beauty is that the speed limits are guidelines as long as you are moving with the flow of traffic. As a country, America may do some strange things but this approach to driving is excellent, along with their constant 2+ occupant lanes. The trip out to Six Flags took about an hour, so we clicked our way through the turnstiles just after 12 noon.

After the magic that was Disneyland, the Six Flags park was a real let down. The tired boring décor, significantly less families, and the overcast day gave the appearance that the park had no soul. The park is on a hill so we spent a fair bit of time just wandering around trying to get our bearings, and an understanding of how the park worked. All in all it wasn’t looking very optimistic.

Until we got on a ride.

Because Six Flags is all about scaring the crap out of you. There’s no time for fancy props and landscaping when all the park is trying to do is put you up a hill and throw you down it as fast as possible. This is why Six Flags is awesome; because it’s everything Disneyland isn’t trying to be.

We started off on the Viper, which only I did as we hadn’t yet figured the system of dealing with gear and Kathryn wasn’t totally ready for it first up. This roller coaster was of fairly standard design but threw you through seven loops within about 30 seconds, hence the high thrill rating.

We then both jumped onto Revolution, which was the first roller coaster in the world to have a loop. This was really interesting as it showed the huge steps coaster design has taken. While most coasters now largely use track to control speed, the Revolution used regular brakes to slow the car right down for the next section. The track designers were so nervous about the loop they actually stopped the cars before the loop and then launched them again, resulting in the slowest loop I’ve ever done. That said, as a whole the ride was still very entertaining despite its age.

After Revolution (and throwing in a go-kart track) we felt that the lines were just that bit too long despite the colder weather and expected rain, so we grabbed a FlashPass, the Six Flags booking system. This works different from Disneyland in that you rent the device which lets you book your place from anywhere in the park. You’re allocated a time to come back based on if you were standing in the line but without actually having to stand there. After a raucous welcome just for us from the Flashpass sales team we were out in the park and ready to really get into it.

The next ride was Goliath. This one got Kathryn and I both nervous, as it kicks off with a 26 storey drop into a tunnel at 85 mph. It’s difficult to explain how massive a drop this is but it certainly got the heart pumping. The feeling afterwards was definitely part satisfaction of actually doing it to go along with the excitement of the ride itself.

From here we moved right across the park to the Apocalypse ride, which is a modern coaster disguised as a classic wooden track. The tight turns and tremendous noise, along with the odd exploding car made this coaster well worth the lengthy walk.

Our next booking was for the Green Lantern ride but we managed to sneak in a quick Gold Rusher run, which was a surprisingly exciting mining cart ride. After a moments confusion about which green track was actually Green Lantern we skipped a huge part of the line and took our spot for the ride. Green Lantern is a ride type that’d we never done before, where the track is on one vertical axis and the riders hang off the side. This meant it incorporated giant drop type elements as well as vertical rotation at speed.   While short, it was a fantastic ride.

We backed this up with the Batman ride, which is a suspended coaster (you hang below the track). Because you do the turns and loops on the outside the forces are reversed and so rather than feeling like you’re going to fall out, you’re actually pushed even more firmly into your seat. This helps a lot as the ride is brutally fast!

We then did our standard one big wait of the day, this time for the Riddler’s Revenge which wasn’t included in the FlashPass. Despite that, this was one ride I was really keen to do (Kathryn not so much) as you do the coaster effectively standing up. The wait was about an hour and we were both pretty anxious once we got to the front, but the feeling of standing up was actually great and gave a whole new perspective to the ride. We would definitely have done it again.

By this time it was 5.30 and the cold and tiredness was making it difficult to keep up the enthusiasm. It was also pretty dark by then and the park isn’t very well lit so there wasn’t much to see. We decided that we had time for one more, the highly anticipated Tatsu. This is a flying coaster, so once you’re seated and buckled in you’re rotated over so that you are looking straight down. Tatsu is the highest, fastest and longest ride of this type so I was looking forward to see what it could do. 

In the end I was blown away by this ride, but not because it thrilled me (there was only on drop that turned my stomach). It was simply that the feeling of soaring through and above the night time tree canopy felt like the closest you could come to flying. The coaster was so smooth and the harness so supportive that it felt like they weren’t there and you were just soaring on our own. Because of the lack of thrill this wasn’t my favourite ride of the park, but it did cause the best reaction.

Luckily for us the rain we had driven out of on our way to Six Flags hadn’t eventuated over the park, which was a huge bonus. It had taken a bit of juggling to ensure Six Flags would fit into our trip plan and we’re very thankful that the weather gods have so far played their part.

All done for the day we jumped back in the Mustang and drove the hour long trip back south to our hotel in Anaheim. After a quick spa to relax the muscles we managed to haul ourselves half a block down the road for dinner and thank god we did because we found some delicious pizzas at Pizza Press, made before you like Subway with your input. The guys working there were great and the pizzas were outstanding. We ended up with a window seat watching a replay of the Disneyland fireworks, so a great end to the night.

Tomorrow is our first cruisey day, a later start at 9am before driving out to Las Vegas to join up with our Contiki group. We’re yet to see how this will all pan out and what activities we’ll be doing and when, but I’ll get a blog post up when I can. I've also been a bit slack with getting photos up on here but I'll add some in tomorrow for the last couple of days.

Rob

Disneyland

Today was our first full day in the States and luckily California turned it on for a day in Disneyland.

We started off early, with breakfast at Mimi’s café at 7.30. This highlighted the massive size of meals in America, I couldn’t finish my cinnamon pancakes with bacon and eggs and Kathryn didn’t get through her egg white frittata. Very full, we wandered the short distance back down the road to the park entrance just after it opened at 8am. We’d already experienced the considered perfection of a Disney park from the previous evening in CAP but this was even more obvious under the light of day. Everything is manicured and I’m sure it’s pretty every day but with the Christmas season the whole park was dressed to the nines.

Having picked up a few tips on the FastPass system over the past few months we headed straight to the FastPass collection point for the Indiana Jones ride. This gave us tickets allowing us to come back in just over an hour later and ride without a queue. This was a good start indeed.

With a little bit of time to kill we went for some of the other rides and struck gold with seemingly low opening numbers in the park. We got through the Pirates of the Caribbean ride (a fairly tame but visually fantastic log flume), the Haunted Mansion (similar to the Pirates ride) and then the Splash Mountain log flume within about forty minutes. As you may have guessed the Splash Mountain was empty for a good reason, as we were in the front and Kathryn’s jeans got drenched! Nevertheless, these dried eventually in the sun and we were saved from 1 hour + wait times later in the day.

We wandered around the main lake just taking in the sights, before making our way to the Thunder Mountain FastPass collection point. The beauty of the FastPass system is that you get given an hour to ride the ride, but you can get your next FastPass before this time. This meant we could grab our FastPasses for Thunder Mountain before heading back to Indiana Jones.

The 4WD adventure of Indiana Jones was very good, as shown by the significant queues already (which we skipped with our FastPass).  We then headed over to the other side of the park to pick up our next FastPass, for the indoor roller coaster Space Mountain. The ruthlessness of the FastPass system was clearly shown here, in that by the time we were able to get our FastPass the booking window was out to 4pm, despite us picking up the pass around 10am.

We checked out Innoventions, which is basically a walkthrough advertisement for Microsoft and Honda so not that interesting. With a brief look at a bunch of little kids getting their Jedi training and then battling Darth Vader we made our way back to Thunder Mountain (why is everything called mountain?) and jumped straight on through. Thunder Mountain is your classic gold mine coaster and was a fantastically entertaining ride.

The exit from Thunder Mountain pushed us out and around into Fantasyland, just in behind the Disneyland Castle. There were some fairly significant lines for the kid’s rides but luckily for us the line for the Mad Hatter Teacups moves pretty quick and next thing you know we found ourselves twirling away like a travel ad.

After a brief look into the hyper-coloured Toontown we jumped on the train and rode around the edge of the park (via a dinosaur infested Grand Canyon display) and headed on out of the park. We’d seen quite a bit of information suggesting taking a break during the peak midday point and this fitted in really well with us given the late night in CAP the previous day. We headed back up the road for a couple of hours sleep and a refresh.

Ready to go again, we headed back to the park in time for our Space Mountain FastPass. With a little bit of time to spare before we had to be there, we headed over to the Matterhorn and used the ever-awesome single rider pass to get right up into the front for the Matterhorn Bobsleigh. Having rattled our way down the mountain we headed back into Tomorrowland and over to Space Mountain. Which was amazing. The hill led up through the rotating tunnel visual illusion so that it felt like you were spinning, before dropping you into a high speed rollercoaster in a giant black room where the only thing you can see are the pinpricks of light for the stars. It was an great experience and made much nicer having skipped the 140 minute queue.

After a pizza dinner (having not eaten since breakfast), we started to look around a bit more, having covered most of what we were hoping to achieve by 5pm. We picked up a FastPass for Autopia (being the only FastPass still available) and then did the Astro Orbiter, a carnivalesque rotating rocket ride. After three goes we finally managed to fit both of us in (I think it’s made for kids). 

It was while in the queue for the Astro that we decided to make a play for the Hollywood Hotel Tower of Terror in CAP, which we hadn’t managed to get the previous evening. While I love roller coasters I wasn’t totally convinced about the drop concept, but Kathryn was dead keen so we were definitely going. This was out longest queue of the day, approximately 60 minutes but I was very much wrong, as this ride was a huge rush and easily the most thrilling of both parks. If you’re not familiar with it, rather than being a straight drop the Tower of Terror takes you up and drops you down multiple times, all from different heights and with no warning. There are many different drop profiles so even if you ride it five times it’s likely to be different each time.

We headed back to Autopia, which turned out to a rather disappointing track based driving experience (especially given what is coming up tomorrow!). By this stage it was very much night-time and the cold and tiredness was starting to kick in. We got lucky with a great little spot to watch the fireworks over the castle before joining the masses in heading out of the park.

So a big thanks to Disneyland; it’s been a great experience and I’m really glad that we got it into our trip. And now it’s time for bed as we have a fairly early start tomorrow.

One hell of a day

Having got Christmas out of the way we're now under way with the trip, and have kicked it off with one hell of a 27th of December, which is only just drawing to a close now. You may realise this from the massive length of this blog post. Let's head back to the start ...

We kicked off the day with some final packing, before a birthday lunch for my brother. We didn't have to check in for the flight to Auckland until 5pm so we spent most of the day waiting. Dad picked us up just after 4pm and we checked in at Wellington right through to LAX. 

We left Wellington right on schedule at half past six and got into Auckland an hour later. We were originally booked to fly at half eight but a week or so earlier we pulled this back a couple of hours. This was originally to minimise the risk of delays further down the line but also resulted in the excellent positive that we could watch the Phoenix play Melbourne Heart in the bar inside customs at Auckland International. FYI, the Nix came back from 2-0 down to win 3-2, get in!

We left Auckland just before 11pm, and as we were on the Los Angeles leg of the Auckland - Heathrow flight we were on the plane featuring Hobbit livery. Being the newest plane this also gave us the bonus of having personal power points which was very useful, although after two more viewings I'm still unimpressed with the Middle Earth-themed safety video. The flight itself was largely uneventful. We both found sleeping difficult and only got a few hours rest, so I'm still not sure what the answer is to long distance travel.

Seeing LA from above was a new experience, having never seen a city of that size before. Once we landed we were both struck by how much everything was different yet exactly the same. LA may be a city on a whole new scale for us, but it is just people living their lives in ways not much different from our own. The standard of the vehicle fleet felt substantially lower than in New Zealand and there seemed to be a huge amount of people who had just bought a van and started a transport business.

We jumped onto our transport out to our hotel at Anaheim. While it's a bit dated it's also walking distance to Disneyland/California Adventure Park so we can't really complain. Having got settled in and refreshed from the flight we managed to keep to our original plan and check out the first theme park of the trip.

Because of the size of Disneyland and the conflicting show times across the park we decided to head first into California Adventure Park. I had been more looking forward to Six Flags and Universal with their more thrilling rides but I was surprised with how much I enjoyed CAP. 

The place was well laid out, themed to amazing depth, spotless, and with us being there only in the evening, the extensive lights added the magical touch you would hope to associate with a Disney product. I found it significantly easier to be drawn into the Disney world than I had expected. 

We spent a little while just wandering around getting to grips with everything that was going on, before hitting our first ride on Goofy's Sky School. This was a short and sharp roller coaster where we also discovered the wonders of the single rider queue, which slashes the main queue by about 90% with the only catch being you have to ride by yourself. 

From here we headed around to Paradise Pier and dropped in to play some sideshow games. For $20US we got to play a bunch of games and win stuffed toys, with Kathryn winning a Dumbo and I picked up a Toy Story horse and a lobster. We then jumped on the single rider queue for the California Screamin' roller coaster. We hadn't expected too much from this but it turned out to be an excellent ride, with a rocket launch and some pretty good drops.

This brought us nicely back in time to head back to Paradise Pier for the World of Color light and water show. There was a huge amount of people watching this so it was difficult to get a good spot, but we found a good place around the side to watch from. They had a huge amount of coloured light fountain jets all working together to great some amazing scenes, as well as projecting Disney characters onto walls of water.

We slipped away from this a bit early to try and get some final rides in while numbers were down. We headed over to Soarin' over California, a suspended motion master ride of the sights of California State. Unfortunately they had just closed the single rider queue but instead Greg the attendant just hooked us up with a FastPass for 15 minutes later! While not much of a thrill it was a fun ride so I'm glad that we got it in.

Lastly we headed around to the Grizzly River Run, a log flume with circular boats. This resulted in us doing a few drops backwards in the dark, and unfortunately Kathryn got a bit wet, but it was our last ride of the day and that wasn't going to get us down. Here’s hoping we can keep it up tomorrow when we have a go at a full day at Disneyland.

Until the next update!

Rob

This looks like snow but it's actually me standing in front of a waterfall , with the mist/spray blown up by the flash.

Feeling pretty happy with ourselves so far, we moved on again and passed through the Pacific Wharf food area on our way to Cars Land. With so many different food styles in on place it was quite an assault on the senses. We entered Cars Land under a huge arch of 'rock' and was amazed at the size of this area. It's massive. The whole thing is encircled with massive 'rock' walls which feel like mountains. The main ride in this area is the Radiator Springs Racers, which took about 30 minutes to get to even in the single rider queue. While a little short, it was a blast to race in cars around a highly cambered track, and I'll admit it was a little bit exciting to win our 'race'.

Pretty much ready to go

Just a quick update, we've picked up our tickets from Mary-anne at House of Travel and gone through the itinerary. Here's a photo of the stack of documents we have to cart around, this is just our tickets and vouchers!

Also a big thanks to those who are helping us out with gear. A special mention of Kathryn's parents Heather and Tom, who have not only lent us their camera (great for the distance shots we hadn't previously planned for) but also for buying their new suitcase early so that we could use it.  You guys are awesome!

Now to finish off work and get Christmas out of the way. For anyone else reading this, have a Merry Christmas!

Rob

Getting close now

We're just over two weeks away from leaving on the trip now and I thought this was a great time to set up the blog, so that it's raring to go once we actually set off.

The trip summary is as follows:

We fly into Los Angeles and head out to Anaheim. We've got a day and a bit checking out Disneyland and California Adventure, and then another day at Six Flags.

We then drive out to Las Vegas and join in with our Contiki tour. This allows to still do our own thing but also meet some other travelers and get free entry and drinks for New Years in Vegas. On our final day we do a huge drive out the Grand Canyon and back, before seeing a Cirque de Soliel show.

From Vegas we're back to LA, this time staying out at Santa Monica. Here we can explore on foot a bit, as well as having a day at Universal Studios. We're also going to check out a LA derby, the Lakers v Clippers (basketball for those that don't know/care).

Then we jump on a plane and fly right across the country to New York, where we spend 4 and a bit days enjoying the sights. This includes catching a showing of Wicked, which Kathryn is very much looking forward to.

From New York we fly up to Calgary, jump on a bus and make our way into the Canadian Rockies for some epic snowboarding. We're at Banff for about 9 days, and then up to Jasper for a few more. We bus out to Edmonton and fly over Vancouver, before busing up to Whistler after a major day's travelling.

We're in Whistler for about a week and then we head back to Vancouver for a day of sightseeing before jumping on the plane back home to Wellington.

We're still  making a couple of adjustments to minor details so I had yet another 45 minutes in the travel agent's yesterday, but Mary-Anne from House of Travel is doing a great job putting up with my pedantic planning and we should be all locked in this week. As a bonus we haven't had to make the final payment yet, despite leaving in two weeks!

Anyway, there probably won't be many if any updates until leaving day as not much will be going on, but I'll try to keep on top of this once we're on our way. This blog is mainly so that we can record our memories of the trip but hopefully you enjoy keeping up with us as well.

Cheers,

Rob