Got out of class at 3:15 and the group was off from Eau Claire WI to Shakopee, MN around 4:45. After a stop for Arby's and bathroom we arrived at the park around 6:30 for a good 4 1/2 hours of what we expected to be no lines coaster riding. When we got out of the car their V2 clone (Steel Venom) was running with damn near nobody in the station, which excited us.
Well, there were barely no lines the whole night...
The first thing I go looking for is the rides closed list, but instead of finding one of those I found something else...a rides open list. All 6 of them...in the entire park....seriously.
So the we go into the park that has one roller coaster (High Roller) operating and 3 haunted houses open. The first thing we did was walk through the "Cemetary" (sort of like Necro, but not as good) which was very very foggy to the point where I couldn't see where I was walkign a good portion of the time. A few scaractors were in there yelling with their electronic sounding chainsaws, whatever.
We get to High Roller and walk right onto the coaster which was only running one train the entire night. The ride wasn't bad, and really reminded me of Blue Streak at Cedar Point. Buzzbars were a plus and while the ride was short it packed a little airtime. So yay, a good ride.
Next was Power Tower, where they only had 1 side of 3 running which was unfortunatly space shot. After a 3 cycle wait (it had about a 4-5 cycle wait most of the night) we get on and woo, just like the space shot at CP...sort of lame wihtout the cool feelign you get after getting dropped from GD. After that we go around and just can't find anything open. Finally we make it to a haunted house that doesn't have a wait. (They are all free) It was about 5 or so minutes long but unfortunatly they let the groups in so close together you can see where the other groups got scared. So that was okay.
Next we went on the Tilt-aWhirl. It was just like a tilt-a-whirl I rode at my church festival...woo. Then we went and watched probably one of the worst magic shows of all time. This guy could have been entertaining if he wasn't cracking the dryest jokes I've ever heard in my life and trying to show off his awefully ugly model's body the entire show. Waste of a half hour, but atleast it was warm in there.
From there we passed up another 15 closed rides and went on the Supercat, which was a slowed down Himalaya. The ride op was announcing during the ride that this was really close to a roller coaster, then the people behind us yelled "If you're drunk!" and we laughed. Pretty lame ride though. After this we walked to Steel Venom hoping to get an actually sort of thrilling ride at this park, and wouldn't you know it...it got closed down. Apparently it was too cold for the ride to keep running. I think thats a total BS excuse, that ride was running just fine when we got into the park, and the more it runs the more warmed up those LIMS get. We had a topic on this earlier, its crap.
Since there were two rides open near to eachother we hit those: The Scrambler (felt slower than HTFM) and their Enterprise which was just about as good as Orbit. So it's about 8:30 now and we've practically finished the park. We walked back through the park and went into the Carevil haunted houses which was really more like a funhouse with weird music. Not scary but atleast a little fun. We walked back over and rode High Roller one more time to end our season and left the park.
Easy to say that Halloween was easily one of the most disappointing park experiences of all time. There probably weren't 25 employees in the entire park (excluding scareactors). We left the park over an hour early after I complained a little to guest services and got back to campus a little before midnight. Biggest waste of my life ever.
Rides open: 6 (most of those were running at below capacity)
Rides closed: 20
So thats my rant, needless to say if their opening day doesn't impress me I may never go to that park again. [/rant]