Photo TR: Bas does Florida and the East Coast Tour

[HerBlackWingsA donkey is a domesticated member of the Equidae or horse family.]

^OH MY GOD. Nice capture!

[Dragon KhanWhen I grow up, I want to breed donkeys!]

^ Not bad indeed, but wait till you see THE picture (Nerd/geek/coasterporn picture, it's up to you). Bas showed me the photo on the bus ride that night... I nearly cream my pants everytime I think about it... Oh, by the way, a bit of advertising: I know Bas and Hano's pictures are absolutely fantastic. But have a look at the full sized HD version of the pictures on Hano's own website (look for the link in his signature). This is REAL coasterporn for all of you to enjoy. Every single EC2008 participant is on the pictures, what you see here on TPR is just a sample of the Magic he's able of...

Thanks for all your responses, here's the update:

hyyyper goes to the USA
East Coast Day 3 - August 9
Six Flags New England and Rye Playland

Because there was no way to put all the ERT SFNE threw at us all in one day, we came back today to get some more ERT on some rides. Traditionally, we started the day with an attempt to break the Boomerang. Unfortunately I don't have any pictures of this, the reason
being that I was on the ride when we broke it. Thankfully they got it work and we got the credit. The second coaster we had ERT on was Pandemonium, which was a very fun coaster. If you get lucky, and I was lucky, you can get an insane amount of spin, and with the inner-facing
cars you have a lot more fun than when you're sitting facing outwards.

After those coasters it was time to hit Superman:Ride of Steel again and it was still amazing with a ton of airtime. I won't go into details because otherwise my story will get two pages long and the ride was just as good as the day before.

So after the ERT was over we split up in groups of four and had a great day with the Gold Q-bots, and since it was our second day at the park
we almost had all the credits and we could relax and also hit some flats and WATER RIDES (I forgot your name, but I was in your group with
Vanjo and Phil, and I'm still angry for getting us wet at the "you won't get wet on this rapid" rapid).

The park was a real succes thanks to the Q-bots and the low-to-moderate crowds. But why do they build every Six Flags park in such a way that you have to walk 3 miles to get from one to another coaster? Well, I guess I'm used to Toverland, where the longests distance is 700 feet.

The second park of the day was a suprise park and it turned out to be Rye Play/Stabland. Once the awesome Rye Aeroplane Coaster resided here. We had quite some time to spend and the crowds were really heavy. The park was really ghetto, the rides weren't all that good, mostly it was just funny to see how ghetto a ride can be(come). The dragon coaster was like any old woodie in the US, rough, fast on the straights, but very slow in the turns. The mouse had some cool laterals and the kiddies, well, was a kiddie.

The atmosphere in the park was terrible. The ride-ops were rude, didn't pay attention and I was glad I stayed within a group because I just didn't feel safe on my own. Perhaps I should've gone out on the pier, pay how am I supposed to know there's a pier in the first place?

That pretty much wraps up Day 3, now lets get on to the pictures.
Oh, and don't expect to much from the "off-the-rails-shot". It's not like the train is two feet of the train

Part 2

[Dragon KhanWhen I grow up, I want to breed donkeys!]

Well, I know Bas is literally DYING to update this topic again, and I know he won't before anyone leaves comments on the latest pictures, here I go. SROS... the more I think about it, the more I love it, even if I was not that speechless after my first ride. Nice shot of the Cyclone too. I actually enjoyed my several rides on this coaster so many TPR members seem to bash. Don't see why. And YES, I rode the back seat. Flashback. I was on it when it broke... for one second you feel ill at ease, even if you know nothing can actually happen. STABLAND ! Well done Bas... But as I told you on our chat session, I'm soooo surprised people felt threatened (even if the term is a bit strong) Maybe I'm used to Walibi Belgium where fights can be witnessed every single summer... and this Zamperla flyer... one more for the list. Make scrap metal out of it, I really won't give a sh*t...
Now Bas, you can update

hyyyper goes to the USA
East Coast Day 3 - August 9
Six Flags Great Adventure

The day that was supposed to be the best day of the entire trip turned out to be a disaster.

In the morning, we drove of to Six Flags Great Adventure filled with joy for the coming day which would be filled with a lot of coasters, and almost just as important, Gold Q-Bots. In the morning, there wasn't a cloud to be spotted in the sky, so getting all the credits in wouldn't be that hard, at least, with the Q-bots.

As usual we started today with ERT (I know this isn't the correct word, because ERT isn't usual, but since this trip was loaded with it, you'll understand my choice of words) on Batman: The Dark Knight. An indoor wild mouse with special effects. I must say, for a wild mouse it was quite good, but no matter how much movie themes you throw at it, it's still a mouse. The outside theming ain't that impressive, but it looks nice from the inside. The pre-show wasn't spectacular, but at least it beats standing in a queue with nothing to do. The ride itself is just like any mouse out there, only it isn't all that forcefull, whereas other mouse-coasters throw you out the car, TDK gently handled the turns and hills. Now, I haven't the new movie, so I might be wrong about the special effects, but they made no sense at all. I am not joking when I say that ghetto-darkrides had better effects than this ride.

After we were done with The Dark Knight (which was pretty soon), we walked to El Toro and took over the ride. El Toro was my first Intamin wood and I must honestly say that I wasn't fond of the way Intamin manufactured wood. It always felt to me that they were cheating and making steel hyper with wooden supports. After riding El Toro my opinion was changed to "Who gives a f***, the ride rocks". And boy did it rock. The cable-lift takes you to the top insanely fast and the steep drop was, well, steep. The speed throughout the ride is amazing and the way you get abducted out of your seats on the hill over Rolling Thunder is not really describable. You should ask Marcus (membername 'lond') how many G's exact, but it felt like -1.7 G's. There is only one thing missing and that's laterals. You build yourself an enormous wooden rollercoaster, fill it up with hills, speed, airtime and twists, yet you 'forget' to put in lateral G-forces. It was such a shame to speed trough those turn and not feel them.
Still, the speed and airtime place it #2 on my ranking, just under Boulder Dash.

As an extra gift to conclude our ERT, we got to be first riders on Kingda Ka. I had heard a lot of bad stuff about Kingda Ka, but since the specs looking so amazing, I had mixed feelings before riding. Kingda Ka is an amazing ride to start with. The speed and sensation is just unexplainable. The launch comes out of nowhere and before you think 'that launch was sick', you are halfway up the tower. When you are thinking "hey, we are going vertical", you're being ejected over the top. And when you think "wow, this tophat has airtime", you're already halfway down. The ride is just fast you can't keep your mind focus on the things happening when they happen.
Some people say Kingda Ka is just a one trick pony, but to me, Ka is a five-trick pony. It has a launch, upward twist, airtime tophat, downward spiral and bunnyhop. I am very curious about Top Thrill Dragster now, the same sensation of speed (8 mph difference is not noticeable on top of 120 mph) but without the OTSR's.

When we got of the ride we were going to collect our Q-Bots from Elissa, but we had a small problem. While Jake, Max and I got of the ride, Eric broke it and was stuck on the brake run just before the station. So after a short delay the CoasterCrazy-crew headed out for Nitro, as there was 'inclement weather' approaching and we just wanted to ride it really badly.

When at Nitro we once again thanked R&E for getting us Q-Bots because the line was insane, while we could go right into the station. Nitro is one hell of a ride. I know and I agree with the fact that B&M Mega's have less airtime than the Intamin Hyper's, but for some reason I like the way B&M 'use' the airtime and twist their track better than how Intamin does. Also, the helix of Nitro is an incomparable experience. Because Nitro was so awesome, we rode it again, this time front seat, which was just as awesome.

After making sure we didn't lost our hearts to Nitro we saw the nasty weather approaching and while we were in the area we might as well do some credit whoring and get the kiddie and Skull mountain. I did like Skull Mountain, but I didn't like it very much, it didn't do much for
me in any kind of way.

The last coaster in the 'right'-part of the park was Batman: The Invert. When our train dispatched, it started to rain and when we got of the ride, it was raining that hard the entire park closed every single outdoor ride, and we didn't got any more credits that day. But back to Batman, which was a superb ride for the most part, but unfortunately it had such a typical B&M-pause-section right before the first first corkscrew. The whole ride is awesome, but it just hurts to see the whole experience being ripped apart by such a dumb low-speed section.

As I said, the park closed down everything and we spend a few hours waiting, checking the weather, taking over flats with TRP and eventually, we decided to leave the park early, since there was no way we could ride any coasters anymore. Robb told us that they would try in any possible
way to get us back to Great Adventure somewhere further into the trip and we should get rain checks for if he succeeded.

With that said, we left for the bus, said goodbye to all the coasters and cursed the weather in any way possible.

[zjerreMacaroni and Donkey]

nice TR so far! also planning to go to the us next year with a visit to florida and east coast with NY and SFNE and SFGA

[Dragon KhanWhen I grow up, I want to breed donkeys!]

^hey, another Belgian ! I had already visited the park in 2001 and on the pregame, and I went back on the second day Robb managed to arrange for us, spoilt kids. I just can't get enough of this awsome park. Sure, it's not Bush Gardens for theming, it doesn't have my favourite steelie. Nor does it have my favourite woodie, by the way... But who cares, when a single park features 3 rides that are in my top 10 out of 220 (I hesitated to write top 5), it's still an excellent park in my book. I'll never visit NY without at least one day in this coaster paradise... Oh, and the pictures are just so good, as usual, Bas...

[philthephorceI roomed with Tony and lived to tell about it!]

I was kinda wondering where everyone went, but I was having too much fun on El Toro to really care...

Ka's overrated anyways.

hyyyper goes to the USA
East Coast Day 5 - August 10
Six Flags America and WANK

So today we went to Six Flags America. Although they have a reasonable collection of rollercoasters at first glance I was glad to leave the place early. It started when we were supposed to get ERT on Wild One, a classic woodie. But when it broke down TWICE before the train actually left the station, the park suggested we got onto Batwing, since in the progress of starting up rides, they also broke Superman.

I don't know if the management doesn't like walking or they actually wanted to give us a backstage tour, but we a short backstage tour trough some backstage lots. So we queued up for Batwing and prepared us from riding the vekoma flyer. Despite the awful capacity, I really liked Batwing. It was my first flyer and it was quite a sensation for me. It didn't feel Vekoma at all. I guess because of the fact there's no room to headbang in the tight restraints. The flying is really amazing. It's a shame the human body can't tolerated more G's in that position, resulting in a limited choice of elements, but I still loved flying!

After we did Batwing, Superman was still down, but Wild One seemed to be fixed. So we walked the entire stretch back to the woodie and thankfully it was still working when we got there. I might be stepping on some toes of other coaster enthusiasts but the ride was not that much fun. Like any other woodie, there was some speed at the drop and some laterals in the turns, but on the hills the ride was really slow and there was nothing to the layout that did very much to me. Actually, there was a fun part, the final helix was good fun because it had sustained laterals and it was very very long.

The improvised ERT ended and we got to be first riders on Joker's Jinx. I expected the ride to be better than Rock'n'Rollercoaster because it wouldn't be as rough and have a tighter layout. Too bad the ride was extremely slow, but props to Premier for getting such a layout together. Also, the station launch was unexpected and sort of cool in that way.

So after Jinx we were set loose in the park with five exit-passes they dared calling Express-Pass, so don't confuse them with the heavenly Q-Bots the larger Six Flags parks have. The was no problem getting all the credits in before lunch and for some reason, Six Flags America's list of coasters looks impressive but they are very rough.

Superman: Ride of Steel was very slow for a Superman, the cheap design resulted in a layout composed of helices, hills and straights and a total of 2 twisting pieces of track.

Roar was extremely rough for a GCI, if I didn't know better it felt like an unmaintained CCI.

Mind Eraser was the roughest I've been on, even rougher than my home-SLC, El Condor, which was the first SLC to be build.

The ride-ops were very rude and weren't paying attention to the ride at all. They preferred making jokes, listing to loud music and texting. For some reason most guests find out about the flash-passes in the queue and very mad at us for cutting in line. Some TPR-member were threatened to be shot.

I was glad that at lunch (which didn't have ANY CHEESEBURGERS OR HOTDOGS) we decided to get out of the park so we could get to bed early for once. Ah well, at least the park had a Time Crisis shooting-arcade.


EXTRA BONUS FEATURE: The History of Wank

You might have heard people from the ECT yelling WANK! around the boards since we got back. If you want to know the background story, read on.

Ok, so when we got settled in our hotel, we got the opportunity to go to WallMart. The bus driver gave us a two-hour window to get our stuff and get back to the bus. Most of us were ready after one hour and we all sat down in the shadow of the bus. It looked like we were all sitting around a campfire, but without the fire.

So after a while, Mike Austin realised he didn't know everybody who came on the WallMart-add-on and he asked the name of the person sitting opposite of him. I believe that person was Jason, but I'm not sure. But anyways, the person says his own name and asks Mike's name.

Mike answers with:"My name is Mike"

for some reason the other person misinterpreted it and replied:

"WANK??!"

Since that day every time someone came across Mike, there was a "WANK!" yelled at him. Sorry Mike, it was just to funny not to.