The Rickenbacker International Airport (LCK) terminal
An Island Getaway
The Rickenbacker International Airport (LCK) terminal
It's not the best feeling to wake up in the morning, look at your watch and immediately think, "7:00...I am supposed to be there already!" But that's just whas happened to me. Saturday had been a really busy day followed by a flight from LCK->SFB and a drive through a strange town in a very strange car at night. The 2004 Chrysler Sebring has some very nasty blind spots, not the least of which is the one just ahead of the front bumper. The rental agency calls this a "midsize" but obviously I am a "full-size" driver. Anyway, I was happy that my drive from the hotel was only a few blocks. Pity that only got me within a quarter-mile or so of the park gate!
I parked the car ($8 - ouch!) and then hiked the ridiculous distance from the parking garage to the park. How ridiculous? It would be closer to park in the very back of Cedar Point's main parking lot and then enter through the Magnum gate. Universal helps out by using escalators and moving walkways, but those only go about halfway, leaving the long portion of Citywalk between the last people-transport-machine and the park gate. After a bit of a jog, I wasn't quite the last person to line up for the ACE event registration, but I was pretty close. Once inside, a guard gave my camera bag a quick once-over (why?) and I proceeded quickly through the Port of Entry, around the corner, and over the bridge to Marvel Superhero Island for a ride on the Incredible Hulk.
Hulk's loading platform is a level up from the midway. This is an older B&M machine, with a fairly conventional sit-down train. No tipped-back seats, no floorless mechanism, and as much as this ride needs them, no lap bars. Just the standard B&M shoulder bar and seats that are much too close together. As conventional as the train is, the ride is not. From the station the train is propelled out onto a series of pinch wheels that launch it up the lift hill. As I recall, it is supposed to start up slowly, then suddenly pick up a lot of speed about halfway up. The reality is that Hulk's launch is so gradual that to someone who has ridden Flight of Fear and Top Thrill Dragster, it doesn't seem all that remarkable. But yes, it is a launch, which starts about halfway up.
This particular morning...I don't know, the ride just felt...well, it felt pokey. Like it's running slow. It has enough energy to get through all the elements, it isn't hanging riders by their shoulders in the inversions, it just feels slow. Or maybe that's my Central Ohio amusement park sensibility colliding with a Central Florida theme park. It's not bad, but...it's a big noisy B&M coaster that rides smoothly through a bunch of inversions and in the end really isn't all that interesting. It's a good, but unremarkable ride.
Breakfast was served in the Cafe 4, across from the Hulk. An unremarkable but generous selection of pastries and bottled drinks, a good way to start the day. Even better, we were issued "Universal Express Plus" passes which would let us bypass the queues for most of the rides. As it turns out, I never used mine, as the park crowds really didn't warrant it. I think the only times I didn't walk right on to a ride were Dueling Dragons and One Fish, Two Fish. More about the Dueling Dragons nonsense when I get to it.
After a half-dozen or so rides on the Incredible Hulk, we were off to ride Spiderman. As unimpressive as the Hulk is as a coaster, Spiderman is that much more impressive as a dark ride. The basic premise of Spiderman is pretty dubious (high-tech news gathering vans? For a newspaper? Run by an apparent tightwad control freak? Riiiight.), but they had to have some kind of an excuse. But once past that, the ride is really impressive. It uses giant-screen 3D films as dynamic dark-ride sets, to stunning effect. While the 3D film sets are the ride's most obvious gag, and the motion base under the ride vehicle is the other widely-talked-about feature, the third innovation for this dark ride is possibly the most significant, and the least noticed. Usually, when a vehicle travels through a dark ride, the vehicle operates semi-autonomously, and triggers stunts at intervals through the show. In most cases, the stunts, the audio, and the effects are all "wild"...that is, they either run as continuous loops, or they are triggered by the ride vehicle and then run independently. In Spiderman, everything is synchronized, and in fact for much of the ride the vehicle isn't even moving...it parks in front of one of the screens and waits for a few seconds, bouncing around in perfect sync with the movie, then moving on to the next scene. It's not the first dark ride where the vehicles make scheduled stops, but I think it is the first one to employ this degree of synchronization between the film, the sets, the vehicle, and the audio track. And I must say, it's just as impressive as it was the last time I visited, in 2000. I took a couple of consecutive rides as the park crowd failed to build. Then I temporarily joined a posse of coaster nuts for a hike around to Seuss Landing.
Seuss Landing is on the other side of the Port of Entry from Super Hero Island, so on the way we all stopped for a quick ride on Doctor Doom's Fearfall. I don't really 'get' the theme, perhaps because with no crowd there is no time to see the backstory material in the queue, perhps because I don't even know who Doctor Doom is. Enclosing the bottoms of two Space Shot towers is an interesting idea, and the enclosure at the base of the tower really doesn't detract from the ride in the sense of making it feel shorter or anything like that. When you look down, you really can't see the queue hou--er--show building directly below you; you can mostly look out over the Universal Orlando complex...or out over Turkey Lake Road if you're on the back side. As for the ride itself...well, it's an S&S Space Shot, and it runs better than the ones at Cedar Point, with a nice kick at the top of the tower. Nice ride, on to Seuss Landing for a ride on One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish.
After a minimal (1.5-cycle) wait, I climbed into a red fish. I was a little surprised to see how badly worn the paint was on the inside of the fish. But then, the ride is essentially a big Mini-Jet, apparently Orlando's favorite flat ride, given that Disney has *four* of these things. This one differs from the Disney rides in that it is surrounded by decorative fountains, programmed to squirt water on the riders. But riders don't have to get soaked...if they follow directions, all the fountains will miss:
Now hear this
All fish that fly
Follow me, and you'll stay dry!
In other words, if you listen carefully and do as the song says, you don't get sprayed.
One fish, red fish
Up, up, up
Two fish, blue fish
Down, down, down.
Okay, that is simple enough! Then the pattern reverses:
That was good, but now I say
Fly up and down
The other way
Two fish, blue fish
Up, up, up
One fish, red fish
Down, down down.
The choice is yours
Fly high or low
Just pick one
You never know!
In other words, it doesn't matter whether I fly high or low, but to keep from getting wet, I should have picked one and stayed there. Oh, well...it's still a cute ride
Next up, just past the truffula trees, was the CaroSeussEl. This is the famous Morgan carousel on which every figure does something when twisted, poked, prodded, or pulled. Or at least that's supposed to be the case. The ride is four years old, and really starting to show its age. Most of the figures could use a coat of paint, and on many the interactive features either don't work or don't work properly. Ears stick, linkages are broken so that handles do nothing, and while overall the ride looks good, it took several tries to find a critter that worked. It seems to me that the ride is about due for a major overhaul, but in a year-round park, when and how can they take a carousel out of commission? Perhaps they can pull the figures off one at a time or something. That's not to say the ride has been totally neglected. In fact, operationally we faced a unique challenge because workers were painting the ride's roof, and their scaffold and other equipment was blocking the exit gate. So riders had to exit through the entrance, past the people waiting in line. Fortunately, crowds were light. There's something else interesting about the way the roof of the CaroSeussEl is painted, but I'll get to that later.
Across the midway is the Cat in the Hat. Technically, the Cat in the Hat is a dark ride, but except for one scene, this particular dark ride...isn't. You sit on a hard Fiberglas sofa, and travel through scenes from the original Cat in the Hat story. The scenes are carefully done and look like they were ripped straight from the pages of the book...well, except for the fact that many of the figures in the dark ride actually move. I thought the use of sliding closet racks in place of the traditional crash doors was an interesting idea. Add some mild spinning action to the motion of the sofa, and you have a pretty neat ride.
Finding your way at Islands of Adventure is pretty simple. You can go that way, or you can go the other way. If you have a particular destination in mind, you can go either way and still get there. The only difference between going the right way and going the wrong way is how far you have to walk before you get there. So instead of going back to the Port of Entry, I proceeded into the Lost Continent.
The first stop here was Poseidon's Fury. The show seemed to be pretty much the same show I'd seen my last time through, including the really neat water tunnel with the really annoying tendency to fog up my glasses. I'd heard that at some point the show had been changed, but that must have been before my first visit. I did have an unusual experience, though...at the end of the show, in the final chamber, the room didn't reset itself correctly, and the walls stopped about a foot higher than they were supposed to. That effectively exposed the mechanism for a terribly effective gag. Because I had seen the show before and knew the critical trick (and hence was able to compensate for it) [Footnote 1], I watched the transformation take place, and given the total distance covered and the time involved, it's truly an amazing bit of staging. I'd be more specific, but it's such a neat trick...! 8-)
The amount of detail in Islands of Adventure is absolutely stunning. I was impressed on my last visit, but that was a few hours of IAAPA party in the dark. The park is even nicer during the day. Unfortunately, an area where the park's attention to design details is at its best is wasted on an area that few people ever get to see: the castle that serves as the queue for Dueling Dragons. What was Universal thinking when they built this? Dueling Dragons is the first coaster built since 1978 that can even come close to matching Gemini in total hourly capacity...with all six of its trains running, Dueling Dragons can move more than 3,000 PPH. I've done some measuring and experimenting and concluded that a single-wide queue on flat ground can only move about 2,400 PPH, and Dueling Dragons' queue goes up and down ramps and stairs, and is about a mile long at its shortest.
Grr. I'm usually not one to make a big stink about parks cutting down on trains on slow days. But the situation on Dueling Dragons was ridiculous, particularly when compared to the way the rest of the park was running. It doesn't help that Fire Dragon is probably the best coaster in the park, second best ride in the park after Spiderman.
Around the corner (everything at Islands of Adventure is around the next corner) from Dueling Dragons (and, I understand, constructed on a disused part of the Dueling Dragons mega-queue...you mean it used to be LONGER?!) is the Flying Unicorn. It's a Vekoma Roller Skater, seemingly just slightly larger than Cedar Point's Woodstock Express. Perhaps not any taller, but certainly a different layout. I don't fully understand the concept of a flying unicorn (unicorns don't fly, Pesasus flies but has no horn. I know this.[Footnote 2]).
From the Flying Unicorn it is only steps through the massive gate of Jurassic Park. Jurassic Park is reached by a bridge which offers a neat view across the lake at the back side of the Lost Continent. This is where I noticed something interesting. From this angle, the most obvious features are the clay mountain which houses the Mythos restaurant. But there is one more landmark that sticks up over Mythos' jagged peaks, and that is the roof of the CaroSeussEl building. It sticks out like a sore thumb and ruins the otherwise rustic view with this giant cartoon thing. Er...wait a minute...no, it doesn't! Back in Seuss Landing, the CaroSeussEl is a brightly colored, oddly shaped, whimsical structure with Dr. Seuss-style creatures standing on the roof. But from Jurassic Park you can see that they did something extremely clever with it. Its odd shape and color are crafted so that while it fits perfectly in Seuss Landing, it also blends in exactly with the Mythos mountain when viewed from across the park. In fact, it's practically invisible, even though it towers over everything in the area! How amazingly clever! What was that I said earlier about IOA's attention to design detail?
The entrance to Jurassic Park
Jurassic Park is a land of lush vegetation, museum-style buildings, and 10,000-volt electric fences. It is also the home of a very unusual Shoot-The-Chutes ride of unknown dampness. Um, yeah. And I'm carrying a camcorder not known for its moisture tolerance. Jurassic Park also contains Camp Jurassic, a large playground with caverns, bridges, nets, dinosaur footprints that, when stepped on, cause the nearby shrubbery to roar, and a drinking fountain that turns on when you duck your head over the nozzle. Camp Jurassic is also home to the Pteranadon Flyers, the suspended swinging monorail roller coaster that got Setpoint started. The ride is blocked off for scheduled maintenance, but from the exit I was able to get a few photos of some of the mechanical stuff. I was lucky enough to gat a ride on this coaster on my first visit. Not a major thriller, but unique enough to be more fun than the Flying Unicorn, as I recall. But that was some years ago. I took some pictures, and was off again.
Up around the next bend, Jurassic Park gave way to Toon Lagoon. A bridge passes over Dudley Do-Right's Ripsaw Falls, another ride far too wet for my present mood. This end of Toon Lagoon contains Dudley Do-Right, and a lot of structures, artifacts, and elements lifted from Jay Ward's Rocky & Bullwinkle cartoons.
Aesop and Son
On down the street, the focus shifts from cartoons to comic strips, with comic strip characters decorating the surrounding shops. Overhead, thought and speech balloons are mounted for special photo opportunities. To the outside there is a large ampitheater of some sort, but I didn't see any signs to indicate what it was for. Somewhere nearby, Toon Lagoon ends and Marvel Superhero Island begins, the cartoons changing from newspaper comics to comic books...appropriately enough, the next attration is the offices of a newspaper, the Daily Bugle, and the Spiderman dark ride. On this trip through Superhero Island, I actually tried out the telephones and call boxes. If you pick up the telephone in a call box, you are given a menu of choices of what kind of incident you are reporting so that your call can be directed to the appropriate superhero. Over by the Incredible Hulk, a kiosk gives the day's superhero intervention update, listing the known supervillains at large and the latest incidents which require superhero assistance. All in a day's work for the superheroes, I guess.
By this time, it was nearly 1:00. I approached the Port of Entry and began a bit of a treasure hunt. Above the Confisco Grill there is a secret restaurant, accessible through an iron gate next to the Croissant Moon Bakery. Through the gate and up the stairs, and down a short corridor, the ACEers were gathering for lunch. The room is nice, but compared with the park below, surprisingly ordinary. It doesn't appear to be so much a restaurant as a hospitality suite, and our group was a bit big for it...initially, chairs were in short supply. Lunch was a buffet of really good food, and with the main room full, many of us ended up sitting outside on a balcony with a good view of the park. Lunch was followed by a brief question-time with...er...I believe he was with the marketing division, but I failed to remember who it was. Anyway, we learned that the event had been a couple of years in the planning, the park had been sold twice in the mean time, but ultimately Universal and ACE were able to pull it off.
The obligatory presentation
Now, it's worth noting that by 2:00 in the afternoon, I had ridden pretty much every ride in the park. So I proceeded to do it all again, going around the lake a second time. This is how I found out about Dueling Dragons running four trains later in the day...I had to wait a few minutes as they added the second pair. I took a lot of pictures (about 40 minutes of videotape) and then took the really, really, really long walk back to the car to drop off the camera, then returned to the park for the last couple of hours of the operating day.
The ride begins as a cut-down version of Splash Mountain, with a series of lifts and scenes depicting memorable items from the Dudley Do-Right of the Mounties cartoons. The scenes are done very much in the Jay Ward style, with lots of explosions, sight-gags, and most of all, dreadful puns. Of course, as with any flume ride, this one ends with a massive drop.
That left one ride still unridden. Now that I need not fear the spray, I proceeded to the Jurassic Park River Adventure. I was expecting a shoot-the-chute ride, but I wasn't familiar with the full layout of the attraction. It begins with a trip up a conveyor lift into a lagoon surrounded by lush vegetation and a high-voltage electric containment fence. In the style of all those Jungle Cruise knockoffs, recorded narration plays over speakers on the bank while dinosaurs lounge in the river. The dinosaurs are really quite impressive. Then there is a fork in the river, and we can see straight ahead that the tour is intended to continue that way, in fact, I think the next bit of narration plays not quite out of earshot ahead. But the boat turns left and goes down another channel, through an unexpectedly open gate into the carnivore containment area. We hear an announcement that we didn't go where we should have, and we approach the warehouse where we are to be pulled from the ride.
I had enough time for another ride on Dueling Dragons (back down to one pair of trains again) and on the Incredible Hulk before leaving. It seems so odd for a park to close so early...before dark, in the winter when dark comes early. But as odd as it felt, how could I complain? After all, I had seen almost every attraction in the park, most of them two or more times. I had a good lunch, and I spent time with some very good friends from ACE and from r.r-c. What more could I want? Besides, this was the start of a very busy week...
Next: The Magic Kingdom
--Dave Althoff, Jr.
Footnote 1: Just as the set is about to move, the audience is hit with an extremely bright light, a combination of an explosion and several strobe lights, then the room is plunged into near-total darkness. The light causes the spectators' irises to close very quickly; it takes a few seconds for them to recover, during which everyone is effectively blind in a dark room. Useful trick. [Return to text]
Footnote 2: Oddly enough, Pegasus was my high school mascot. Yes, it was an odd place; the unofficial fight song was "The Muppet Show Theme" and there was no official fight song. [Return to text]
Footnote 3: That's "foreshadowing," as this trip report covers Visit #2. [Return to text]
--DCAjr
Next: The Magic Kingdom
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