Theme Parks

Valerie and I had been meaning to go out to Worlds of Fun for Halloween Haunt this year, but we hadn't had a chance because we had been busy with our own Halloween festivities. We also needed to go out there to renew our season passes for 2009 while they were still discounted. We got to the park around 3pm and our first stop was to pay for our renewals and get them processed. This took less than 5 minutes and it was much easier than having to deal with it at the beginning of next season. Once the administrative part of the visit was taken care of we headed over to Lore of the Vampire. Lore is the only "Extreme Haunt" open on Sundays. In the past this had been one of my favorites, but I was a little disappointed with it this year.

One of the parks Valerie and I had been meaning to visit for a while was Elitch Gardens. Valerie works at an independent hotel, and one of the properties is about 20 minutes from Elitch Gardens. Each year the managers go out to the owner's home in Breckenridge to set the budget for the next year so they don't have to worry about to dealing with other distractions. I wasn't able to go out there with her last year because of scheduling conflicts, but this year we were able to suggest some dates that would work best for us. I flew out last Friday after I was done with work and met up with her later that evening. After eating a late dinner we decided not to set a definitive time that we wanted to be at the park since we both wanted to sleep in.

First I want to apologize for the delay between entries. I haven't felt like writing much lately, and sitting out on the back deck has made for a good diversion. Three weeks ago Valerie and I took a trip up to Altoona, IA (just outside of Des Moines) to go to Adventureland Park. We left town on a Friday evening after work, and after a hitting some construction, going through a few detours, and stopping for food we made it to our hotel around 10pm. The most exciting thing within sight of the hotel was a Casey's General store so we just watched TV that evening. The next morning I got up around 9am with the intent of getting to the park when they opened at 10am. But, after I looked out the hotel window all I saw was dense fog. The entire town was covered and visibility was maybe 100 yards. Since the fog was going to make any pictures I would take look bad, we decided to take our time getting ready. We ended up getting to the park around 11am at which point the Sun was out and the fog had burned off.

In my my Silver Dollar City trip report I mentioned that I also went to Celebration City while I was in Branson, MO. For those of you not familiar with the park, it is themed around a 50's city. In some ways it is similar to the city that was in Back to the Future. 1950's era music is piped all throughout the park giving you the feeling that you stepped in to the city during some sort of Summer festival. The park is clean and well landscaped. While SDC is daytime and early evening theme park, Celebration City is exclusively a weekend evening theme park. Their hours are 3PM-10PM Friday and Saturday through October. I assume that there are several reasons for these limited hours. One of which is that it prevents Celebration City from competing directly with SDC.

I went up to Worlds of Fun today to be present for the new thrill ride press announcement, information on the new Haunt attractions, and 2009 season pass pricing. While I was there I went ahead and took some pictures of the Master McCarthy's Doll Factory Haunt construction, some coaster construction site pictures, and the new decorations that have gone up Oktoberfest. This is a return of the photo trip report format. Click the "read more" link to see the update.