Back to Six Flags New England
Jul. 22nd, 2023 09:29 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mmcirvinLast weekend, with our kid off at a summer arts program, Sam and I made a return visit to Six Flags New England (formerly Riverside) in Agawam, the only really big chain theme park in the region. On my last visit, I spent much of my time just riding the park's three best coasters: Wicked Cyclone, Superman: The Ride and Batman: The Dark Knight (and the standby line for Superman ate up way too much of the day).
This time, it was very hot and I felt like hanging with Sam, who mostly wanted to visit the waterpark, which I hadn't experienced at all. So I checked it out. SFNE's waterpark (called "Hurricane Harbor", like many Six Flags waterparks) is actually a really good one; it's advertised as the biggest one in the region, and it might be, but I suspect it's a pretty near thing with Water Country in Portsmouth, NH. They have an excellent lazy river ("Adventure River") and a lot of water slides, of which the most notable one we did was Swiss Family Toboggan, their family-sized raft slide. This is basically just a really tall uncovered helix with regular side-to-side wiggles, and the interesting thing about it is just that the side walls are low enough on the straight sections between the bends that it looks like your raft is going to protrude over the edge. It's a really good water slide, maybe better than the analogous ones at Compounce and Water Country, but they only had one person working the top, so operations were pretty slow and the line up the stairs was agonizing. Also, in bare feet, the sunlit top of the tower is painful to stand on--everyone was dancing around up there to cope with the burn.
I was perhaps remiss in my duties as a coaster fan since the park is so packed with roller coasters, a... few of which are actually good, but the only coasters I rode that day were Wicked Cyclone and the one that was new to me, the park's 1941 classic woodie, Thunderbolt.
The first thing we tried to do at opening was rope-drop the park's rapids ride, Blizzard River. This turned out to be a mistake, since the ride didn't open until noon. Blizzard River's entrance is right next to Wicked Cyclone's; watching it test-run, the pull of its wickedness naturally tempted me so I went over to do that, and Sam headed to the waterpark entrance near Batman, way over at the opposite end of the park. Wicked Cyclone had a short line and it looked like I was going to be able to hop right on, until it broke down right when I was about to enter the station--apparently one of the restraints on the orange train was failing to register a positive latch. Repairing it was short work but then they had to test-run it and get authorization from on high to open the ride again, and that was about a 40-minute wait while I stood in the sun, with my hat stashed in a locker (fortunately I had a lot of sunscreen on). Wicked Cyclone is so good that I just waited for it, but Sam was apparently able to walk right on a lot of stuff at the waterpark while I was doing that.
Wicked Cyclone was running both trains and I rode the blue one this time. It's still the best roller coaster I've ever ridden, though I suspect that is partly because it's the only RMC I've ever ridden. The first drop is not bad, not world-beating, but after that it's relentless, a hyperactive succession of wild airtime bucking and roll/stall inversions. My favorite moments are the zero-G stall through the supports for the lift hill, and the violent double-down followed by a camelback hill that follows that. Some fans complain about the layout's third lap being slow, but a couple of years back they seem to have done something that mitigated that problem--to me, at least, it seems to be hauling through the whole ride.
The Thunderbolt has an interesting history. It is a reconstruction of a Philadelphia Toboggan Company coaster, a basic figure-8 layout designed by Harry Baker and the legendary Harry Traver, that was built under the name "Cyclone" for the amusement area of the 1939-40 New York World's Fair in Flushing/Corona Park. After the fair closed, the Cyclone was no more, but the owner of Riverside Park bought the plans, the trains, and, according to some sources, the track, and rebuilt it on its current site in Agawam. It seems to have been called the Cyclone until sometime in the 1960s, when it was renamed the Thunderbolt, which is confusing to talk about because Wicked Cyclone was a conversion of a completely different Cyclone (built in the 1980s).
The Thunderbolt is a good, well-kept ride--not very big or intense, but not overly rough either for a woodie of its vintage, with just a few rattles here and there. It also has a pretty good double-down midway through, and there's a famous bunny hill hidden way in back on the final lap that gives you an abrupt pop of pretty strong airtime. it'd be a good ride to introduce a kid to big coasters, and I'm (nearly) always up for a historic woodie.
Late in the day we did ride Blizzard River. It was, I'm sorry to say, kind of disappointing, one of the tamer rapids-raft rides I've ridden. There was a little boy on our raft who suddenly decided he was terrified of getting wet, and was crying that he wanted off the whole way... but this ride doesn't actually get you very wet. There are some moments where they sprinkle some water on you, and whatever wetness you do get relies overmuch on that, kind of like Dr. Geyser's Remarkable Raft Ride at Story Land. The boy decided at the very end that he'd had fun regardless, so I guess it was a success in that respect. Here's New England Escapades' POV:
I'd had ideas of riding Superman again to get a more direct comparison with PortAventura's Shambhala, which I rode in the spring... but Superman being surely slammed as always, I probably would have had to spring for the paid Flash Pass to make it worthwhile, and I was getting tired by late in the day. I was tempted to pick up a few other creds I don't have yet, like the janky but apparently not-as-bad-as-it-used-to-be Riddler Revenge, but I'd come in kind of tired to begin with and wondering if I was going to ride coasters at all. As it was, I think I held up pretty well.
This time, it was very hot and I felt like hanging with Sam, who mostly wanted to visit the waterpark, which I hadn't experienced at all. So I checked it out. SFNE's waterpark (called "Hurricane Harbor", like many Six Flags waterparks) is actually a really good one; it's advertised as the biggest one in the region, and it might be, but I suspect it's a pretty near thing with Water Country in Portsmouth, NH. They have an excellent lazy river ("Adventure River") and a lot of water slides, of which the most notable one we did was Swiss Family Toboggan, their family-sized raft slide. This is basically just a really tall uncovered helix with regular side-to-side wiggles, and the interesting thing about it is just that the side walls are low enough on the straight sections between the bends that it looks like your raft is going to protrude over the edge. It's a really good water slide, maybe better than the analogous ones at Compounce and Water Country, but they only had one person working the top, so operations were pretty slow and the line up the stairs was agonizing. Also, in bare feet, the sunlit top of the tower is painful to stand on--everyone was dancing around up there to cope with the burn.
I was perhaps remiss in my duties as a coaster fan since the park is so packed with roller coasters, a... few of which are actually good, but the only coasters I rode that day were Wicked Cyclone and the one that was new to me, the park's 1941 classic woodie, Thunderbolt.
The first thing we tried to do at opening was rope-drop the park's rapids ride, Blizzard River. This turned out to be a mistake, since the ride didn't open until noon. Blizzard River's entrance is right next to Wicked Cyclone's; watching it test-run, the pull of its wickedness naturally tempted me so I went over to do that, and Sam headed to the waterpark entrance near Batman, way over at the opposite end of the park. Wicked Cyclone had a short line and it looked like I was going to be able to hop right on, until it broke down right when I was about to enter the station--apparently one of the restraints on the orange train was failing to register a positive latch. Repairing it was short work but then they had to test-run it and get authorization from on high to open the ride again, and that was about a 40-minute wait while I stood in the sun, with my hat stashed in a locker (fortunately I had a lot of sunscreen on). Wicked Cyclone is so good that I just waited for it, but Sam was apparently able to walk right on a lot of stuff at the waterpark while I was doing that.
Wicked Cyclone was running both trains and I rode the blue one this time. It's still the best roller coaster I've ever ridden, though I suspect that is partly because it's the only RMC I've ever ridden. The first drop is not bad, not world-beating, but after that it's relentless, a hyperactive succession of wild airtime bucking and roll/stall inversions. My favorite moments are the zero-G stall through the supports for the lift hill, and the violent double-down followed by a camelback hill that follows that. Some fans complain about the layout's third lap being slow, but a couple of years back they seem to have done something that mitigated that problem--to me, at least, it seems to be hauling through the whole ride.
The Thunderbolt has an interesting history. It is a reconstruction of a Philadelphia Toboggan Company coaster, a basic figure-8 layout designed by Harry Baker and the legendary Harry Traver, that was built under the name "Cyclone" for the amusement area of the 1939-40 New York World's Fair in Flushing/Corona Park. After the fair closed, the Cyclone was no more, but the owner of Riverside Park bought the plans, the trains, and, according to some sources, the track, and rebuilt it on its current site in Agawam. It seems to have been called the Cyclone until sometime in the 1960s, when it was renamed the Thunderbolt, which is confusing to talk about because Wicked Cyclone was a conversion of a completely different Cyclone (built in the 1980s).
The Thunderbolt is a good, well-kept ride--not very big or intense, but not overly rough either for a woodie of its vintage, with just a few rattles here and there. It also has a pretty good double-down midway through, and there's a famous bunny hill hidden way in back on the final lap that gives you an abrupt pop of pretty strong airtime. it'd be a good ride to introduce a kid to big coasters, and I'm (nearly) always up for a historic woodie.
Late in the day we did ride Blizzard River. It was, I'm sorry to say, kind of disappointing, one of the tamer rapids-raft rides I've ridden. There was a little boy on our raft who suddenly decided he was terrified of getting wet, and was crying that he wanted off the whole way... but this ride doesn't actually get you very wet. There are some moments where they sprinkle some water on you, and whatever wetness you do get relies overmuch on that, kind of like Dr. Geyser's Remarkable Raft Ride at Story Land. The boy decided at the very end that he'd had fun regardless, so I guess it was a success in that respect. Here's New England Escapades' POV:
I'd had ideas of riding Superman again to get a more direct comparison with PortAventura's Shambhala, which I rode in the spring... but Superman being surely slammed as always, I probably would have had to spring for the paid Flash Pass to make it worthwhile, and I was getting tired by late in the day. I was tempted to pick up a few other creds I don't have yet, like the janky but apparently not-as-bad-as-it-used-to-be Riddler Revenge, but I'd come in kind of tired to begin with and wondering if I was going to ride coasters at all. As it was, I think I held up pretty well.