USA 04/19 – Six Flags Over Georgia

Day 10 – Six Flags Over Georgia

This place already looks a lot better than Great Adventure on the outside. The arrival underneath a B&M hyper with nice landscaping, the sight of a fresh RMC, a new looking entrance, another beautifully re-painted B&M. All good signs.
The bad sign was that we arrived to a slightly busy looking car park. It was back to being a weekend again and there was some sort of cheerleading competition going on(?) with tons of small children around, dressed in a disturbing fashion and their many families in tow.

We powered in to assess, first walking past the Georgia Spiter. Apparently it’s our own fault.

From here we could see that Dare Devil Dive queue was terrible, as predicted. We would have hit it first, but hadn’t quite arrived for opening time so it wouldn’t have worked well. Plan B was to join the queue for Goliath instead, which happened to move particularly swiftly.

Had a vague idea that this was meant to be one of the better ones of these. It wasn’t really. Might have been underwhelming after Fury or after riding so many other B&M hypers in quick succession.

Though the layout leaving the park was rather nice, it was the same old story of underwhelming hills and a helix.

Of particular note, the bottom of the last couple of hills had a bit of an unpleasant crunch to them, rather like El Toro was doing, but completely unjustified in this case and uncharacteristic of the ride type.

The final assessment was to head round to something else with a reasonable capacity and judge.
Mind Bender has a 90 minute queue. Right. This trip hadn’t really conditioned us for queues, so we weren’t particularly willing to put up with risking this park the hard way at this stage.

It was time to put a Flash Pass to the test. It’s a reasonable enough price if you ever think you really need it to get things done, particularly when you’re getting into all the parks for free with a season pass. It runs that system where you get to virtually queue for something while you do something else, which I’ve always enjoyed playing with on the odd occasion. It also seems to be the next generation of this, using a wristband with a touch screen rather than the Tamagotchi egg thing.

Our wristband was behaving weirdly to start with, working wonderfully in our favour, with most things seemingly not up to date and sitting on weird timings like a ‘4 minute queue’.

So each of the first few rides were ready by the time we walked to it.

Always had Mindbender down as one of those big names that’s a bit of a classic, almost one of the star attractions here. Was a bit of a let down really.
It was just some run of the mill loops and stuff, with a bit of nice (for Six Flags) landscaping.

Another Batman layout that didn’t quite perform at its best.

Flash Pass was definitely broke for Dare Devil Dive with it being another walk on for us. A seething queue of what looked to be at least 2 hours were watching 2 out of every 6 seats on a car get filled by those with passes, while the remaining 4 seats were receiving poorly batched groups of inappropriate sizes. Then it broke down as we left. The system works.

It was nice to have lap bars and a bit of a different layout on one of these. It’s not fantastic, but enjoyable enough with an interesting mixture of awkward forces. Rides ok.

I was still counting down (or up) to my 800th coaster at this stage, working out how many more we needed to hit before the main event. Suddenly the pass seemed to get a hold of its senses and showed queue times that ended in 0s and 5s. The RMC was now 90 and remained that way for the rest of the day. Better book it then.

Did some actual queues while that was being eaten away, starting with this weird Chance ride.

What an odd layout. Lift hill a quarter of the height of the ride, a drop, a corner, a tunnel, a kicker wheel cos it’s already too slow, a corner, and now we need some more tyre lift to get back into the station. That’ll do lads.

Got lost on the way to the mine train, which took the prize for the most unpleasant queue of the day. Seemed short walking in, but the station is huge with air gate queues of about 20 people each, all rammed in and sweating.

Ride was bad too, more dumb layouts. Diablo had comedy with its lift hill that leads to nothing, but this was just moving through leaves at 5Mph for several sections in a row until the tunnel at the end that was weirdly rough. Served its purpose, taking me to #799.

It’s time.

Another RMC I know nothing about. It’s got a cool little pre-lift section, I’ve missed these. The first drop is amazing as always, then you get Wicked Cyclone’s uphill inversion into Twisted Timber’s downhill inversion. Clearly the trio aren’t just linked in name alone.

There’s a few more punches of ridiculous airtime in there, in between more funky elements, keeping it varied again, but then it ends very suddenly by hitting the brakes at what feels like full speed.

So I love what it does, but it’s done a Lightning Rod again and left me wanting more. Weird that both the other ones in the aforementioned trio get so much more out of their extra 10ft of height. Is this a conversion limitation?

In quest for completion, headed over to the final section of the park, forgetting what half the creds actually were. Superman was down, Blue Hawk had a sign up about having only 1 train and looked awfully grim. Decided to book that and have some food while waiting.

Thought it was another flyer, but it ended up almost as bad being a Vekoma looper. It looks deceptively new having been relocated and repainted, but it’s basically blue Goudurix and it rides worse. At least it’s a somewhat rare breed.

It lost the claim to worst ride in the park to GASM immediately afterwards though, which also claimed worst ride of the trip for me. Not good.

When woodies catch me the wrong way they really suck hard, and this just didn’t want me to enjoy it. I may struggle to describe what it was doing, but it’s like when some trains (often SLCs) do a weird forwards and backwards pumping motion, independent of the intended forces of the ride, but not in a funny way and in my case a certain rythym only affects my internal organs and not the rest of mybody. It wasn’t career endingly bad like Nash, but it’s another ride I would never risk again, particularly when it had no redeeming features anyway.

Superman remained broke, even though it tested, so that was the best we could do with this place. At least it looked 100x nicer offride than the previous one.

Did the Monster Mansion cos it’s old and cool. Didn’t quite understand it, sailing through a flooded mansion to be told not to go to the swamp. Going to the swamp. Monsters. Getting out of the swamp by someone firing a cannon? Hilarious noise. End.
What a charmer, Six Flags should have more stuff like this to break up the monotony of concrete and rides.

As the overall ride lineup wasn’t all that fantastic, we were now left in a position of having to wait out any more flash pass stuff by just sitting elsewhere in the park and not standing suffering in the actual queues. Queue times didn’t show any signs of improving so we just settled for the magic 3 laps on the wrong TC and left early to take some pics from the outside.

Got approached by a security guard for photographing the ride from an unsigned service road who thought we were up to something dodgy. It took us explaining where we were from and trying to convince him that we had basically come to this part of the world for
“THAT RIDE?! Why is that so special…”
“Umm…”
“Did you ride it as the old one?”
“No…”
before he made us leave anyway. Odd.

On paper this was the nicest Six Flags yet, as nothing particularly went wrong. Just a shame the queues were big, the rides weren’t the strongest and 2 of the B&Ms spited. I still don’t really like any of their parks then.

Up next: a mission of madness.

Day 11