cptnmingo

Sounds like you had a really good experience Mermalizer! We just did the Services Day end of season event and got to experience The Walking Dead Fright Nights as well as ride everything in the dark. I put the vlog trip report below but I echo your comments, park operations were on point for this one. THE GOOD Living Nightmare Walking Dead maze was incredible. The scare actor who played Negan had the character down to a tee, mannerisms and accent and all. The maze itself was just wonderful for me as a fan of the series, to see all the scenes they'd set up was excellent. I also really enjoyed Big Top again, the chainsaw guy really got the group in front of us scared and I ended up shouting RUN FOR IT causing all 10 of us to comically leg it out of the maze. Platform 15 has also improved, I didn't expect a huge burst of fire like that! Also got to experience the ghost train again. I have to say the Rise of the Demon vastly improves it in the second half of the experience. We used the Thorpe Park app to keep track of when it opened and only ended up queuing for 20 minutes, queue time jumped up to 80 minutes while we were waiting to board. THE BAD Couple of bad points this trip. Sanctum, the second walking dead maze, wasn't AS good. It was a little too short for my liking? Mega thumbs up to the female zombie scare actor who cornered me and creepily stroked my face though, not sure if I was laughing out of fear or something else! The Thorpe Park hotel wasn't that great. My first time staying in it and it was just my personal preference, I think it is a cool idea but I guess I'm just used to a more airy and open feel to a hotel room and I struggled with how warm the room got! I loved the shark facts though. THE UGLY One sore point I am still waiting for a reply from customer service from. Amity Fish & Chips. I stopped there with friends for a £7.95 meal deal which was just awful. Chips weren't cooked and when we went to complain we received some pretty poor customer service. I get that it's the last day of their contract, but ya'know. Just a small blip on an otherwise epic day! ... Oh, and my friend won a toy on the 2p machines in the arcades so he is happy is a pig in poop.

Just wanted to check back in and share a trip report about this park. Most of it is covered in the video below, but key points. - Cobra's Curse was pretty cool, not the best coaster I've been on but certainly good fun and the queue system had a few cool features to keep you occupied. - We didn't get to ride Falcon's Fury due to high winds but all that means is I have to go back some day and do that. It is enormous but looks great fun. - If I had to pick, Montu might be my favourite. Cheetah Hunt was fun but my least favourite due to the hour long queue and very short ride. Everything else was walk on for us! - Sheikra. Do it.

It has been a while since this thread saw any activity, so on the above poster's discussion of the Star Wars aspects of Hollywood Studios... I figured I would share my video blog trip report having returned not too long ago from Florida myself. I think Hollywood Studios could quite well be renamed Star Wars land given the amount of stuff we saw!

Okay, I went. It was amazing! You guys need to give it a go if you're in Orlando. Here is my video trip report...

And I can now confirm that said raft ride, Miss Adventure Falls was AWESOME to ride :-) Sent from my Nexus 5X using Tapatalk

I'd rather they just concentrate on the ride actually being open for a change. 2/3 of my visits it was closed the entire day, on the third visit it was open but with a 2hr queue. I'd travel the 100 mile trip to visit if they advertise more ride availability and a queue that actually frickin moves somewhere.

I actually like DBGT Disney's Magic Kingdom is a bit of a waste of time Space Mountain sucks (in my opinion) The Smiler is better than Stealth.

I agree and I love this part of the park. I absolutely cannot wait to go back next year, last time we went the queues were so short that we had an awkward moment trying to enjoy the holographic scene in the Forbidden Journey queue and holding up people behind us (the ride was walk on at the time). So I look forward to being able to take the time to enjoy the surroundings and ride it at least twice!

Holy THREADSURRECTION Batman! I wasn't sure where to put this but I feel it worth mentioning that the arms race continues... In response to Volcano Bay, Disney has closed the shark bay reef attraction in Typhoon Lagoon and plan to build a long family raft ride in it's place. Hmm

Genuine photo I took. Now at least I know what explosions do huh...

Had an amazing trip on the last ever day of the season (services day private event) where Fright Nights was on and all the staff seemed to be having a blast. I'll start off by saying we rode SWARM three times in a row at the start of the day and Nemmy three times in a row at the end of the day, so yeah the queues were pretty damn short which made for an even more amazing day. SCARE MAZES - Blair Witch leads this one as the best experience for us, mainly because the scare actors within did such a fantastic job and the 'last day of season' atmosphere means people were having a little more fun than ever before. My better half got trapped in the cabin at the end, much to my amusement. Big Top was a fantastic experience, Platform 15 in third place (I fell over a bin though) and Cabin in the Woods worthy of a mention too for my friend hilariously breaking the maze and wandering out of it into a staff room... Oops!? RIDES - Along with the three rides in a row times two (which makes you feel a little dizzy by the way...) we also got on pretty much everything else we wanted to. Sadly though the Ghost Train was broken yet again. It was running for about 50 minutes at the start of the day with a 100 minutes queue from park open. Then it broke about 1pm and didn't reopen at all for the rest of the day. I tweeted T.P who said they were working on it but it didn't surface. Little gutted as my two friends wanted to experience it for the first time ever but its to be expected with that ride. Made up for it with multiple rides on SAW, Colosuss etc. As usual I made a little vlog of our day at the park, if you don't believe me about the queues check it out and I'll see ya'll next season for more madness

The way the scale model preview in PortAventura depicts them is as duelling drop towers

Don't talk to me about Volcano Bay [emoji14] One of the big selling points a couple years ago on convincing my friends to book a March '17 break with me was the drop slide at Wet n Wild. Of course, that closes Dec 31. AND Volcano Bay doesn't even open until June so there's a gap with no Comcast owned water park available, one less fun thing to do for us. Also, it has sent the package tickets into chaos. You can now buy 5 different combo tickets so having to make sure we all buy the exact one that doesn't include either water park. Doh! On a brighter note, Fallon could be fun and I am looking forward to Kong!

Theyre spending so much time and money on an attraction I literally don't care about. Not excited at all but maybe with this being the "new" thing when I go in March, the other rides won't be as busy...

Indeed! I don't like saying it but I didn't have a great day there, in fact it was probably the worst day I've had at a theme park in a long, long time. It has the potential to be a nice little day out but the park operations inside compounded how busy it was and how low the throughput was and just generally made for a poor atmosphere. The rides themselves weren't the best in comparison with what other Merlin parks have to offer. Giving it a positive though my wife and I really enjoyed the animal section