Six Flags New England

Today was the day the boys had been looking forward to the most. We had beta tested the theme park experience in Alton Towers a few weeks ago and suffered badly on day 1 due to problems with rides not running and horrendous queues. We had partially made up for it on day 2 but with a single day at Six Flags I couldn’t take that risk. So, I hate to say, we threw money at the problem in the form of a FastPass.

The park was open at 10am and unlike theme parks back home stayed open to 10pm. I had my doubts we’d have the stamina to go the full 12 hours but we were up fairly early to take advantage of less crowding in the morning. Tom, Harry & I went to the gym for our daily Tabata fix and then ruined that by having the buffet breakfast of the century in the hotel. The thinking behind this was a combination of greed, value and managing a lengthy first session at the park.

Six Flags was only 20 minutes from the hotel and we were early enough to avoid a lengthy walk from the parking lot to the entrance where we collected our FastPass gadget. This works by displaying a constantly updated list of rides together with an availability time – so it might say Bizarro 10:43. We found the longest ever wait (with our deluxe pass) was 9 minutes – and that included the walk there. So you reserve your ride (max 1 at a time) and off you go. On arrival, you enter a FastPass entrance and literally walk directly to the front of the queue. In the UK, this just gets you to a much shorter queue where as here there is no waiting at all. The other benefit was you could stay on the ride after finishing for one more go without having to rejoin the queue.

Harry was fairly ill in the morning having elected to ride a couple of backwards facing rides along with Pandemonium which basically spins you and is designed to induce seasickness. It worked and waffles were refunded late morning leaving him feeling considerably better and ready for battle.

There was also a water park included in the ticket price so we spent a couple of our treasured 12 hours chillaxing by the water while the boys took advantage. Afterwards, we finished off with a final couple of goes on Batman the Ride and Bizarro before returning back to the hotel for about 9pm.

I doubt we waited for more than 5 minutes on any ride while they changed passengers with the notable exception of a barf cleaning needed on Batman the Ride just as we were about to get on. It would have been quite entertaining watching the middle class girls struggle to hold it down while they cleaned if it hadn’t been our row they were cleaning. We struck lucky when they sent it round to air dry and we boarded the second train.

Although the FastPass cost a proper fortune it did mean we managed (thanks to Joe for statistics) a total of 87 rides between us with Joe topping the list at 21 rides. That’s one every 27 minutes! Compare that to 7 rides at Alton Towers. Every one of the 10 rides was a proper big ticket roller coaster unlike at Alton Towers or Thorpe Park where there really are only a few big coasters.

Bizarro was the most dramatic and frankly scary. Absolutely massive – rising for a 221′ drop and reaching 77mph and lasting a whopping 2m 35s. Second in the rankings was Batman the Ride which Joe & I rode 6 times.