Six Flags Buying Discovery Kingdom

The Vallejo Times Hearld is reporting that Six Flags Inc. intends on purchasing Six Flags Discovery Kingdom from the city.

The company will pay $52 million to buy out the city's interest in the property, or more depending on current land assessments.

Six Flags spokes-mouth Wendy Goldberg says that Six Flags is "well-positioned and we have the liquidity to do this." I guess not ALL of the cash they got from selling those parks will be going to debt service.

You can read the article from the Vallejo Times Hearld.

Journey to the Center of the Earth, DisneySea

Journey to the Center of the Earth, at Tokyo DisneySea, is one of the coolest looking rides that I've yet to experience.

One of the reasons I'm so drawn to it is the animatronic "lava monster" seen in the picture above. The ride, which uses a Test Track-ish ride system, takes passengers deep into inner earth and provides them with an encounter with many odd creatures, including Mr. lava monster.

The lava monster is surrounded by fire balls and flowing, molten lava, and does not seem happy that riders have entered it's lair. The animatronic is 20+ feet tall, and moves with amazing fluidity for its size.

Hopper from Bug's Life will always be my favorite animatronic, but this baby looks like it would make it a close race.

Mouse Planet features this awesome photo during a review of the ride:

© MousePlanet

When you really think about, the lava monster looks like it could be a pretty close relative to the Alien Encounter alien:
And yes, I do have the toy, thank you very much.

Anyway, here's a really high quality video of Journey to the Center of the Earth via You Tube user TBDave716:

LaughingPlace also has a nice video of the lava monster in action. You can get that video from their site, just click here.

How much does it cost to fly to Japan?

Old Laser Picture from Dorney Park

200th Post!

Here is an old picture of Laser at Dorney Park.

This is obviously before it got painted one winter. There's a lot to see in this picture, and in honor of that I wanted to point some things out. So I made this:

You can click to see it bigger so you can read everything. Enjoy.

Where Does the Time Go?

Congrats to NewsPlusNotes on it's 10,000th visitor. Man, the time has really gone by. NewsPlusNotes has been open for 6 months or so, but it doesn't feel that long.

Here's to six months more!

O.C. Register Knott's Sierra Sidewinder Article

© The Orange County Register 2007

The Orange County Register has an article today about Knott's Berry Farm's new roller coaster, the Sierra Sidewinder.

The paper has some nice photos of the ride in action, like the one seen above, as well as a video of the ride in action. If you haven't yet seen a video of the ride on You Tube or anything, it's certainly worth checking out.

You can read the article on the O.C. Register's website.

Dorney Aqua Racer Photo Report

I finally had the chance to grab some photos of Dorney Park and Wildwater Kingdom's new attraction for 2007, Aqua Racer. The attraction is a 6-lane Mat Racer slide made by WhiteWater West. Here we go!

The sign for the attraction. As always, Dorney Park did an fantastic job on the sign. I think it looks really nice, and the whole Capital Blue Cross thing is done appropriately.

The attraction in a wide view. The attraction is very popular, however, since it's a capacity machine, the line moves very fast.

A view of some riders coming down. As expected, the larger the rider the faster you go down. That means that some of the larger individuals that come down look like they have quite the speedy ride.

Here you can see that the run out portion of the slide is an alternation of blue colors, with bright yellow at the end.

Here's so you can see where they put the slide. There was a small hill here last year with a few pine trees on it. You can walk around the whole slide. In this photo the original wave pool is on the left.

Last view of the slide. They have a yellow section at the bottom that I suppose could act as a finish line.

Here's where the Torpedo Tube slides were until this past winter. You can see they planted some pine trees and mulched the hill where they were. The splash pool for them is now the Swim Race game.

Here's the details of the Swim Race game, in case you were interested. I didn't see anyone try it again when I was there.

Other things I noticed while at the park:

• White Water Landing now has two water cannons (literally, they're shaped like little cannons) that you can blast passing boats with. This, naturally, costs money. Bring quarters.

• There were plenty of stakes in the ground for project 2008, but on my most recent trip I didn't see them. They stretched pretty much from Laser up to behind 3 Point Challenge.

That's it for now!