Busch Gardens Williamsburg
25th July 2006
Busch Gardens Williamsburg was not a park on my itinerary for this trip; rather, it was somewhere George was planning to visit on his own on the Saturday while I spent the day in the custody of Delta Airlines. Unfortunately, due to a combination of exceptionally bad weather and incompetence from the good folks at Delta that entire plan got shelved at short notice, and George got to spend the night in an airport. As this was a park on his hit list for years we decided to squeeze it into a few hours. There is scope for an entire page about the shortcomings of the second largest airline in the world, whose customer services make a certain low cost Irish airline seem on the far side of superb. However, as this is a coaster site suffice it to say that it is very obvious to us why Delta is in bankruptcy protection. In all honesty, given our experiences, neither of us will be going out of our way to fly Delta again in future.

The only significant change since my last visit to the park has been the removal of the old Wild Maus in favour of a major new dark ride, a positive alteration even from the perspective of a coaster counting enthusiast. However, this has brought with it a negative change too, insofar as the admission fee has been increased to the point that the park is now one of the most expensive in the world for a single day admission. There is no doubt that visitors get a lot for their money, with a wide variety of high quality attractions and shows as well as some spectacular landscaping. However, this doesn't take away from the fact that a full day admission without parking now costs more than fifty dollars per person. One can legitimately argue that this is not a problem as long as guests are coming through the gate, and given the waits we saw the park clearly doesn't have any issues there. Nevertheless, it puts the park out of reach of a lot of people, which is really a sad state of affairs.
The first thing we did on arrival was inadvertently upset a staff member. There was nobody in the cattle pen leading towards the entrance gates, so we stepped over them. This resulted in us being officially grumbled at by a staff member who insisted that we return to the qwaiting point; "I need you to wait here please". A few moments later we were directed to one of the shorter lines, no different to the one we had located ourselves in in the first place. I'd love to know what possible reason the park operations staff would have for this one. While on the subject of silliness, the park suffers from a problem that has annoyed me before in other parks; certain areas do not open until half an hour after the rest of the park. This is no doubt a cost saving measure, but an excessive and wholly unnecessary one when you consider how much money the park must take in. Better yet, when the section finally opened, Big Bad Wolf still hadn't completed its test runs. What better time to make these then when guests have arrived in the station and are waiting to board?
The key draw for me, having already ridden the coasters, was the recently added dark ride, Curse of DarKastle. The atmosphere is set even as riders enter the queue line, which, though outdoors, is air conditioned to a temperature sufficiently low to cause those waiting to feel the occasional involuntary shiver. The standard of theming even here is impressive, with the air conditioners totally hidden behind alcoves. Guests will not see where the chill is coming from unless they make an active effort to find it. The ride operates using the same basic vehicles as the Spider-Man attraction at Universal Studios Islands of Adventure, which I have raved about in these pages before. The Busch implementation is targeted at a somewhat older audience, and uses the 3D features in a particularly dramatic fashion to startle riders. The effects are so good, in fact, that the queue features a warning advising parents that some scenes may be too intense for younger children, and as it happened we did see a crying child on the exit ramp as we disembarked.
On the whole the park has a winner with this ride, although it could use just a little bit more tuning in a few places. On one occasion the car made a 180° turn, but not quite fast enough to prevent those on board seeing the previous scene resetting itself. At another point riders can (briefly) see the track system the ride is running on. These are of course nit picks only, but they would seem to be relatively easy fixes that could bring the attraction from a top twenty ride to a top ten one. Apparently the park has already done some tweaking on the ride since its first season; a little bit more should make it perfect.

We naturally found time for the four remaining coasters. Big Bad Wolf has improved somewhat with age, probably due to less aggressive braking than I remembered. The other three coasters hadn't changed at all, which is a good thing; it's nice to see park maintenance looking after them properly. My overall impression of the park was stated above but bears repeating. The quality of the product is superb, but there just isn't enough of it given the admission cost. A major new coaster is under construction for next year, and to be honest one is sorely needed; as it was we'd done all the majors bar the shoot-the-chutes attraction in less than two hours, including multiple rides on Alpengeist. With the necessity of a second park today we elected to forego any of the shows, making our exit just after lunch time.