After all of our amusement park adventures this year I’m happy to close out the year’s photo collection with several ride photos from Knott’s Berry Farm.

Timber Mountain Log Ride was completely rethemed into Elf Mountain Christmas during Knott’s Merry Farm and, as Knott’s so often does, it got a custom digital frame for the ride photo as well (pictured at left).  This is the epitome of a holiday frame as it not only reflects the season, but the re-themed ride as well and still perfectly frames the riders themselves.  Zaira decided this was her absolute favorite frame of the year.  Congratulations Knott’s!

Ghostrider wasn’t re-themed and didn’t receive a special holiday frame, but there was pretty big news… They installed on-ride video cameras supplied by CD R!de. We didn’t buy a video, of course, because we’ve seen them before and they’re absolute garbage. But we did buy this wonderful photo. It’s always great when the other folx in the pic are having a great time as well. And now it’s time to ask a favor…

If you’re a fan of amusement park ride and roller coaster photos and you see any booth like Ghostrider’s that has both video and still photos, buy the photo! In fact, even if they don’t have video, buy the photo! The video systems aren’t coming in because they’re better or more popular. They’re coming in because people aren’t buying enough photos. The videos are not only horrible, but the systems are far more expensive to install and maintain. But the odds of a park admitting its mistake and going back to photos are slim. So buy photos when they’re available and help ensure your kids will have the opportunity to buy them as well. </rant>

Despite the horrible experience Zaira and I had being the “first ever” riders on Pony Express, when we saw that they had a special holiday frame we knew we’d have to ride it again.  I actually really like the way the snow is depicted in this digital frame, and the ride wasn’t nearly as uncomfortable as it was back in May.  We also rode in the very front of the ‘car’ and actually managed to feel a little bit of the roller coaster forces affect us.  The ride-ops have definitely mellowed out on squeezing the restraints as tight as possible and I have a feeling they loosened up on the brakes as well.  Still not a quality coaster, but no longer an all-together negative experience.

Cobra, Medusa and Roar all have their own special holiday borders this year at Six Flags Discovery Kingdom and I’m as happy as a snowman in a blizzard. The only thing I like more than a roller coaster picture is a limited frame on a roller coaster photo.

Believe it or not, the Medusa sleigh on the left is only my second favorite holiday ride photo.  If the presents across the top were actually in focus it might have actually become my number one photo.  The rest of the frame is focused just fine, so it’s neither a printing nor an image problem.  Whoever designed this frame (Six Flags?  Kodak?  Discovery Kingdom?) chose for the presents to be out of focus, though for the life of me I couldn’t tell you why.

The Cobra digital border (pictured right) is actually my favorite holiday ride photo. It looks like the Yeti is actually launching the bobsled. This particular shot is even cooler, IMHO, because that’s Bumbles the Abominable Snowman (from the Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer cartoon) hanging out next to Zaira. We won him on the midway. Unfortunately, the photo both attendant claimed she couldn’t make any adjustments to the photo to get both Zaira and I into the frame, but more on that later. On the other hand, this digital border is all the more rare because she damn near refused to sell it to us despite our numerous assurances that we still wanted it the way it is.

In hindsight I don’t think this frame was ever intended for Medusa photos, but one of our regular photo clerks was working the booth and she had no problem selling us both digital frames.  Zaira loves this solo picture because of the goofy face made by the kid in the row behind her (top right corner).

Serious kudos must go out to the designer of Roar’s holiday frame.  Last year Roar was closed for the Holiday In The Park event, so this is the first in what will hopefully be a long line of holiday frames for Northern California’s most popular wooden roller coaster.  The snow and ice effects are superbly done and they even made the ice on the front of the coaster appear to be organic by having it streak back away fro mthe front edge.  I also think the (relatively) subtle addition of “Roar” around the edges of the photo is a quality touch that I hope to see emulated on the 2009 Roar digital border.

Discovery Kingdom transformed from Sea, Land and Air to Sea, Land and Snow for the holidays.  Although the transformation wasn’t impressive overall, Zaira did have a blast sliding down their little snow “hill” and Discovery Kingdom got this one right, having professional photographers taking pictures of every run.  We had to kind of nudge the photo clerk at the front gate photo booth to add the snow flurry digital border to this photo although it seemed like a natural match to us.

I came across this picture on the web and just couldn’t resist adding it. Although the digital frame is a bit dull, it does somewhat evoke the ride’s theming of being trapped in a (DOS based) computer virus. It sure doesn’t look like “the world’s only backwards roller coaster in the dark” had the intended effect on these riders however

As much as I’d love to experience this ride for myself the odds of me geting to England before it’s removed are slim.  The rides already twelve years old, much of the theming has been removed, and its target audience (teenagers) never really seemed to be fans anyway.

Six Flags may not be able to match Knott’s Berry Farm for overall theming of the park for Halloween, but when it comes to souvenir photos and custom digital frames/borders, they wipe the map with Cedar Fair.  The only step they missed was not having special Fright Fest photo folders like those available at the Knott’s Scary Farm Halloween Haunt.

Zaira and I visited along with her friend Hannah and managed to bring home more than half a dozen new photos for our collection.  Before I start detailing the photos, though, there have been a few changes to the way pictures are handled at Six Flags Discovery Kingdom…

First, we did not receive a My Six Flags Photos card from the gate photographer as we usually do.  Frankly, I forgot about it until we were home, so it is possible they had them available, but our gate photographer gave us the standard paper slip instead.

Second (and more importantly, IMO), Six Flags now offers $5.oo Kodak photo vouchers on their website.  If you’re a fan of theme park photos and are buying your tickets online anyway then this is a great deal!  Not only do you need to use your cash in the park as they’re prepaid, but it’s a great deal as well since these are normally a minimum of $12.99.  The only problem is that Six Flags has also instituted a $5.00 per order ‘delivery’ fee for etickets and vouchers that you print at home.  I realize they’re trying desperately to avoid bankruptcy, but this is an absolutely ridiculous fee.  Even at $5.00 it verges on gouging, particularly since we have season passes so the only reason we need to use their online ticketing system is to buy these Kodak photo vouchers.

Back to the topic at hand, check out the digital frames on those two gate photos.  Not only did they make separate horizontal and vertical borders, but both are awesome!  Although the vertical is more fitting with the theme of Fright Fest, I just love the way that Gossamer the Hair Monster looms over us.
But that’s not the end of Fright Fest Photo goodness. The picture on the right was taken while I was chowing down on super worms from the Wheel of Fright. Although it’s not a very good photo, IMO, I love the Halloween cuteness of the digital frame.  This would be even better for pics of kids in costumes, perhaps with a character or two.

Speaking of characters… The only one we managed to get a photo with was Sylvester The (Cat) Vampire. but there were plenty of others out and about as well: Bugs (Bunny) Vampire, Tweety (Bird) Baseball Player, Franken-Foghorn Leghorn-stein’s Monster, and Daffy (Duck) The Pirate. We didn’t see the Tasmanian Devil, but I’m sure he was out and about somewhere.  I am considering returning next Saturday (November 1st) for the primary purpose of hunting down photo opps with Lonney Tunes characters dressed up in Halloween.

The great thing about collecting Six Flags ride photos is that they make special holiday frames for all of their on ride photos.  In fact, for their most popular roller coaster, Medusa, they not only made a special Fright Fest frame, but it’s an entirely different look then the either the standard Medusa ride photo, last year’s Fright Fest frame, or last year’s Holiday in the Park ride photo.  We actually bought three Medusaphotos on this trip-

Medusa isn’t the only coaster with a ride photo of course. Somehow we missed out on the Fright Fest frame for Cobra last year, so I have no comparison photo for y’all, but we were pleased to get our grubby mitts on this one. The ride itself is amusing, but the fogged up ride photo is top notch.

Of course, no trip to Six Flags Discovery Kingdom is complete without a ride on their wooden roller coaster, Roar. Unfortunately, the ride photo equipment was having problems and didn’t grab our picture on our first ride. We returned later in the evening, checked in at the photo booth to ensure it was operating, and headed through the exit with our flash passes to ride again. Still no photo. It literally broke down again on the ride before ours . The folks at the booth were very understanding, however. They offered me another flash pass ride, but instead I asked for (and received) a copy of someone else’s Roar ride photo. After all, not getting our photo was unfortunate, but missing this cool fright Fest frame would have been a tragedy.

While wandering the web I came across a great blog post at Brent’s Online Journal. It seems his family visited Dollywood in Pigeon Forge, Tennessee earlier this year where he got the awesome picture shown here. That’s him with his six year old daughter Jillian on Dollywood’s latest coaster, Mystery Mine.

Mystery Mine is a two and a half minute roller coaster ride with a 95-degree, 85-foot vertical drop, a weightless inversion known as a “heart-line roll” and a “rollover loop” (a double inversion which consists of an upward half-loop and a half-roll). So, is it really any wonder that Brent and Jillian looked like they do in the picture to the right?
I have no idea when Z and I are going to find ourselves in Tennessee, but I assure you when we do, Mystery Mine will be on the top of our list!

When I found out that I could bid on a chance to be the first rider on Knott’s Berry Farm’s newest roller coaster, Pony Express, I jumped at the chance. in fact, despite the auction(s) already being up for three days I was the first person to bid. I shuold have known Cedar Fair would screw me again. I ended up winning four seats – two on the first train and two on the second. I got four seats so I could share this experience with Zaira, her half-brother Gavin, and my ex-wife. Total cost for the tickets and hotel stay was around $450. Which would have been just fine, except we weren’t the first riders. No, that honor went to people who won some KIIS-FM radio contest, not those, like myself, who donated cold hard cash to a charity of Knott’s Berry Farm’s choice.

We didn’t even manage to get the honor of “first ride photo” on Pony Express because, despite eight or so runs beofre us that morning (the camera flashing each time) they didn’t manage to capture the photos on our first run, so we had to go again just to get the photo.  At least they didn’t charge us for it too…

Obviously no day at Six Flags Discovery Kingdom is complete without a ride (or two or three) on Medusa. Not only is it a great coaster, but we get the chance to rap with the best photo booth clerk anywhere (whose name I still didn’t note). This time around I actually put my foot in my mouth by complimenting her as she printed our latest photo only to have it pointed out to me that this was not, in fact, the same girl. The one I was speaking with was being trained by the one I thought I was talking to. Well, the good news is that now there are two of them!

While discussing how our collection had grown since our last visit we mentioned that this was actually our first Medusa photo with the non-Holiday frame. The girls were great enough to actually bring up the old digital frame for Medusa and we got a copy of that for the collection as well. The difference is startlingly dramatic as you can see for yourself. I can’t imagine many people were interested in spending cold hard cash for the old digital frame with the tiny little picture of them on the ride. Even worse, imagine it in a wallet size! Still, it’s great to have it in the collection.

Photos #095 & #096

I’d really been looking forward to riding Roar again for some time and was excited to see what the non-holiday digital frame looked like as well. You can see it to the left, but you almost couldn’t! The worker at the photo booth first gave us a picture without the digital frame and we had to ask for her to redo it so we could properly add it to our collection.

Of course, had we simply been more observant on our earlier trips we would have known all along what the normal digital frame looks like because there are oversized pictures of it posted right on the side of the photo booth as advertising-

Photos #075 & #076

Unfortunately, we’re going to have to add Kong to our list of missed opportunities. Although we rode Kong on our first visit to Six Flags Discovery Kingdom in October 2007 the photo booth was closed all day. It was also closed during our visit to Holiday In The Park. Now, not only is it closed, but it has been entirely removed!! You see those lockers in the photo up there? That’s where the Kong photo booth used to stand

As if it’s not bad enuogh that they removed the photo booth (and before we managed to get an on ride photo!) the lockers they replaced them with are basically a scam. Six Flags no longer allows visitors to put stuff in cubbys on the ride platform. Any hand-held objects must be put in these lockers at the front of the ride. While this may seem like an excellent idea, they then charge you $1.00 for the use of the lockers! Six Flags really needs to take a long hard look at this system before next season. After all, Hard Rock Park in South Carolina uses the same locker system for the same apparent purpose, but the lockers at Hard Rock are free for the first two hours.

Somehow Zaira and I went all the way through the month of April without adding a single ride photo to our collection. But May is certain to more than make up for it with amusement park goodness pretty much every weekend. We kicked things off with something a little different – a visit to the Butler’s Amusements carnival being held as a fundraiser at Santa Teresa High School in San Jose. We hit several rides, but the portable coaster, Orient Express was our favorite (okay, Gravitron was probably Zaira’s favorite but there’s no ride photos from it ).

One of the great things about a carnival set-up is that even though they never have ride photo booths (that I’ve seen) it’s usually pretty easy to get into position to do so yourself. So while neither of these photos were taken by a “professional” machine we’ve still decided to count them as being part of our collection.

Photos #068 & #069