Dave Althoff, Jr.
2020-08-13 06:23:27 UTC
Trip Report: Holiday World
Santa Claus, Indiana - 07/12/2020
=================================
"InLine sucks. There's no other way to put it."
Another weekend, another search for a suitable park to visit. This week's
voyage takes us to the legendary Holiday World. For added fun, we're
introducing a newbie to perhaps the finest collection of modern wood
coasters on the planet.
It has been a difficult season to say the least. Ordinarily by this time of
the year I would have been to a bunch of parks, and I would have visited
Cedar Point and Kings Island multiple times each. This year, well, quite
frankly I am starting to go a little bit nuts. As has the world around me.
So while I normally only make visits to Holiday World for special events
just because it is such a long drive, this season every park visit is a
potential special event. Off we went.
It's a long way to Holiday World, and by the time we got there the day was
well underway. The park is actively encouraging everyone to park in the
Legend lot, and combining that with the expectedly small crowd, the Raven
lot remained quite empty, and as late as we were, we were able to snag a
premium parking space that someone had already vacated.
It's been well publicized that this year if you want to buy tickets you
have to buy them online for a specific date. What has not been well
publicized is that if you are buying a *discount* ticket, of the sort that
does not feature a standard promo code in the e-commerce platform (that
means you, ACE members!) you have to do it at the gate. We did, and this is
where things got a little strange. The park is now doing bag checks and has
a magnetometer set up (?!) but unlike most parks the security checkpoint
doesn't block access to the park entrance. There is a very large switchback
queue set up in front to enable parties to keep separated while waiting to
enter the park, though at this time of day none of it was necessary. I
awkwardly emptied my pockets and passed through, instead of around, the
magnetometer, even though I knew I wasn't entering the park yet, and was
surprised when the guard made no mention of the Victorinox Spartan that I
had handed him along with my keys and loose change. As it turns out they
have a specific rule about that, and pocket knives like mine are permitted
in the park. I imagine culturally it could still be true that every male
over the age of about 6 in Southern Indiana routinely carries one. We
bought our tickets, then returned to the car; I dumped all the stuff I had
previously been carrying in my pockets (including the Spartan), and
switched to my swim trunks. This also means I was operating *without* my
ever-present camera.
Upon entering the park we were presented with printed, laminated
wristbands. These wristbands are coded with QR codes to facilitate the
park's InLine virtual queue system. They are also constructed in such a way
that they are difficult to put on, and use an adhesive fastener that does
not stick well to the laminated surface. Of all the wristbands I have used
in a park this was one of the worst designed and constructed, and one of
the least comfortable. I connected my handheld device to the park wi-fi,
and registered our wristbands. The registration system is cumbersome at
best, and the whole concept of having a single account for all the
wristbands in the group makes some sense...but it isn't set up with a
many-to-many relationship. One account has to be used to set up all of the
ride reservations for the group, and if the group splits there is another
cumbersome process to transfer a wristband to another group. In hindsight,
it would make far more sense to simply have each person manage his own
wristband and InLine account. We finally ended up with a single account
with all of our wristbands, with two of us logged into the account. That
does sort of work, although because there is no smartphone app, the system
is highly dependent on continuous web browser access. If you switch to
another app and the browser unloads, or if you switch tabs and the InLine
tab unloads, you may find yourself signing in again, and worse, because the
wifi access in the park is spotty, you might not be able to even bring up
the page again. I guess that explains why they went with wristbands instead
of just displaying QR codes in the browser.
We booked a slot for the Raven for 28 minutes out. Five minutes later we
had reached our browsing limit in the gift shop and started looking for
something else to do, but found...nothing. Perhaps another ride not on
InLine? Not Frightful Falls, or Scrambler, both are on the system and the
Scrambler wasn't running. 20 minutes later our time comes up for the Raven,
and we enter a queue, checking in with our coded wristbands. Only one band
was actually needed for the whole group to check in. We continued into the
queue where nobody else is paying attention to the social distancing
instructions. That, or they are all just in really big groups...which, now
that I think of it, might actually be the case. But in the Raven station
instructions say that you should not stand on the stairs, but should move
your group directly to the landings once clear. People were not doing that.
Meanwhile I was getting annoyed. We thought while we waited we should
reserve our next ride, but neither wifi signal nor cellular data was
available to us in the Raven queue and station.
The Raven itself is...well, it's hard to say. The park is assigning seats,
and like an idiot I didn't ask to wait for the one I wanted, so I got to
ride in the Bill Buckley seat right in the middle of the train. The ride
seemed to be running rough, but I am not sure I can blame the Raven itself
so much as I can blame sitting in a bad seat. Maybe I'll find out
later...anyway, it was nice to be able to ride a good wood coaster that
isn't older than me, for a change. That's right...the Raven was, to this
point, the newest coaster I have been on this season.
We scheduled a ride on the Voyage, then set off trying to find something
else to do while we waited for our time to come up. We took the upper path,
bypassing the Legend against my better judgement. Holiday World has removed
a few rides from the InLine system to accommodate people who are waiting
for their times to come up. None of us was particularly interested in the
Zero Gravity, but we could have ridden the Hallowswings or the Flying
Scooter except that both were closed. We finally ended up on the train just
because it was the only thing we could find that was open and didn't
require a timed ticket. As it is, the train ride is not much of a ride, and
the operator dispensed with the usual recitation of nursery rhymes. I still
think if you look at the park on a topographic map, the train ride and
Thunderbird have got to be at about the same elevation. Wouldn't it be
great if they put a giant trestle over the employee parking lot and turned
the train into useful transportation? Hey, it worked for Universal Orlando!
As promised, InLine offered us only a short wait before our turn at the
Voyage. We checked in, then noticed that the line was doing something I had
not seen in about a dozen years: it entered the station building and went
to the RIGHT, and DOWN the stairs into Steerage, the tightly packed queue
house beneath the Voyage station. Mercifully, the line went down and back
up, not winding through the queue house. It looks like the window into the
station tunnel has been replaced again and while still not as impressive as
the original, is now a bit larger than the first replacement. Anyway, it
was here that the frightful miscalculations of InLine became apparent. With
single train operations on the world's second longest wood coaster, plus
the train being loaded to put empty rows between groups, our wait on the
Voyage stairway was well in excess of 45 minutes. Even putting aside the
long ride time, something about station operations...though I never did
figure out what...was intolerably slow, meaning another train went out
every 6-10 minutes. This time we insisted on riding in the last available
car (since Car #7 is still missing...). To add to the aggravation, one guy
with a large posse tapped me on the shoulder as we reached the landing to
go up the last stairway to the station, and suggested I should move up into
the empty space ahead of me. I replied that he'd be smarter to back off;
crowding together in the queue will NOT get us on the ride any faster.
Speaking of crowding, I should mention that Holiday World is not closing
off rows on their rides to accommodate social distancing; instead they are
seating groups together, then leaving an empty row between groups. Given
that the average group size tends to be about four people, this makes for a
far more efficient allocation of seats than the common practice of simply
closing every other row.
And yes, the Voyage is the best wood coaster anywhere. Tony was thoroughly
impressed with his first ride, and yet when it was over, April turned to me
and asked, "Doesn't it seem like it is running a little slow?" And indeed
it was; with the trim brake before the triple down certainly not doing the
ride any great favors. As a general rule, if you aren't out of breath when
you hit the final brakes, the ride isn't delivering at its full intensity.
I would have loved to ride again, except for the long wait and the longer
line. Instead we made our reservation and the hike up the hill to
Thunderbird.
Thunderbird is, in fact, a people-eater. Because of the design of the
train, every row can be used in spite of pandemic concerns. Holiday World
was running both trains on this winged creature, with the result that there
was nobody waiting to ride. Partly because of its awesome capacity, and
partly because it sits at the top of that hill, Thunderbird really should
be removed from the InLine system completely. We actually rode several
times, and after our second ride we actually didn't even bother checking in
with the attendant at the entrance. Again, assigned seats were the order of
the day, with an attendant making seat assignments at the bottom of the
stairs where you decide whether to ride on the left or right. As this was
Tony's first visit we had to be sure to ride on both sides. Thunderbird is
a really short ride, and it ends with that stupid low-rate corkscrew
element that was the B&M flavor of the week for a while, but of the three
wing coasters I have ridden (the others are GateKeeper and Wild Eagle) I
think Thunderbird is my favorite. Part of that is certainly that it has a
more solid feel than GateKeeper, and that's entirely because of the launch,
which means it doesn't have all that lift hardware clanking and banging
around during the ride.
One of our goals for the day was to ride the water coasters, so on our way
back down the hill to civilization we detoured into the waterpark. It was
more or less here that I realized that my InLine wristband was not going to
survive getting the slightest bit wet, so I removed it. The QR code still
works whether it is attached to my wrist or not, but if I lose the darned
thing it won't work at all. We looked at the new Cheetah Chase and ended up
not riding, partly because of the length of the line, but mostly because we
couldn't figure out a good way to configure ourselves. The ride has a
narrow band of acceptable raft weight ranges AND a two-rider minimum load.
Trouble is, almost any way we configured ourselves, we were over the
maximum weight limit. Perhaps next time we'll figure it out. I had not been
aware that the lift mechanism on this thing uses water jets to propel the
boats up the hill, not a linear induction system as found on Mammoth and
Wildebeest. We skipped the new ride and opted instead for a trip on
Wildebeest, which is always a lot of fun, followed by a ride on Mammoth.
Someone did something aggravating on Mammoth while we were waiting which
resulted in a ride shutdown and at least one of the gigantic rafts sliding
down to the bottom of the hill. This necessitated a lengthy recovery
process during which the stranded raft was evacuated and lifted off of the
ride with a crane. We see inflatable rubber rafts, and it's easy to forget
that first of all those rafts are quite large, and second, each has a
laminated metal plate in the bottom, so even the Wildebeest rafts are
several hundred pounds empty; I hate to think how heavy the Mammoth rafts
are. Kind of makes you wonder why the weight limits have to be so strict!
By now the day was winding down. We opted for another ride on the Voyage,
and while we waited for our queue entrance window to open, I sneaked a ride
on the rapids ride. I had thought it was not an InLine ride; turns out it
is on InLine but nobody was waiting for it and the attendant let me in
anyway. It's not an especially remarkable rapids ride, and I really only
got wet because someone was dropping quarters into a geyser machine, but it
was far better than simply standing around the Thanksgiving midway waiting
for my ride window to open.
Our final ride of the day was on the Voyage, this time requiring only a
half-hour wait in the actual queue, but still with painfully slow
operations. This time we rode up front, and April and I both agreed that
the ride was running faster than it had been earlier in the day. It's a
shame our day was cut so short; I would have liked to have ridden a lot
more, and we didn't even make it to the Legend. As usual, Holiday World
does a lot of things right, with a top-notch staff that is doing as well as
they can under the circumstances. They have done a remarkable job of
reconfiguring the park so that people can keep their groups safely
separated, although some of the customers don't do a very good job of using
those tools. The one place where things consistently fell apart, though,
was the InLine virtual queue system. I honestly cannot think of a single
good thing to say about it. The system relies heavily on a level of
technology that the park has not yet achieved, as the in-park wifi is
extremely spotty, and April found that the cellular data coverage wasn't
much better. The web site that InLine depends on is actively user hostile
in several different ways; it's difficult to navigate, the overall design
is confusing, and it requires network access that can be difficult to
achieve in the park. The wrist bands that the program uses are...well, the
bands themselves are plenty durable, but the adhesive doesn't stick well to
the laminated surface. Whatever algorithm the system is using to determine
queue arrival times is badly broken meaning that you still spend a
significant amount of time waiting in the normal queue, a queue which quite
frankly is longer than it probably would be without InLine as when you can
see how many people are ahead of you in line, the line lengths tend to
self-limit. And finally, with the system in place there is far too little
to do in the park while waiting for a ride reservation window to open. You
can't even spend the time fighting with the InLine web app because it won't
allow you to make a second reservation until you check in for the first
one. In general the InLine system produces various emotional responses from
its users ranging from "aggravation" to "infuriation". When you combine
that with the added aggravations brought on by both the COVID-19
precautions and your fellow park-goers' frequent willful ignorance of same,
the result really detracts from what should be a wonderful day at the park.
I realize this report contains a lot of unpleasantness, and that's because
our visit was filled with a lot of nagging aggravations that tend to add up
over the course of the day. But a lot of that is because a report like this
is intended to describe what is novel about the visit, and quite frankly
the novelty of this particular visit was about the annoyances. That doesn't
change the fact that Holiday World continues to mature into a beloved
regional park, with a staff that truly cares about achieving the best
experience possible, maintaining some of the best wood coasters on the
planet (and Thunderbird!). I mostly enjoyed myself, I really like Holiday
World and I am more than ready to go back for HoliWood Nights. I'm even
more ready for all of this pandemic nonsense to be behind us, and I truly
hope that once we can all get close enough to each other to wait in line
again, the entire Accesso-driven InLine system is dead, buried, and
forgotten about forever.
---Dave Althoff, Jr.
/X\ _ *** Respect rides. They do not respect you. ***
/XXX\ /X\ /X\_ _ /X\__ _ _ _____
/XXXXX\ /XXX\ /XXXX\_ /X\ /XXXXX\ /X\ /X\ /XXXXX
_/XXXXXXX\__/XXXXX\/XXXXXXXX\_/XXX\_/XXXXXXX\__/XXX\_/XXX\_/\_/XXXXXX
NEW! When emailing this account, include the 'canonical magic word' in
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Santa Claus, Indiana - 07/12/2020
=================================
"InLine sucks. There's no other way to put it."
Another weekend, another search for a suitable park to visit. This week's
voyage takes us to the legendary Holiday World. For added fun, we're
introducing a newbie to perhaps the finest collection of modern wood
coasters on the planet.
It has been a difficult season to say the least. Ordinarily by this time of
the year I would have been to a bunch of parks, and I would have visited
Cedar Point and Kings Island multiple times each. This year, well, quite
frankly I am starting to go a little bit nuts. As has the world around me.
So while I normally only make visits to Holiday World for special events
just because it is such a long drive, this season every park visit is a
potential special event. Off we went.
It's a long way to Holiday World, and by the time we got there the day was
well underway. The park is actively encouraging everyone to park in the
Legend lot, and combining that with the expectedly small crowd, the Raven
lot remained quite empty, and as late as we were, we were able to snag a
premium parking space that someone had already vacated.
It's been well publicized that this year if you want to buy tickets you
have to buy them online for a specific date. What has not been well
publicized is that if you are buying a *discount* ticket, of the sort that
does not feature a standard promo code in the e-commerce platform (that
means you, ACE members!) you have to do it at the gate. We did, and this is
where things got a little strange. The park is now doing bag checks and has
a magnetometer set up (?!) but unlike most parks the security checkpoint
doesn't block access to the park entrance. There is a very large switchback
queue set up in front to enable parties to keep separated while waiting to
enter the park, though at this time of day none of it was necessary. I
awkwardly emptied my pockets and passed through, instead of around, the
magnetometer, even though I knew I wasn't entering the park yet, and was
surprised when the guard made no mention of the Victorinox Spartan that I
had handed him along with my keys and loose change. As it turns out they
have a specific rule about that, and pocket knives like mine are permitted
in the park. I imagine culturally it could still be true that every male
over the age of about 6 in Southern Indiana routinely carries one. We
bought our tickets, then returned to the car; I dumped all the stuff I had
previously been carrying in my pockets (including the Spartan), and
switched to my swim trunks. This also means I was operating *without* my
ever-present camera.
Upon entering the park we were presented with printed, laminated
wristbands. These wristbands are coded with QR codes to facilitate the
park's InLine virtual queue system. They are also constructed in such a way
that they are difficult to put on, and use an adhesive fastener that does
not stick well to the laminated surface. Of all the wristbands I have used
in a park this was one of the worst designed and constructed, and one of
the least comfortable. I connected my handheld device to the park wi-fi,
and registered our wristbands. The registration system is cumbersome at
best, and the whole concept of having a single account for all the
wristbands in the group makes some sense...but it isn't set up with a
many-to-many relationship. One account has to be used to set up all of the
ride reservations for the group, and if the group splits there is another
cumbersome process to transfer a wristband to another group. In hindsight,
it would make far more sense to simply have each person manage his own
wristband and InLine account. We finally ended up with a single account
with all of our wristbands, with two of us logged into the account. That
does sort of work, although because there is no smartphone app, the system
is highly dependent on continuous web browser access. If you switch to
another app and the browser unloads, or if you switch tabs and the InLine
tab unloads, you may find yourself signing in again, and worse, because the
wifi access in the park is spotty, you might not be able to even bring up
the page again. I guess that explains why they went with wristbands instead
of just displaying QR codes in the browser.
We booked a slot for the Raven for 28 minutes out. Five minutes later we
had reached our browsing limit in the gift shop and started looking for
something else to do, but found...nothing. Perhaps another ride not on
InLine? Not Frightful Falls, or Scrambler, both are on the system and the
Scrambler wasn't running. 20 minutes later our time comes up for the Raven,
and we enter a queue, checking in with our coded wristbands. Only one band
was actually needed for the whole group to check in. We continued into the
queue where nobody else is paying attention to the social distancing
instructions. That, or they are all just in really big groups...which, now
that I think of it, might actually be the case. But in the Raven station
instructions say that you should not stand on the stairs, but should move
your group directly to the landings once clear. People were not doing that.
Meanwhile I was getting annoyed. We thought while we waited we should
reserve our next ride, but neither wifi signal nor cellular data was
available to us in the Raven queue and station.
The Raven itself is...well, it's hard to say. The park is assigning seats,
and like an idiot I didn't ask to wait for the one I wanted, so I got to
ride in the Bill Buckley seat right in the middle of the train. The ride
seemed to be running rough, but I am not sure I can blame the Raven itself
so much as I can blame sitting in a bad seat. Maybe I'll find out
later...anyway, it was nice to be able to ride a good wood coaster that
isn't older than me, for a change. That's right...the Raven was, to this
point, the newest coaster I have been on this season.
We scheduled a ride on the Voyage, then set off trying to find something
else to do while we waited for our time to come up. We took the upper path,
bypassing the Legend against my better judgement. Holiday World has removed
a few rides from the InLine system to accommodate people who are waiting
for their times to come up. None of us was particularly interested in the
Zero Gravity, but we could have ridden the Hallowswings or the Flying
Scooter except that both were closed. We finally ended up on the train just
because it was the only thing we could find that was open and didn't
require a timed ticket. As it is, the train ride is not much of a ride, and
the operator dispensed with the usual recitation of nursery rhymes. I still
think if you look at the park on a topographic map, the train ride and
Thunderbird have got to be at about the same elevation. Wouldn't it be
great if they put a giant trestle over the employee parking lot and turned
the train into useful transportation? Hey, it worked for Universal Orlando!
As promised, InLine offered us only a short wait before our turn at the
Voyage. We checked in, then noticed that the line was doing something I had
not seen in about a dozen years: it entered the station building and went
to the RIGHT, and DOWN the stairs into Steerage, the tightly packed queue
house beneath the Voyage station. Mercifully, the line went down and back
up, not winding through the queue house. It looks like the window into the
station tunnel has been replaced again and while still not as impressive as
the original, is now a bit larger than the first replacement. Anyway, it
was here that the frightful miscalculations of InLine became apparent. With
single train operations on the world's second longest wood coaster, plus
the train being loaded to put empty rows between groups, our wait on the
Voyage stairway was well in excess of 45 minutes. Even putting aside the
long ride time, something about station operations...though I never did
figure out what...was intolerably slow, meaning another train went out
every 6-10 minutes. This time we insisted on riding in the last available
car (since Car #7 is still missing...). To add to the aggravation, one guy
with a large posse tapped me on the shoulder as we reached the landing to
go up the last stairway to the station, and suggested I should move up into
the empty space ahead of me. I replied that he'd be smarter to back off;
crowding together in the queue will NOT get us on the ride any faster.
Speaking of crowding, I should mention that Holiday World is not closing
off rows on their rides to accommodate social distancing; instead they are
seating groups together, then leaving an empty row between groups. Given
that the average group size tends to be about four people, this makes for a
far more efficient allocation of seats than the common practice of simply
closing every other row.
And yes, the Voyage is the best wood coaster anywhere. Tony was thoroughly
impressed with his first ride, and yet when it was over, April turned to me
and asked, "Doesn't it seem like it is running a little slow?" And indeed
it was; with the trim brake before the triple down certainly not doing the
ride any great favors. As a general rule, if you aren't out of breath when
you hit the final brakes, the ride isn't delivering at its full intensity.
I would have loved to ride again, except for the long wait and the longer
line. Instead we made our reservation and the hike up the hill to
Thunderbird.
Thunderbird is, in fact, a people-eater. Because of the design of the
train, every row can be used in spite of pandemic concerns. Holiday World
was running both trains on this winged creature, with the result that there
was nobody waiting to ride. Partly because of its awesome capacity, and
partly because it sits at the top of that hill, Thunderbird really should
be removed from the InLine system completely. We actually rode several
times, and after our second ride we actually didn't even bother checking in
with the attendant at the entrance. Again, assigned seats were the order of
the day, with an attendant making seat assignments at the bottom of the
stairs where you decide whether to ride on the left or right. As this was
Tony's first visit we had to be sure to ride on both sides. Thunderbird is
a really short ride, and it ends with that stupid low-rate corkscrew
element that was the B&M flavor of the week for a while, but of the three
wing coasters I have ridden (the others are GateKeeper and Wild Eagle) I
think Thunderbird is my favorite. Part of that is certainly that it has a
more solid feel than GateKeeper, and that's entirely because of the launch,
which means it doesn't have all that lift hardware clanking and banging
around during the ride.
One of our goals for the day was to ride the water coasters, so on our way
back down the hill to civilization we detoured into the waterpark. It was
more or less here that I realized that my InLine wristband was not going to
survive getting the slightest bit wet, so I removed it. The QR code still
works whether it is attached to my wrist or not, but if I lose the darned
thing it won't work at all. We looked at the new Cheetah Chase and ended up
not riding, partly because of the length of the line, but mostly because we
couldn't figure out a good way to configure ourselves. The ride has a
narrow band of acceptable raft weight ranges AND a two-rider minimum load.
Trouble is, almost any way we configured ourselves, we were over the
maximum weight limit. Perhaps next time we'll figure it out. I had not been
aware that the lift mechanism on this thing uses water jets to propel the
boats up the hill, not a linear induction system as found on Mammoth and
Wildebeest. We skipped the new ride and opted instead for a trip on
Wildebeest, which is always a lot of fun, followed by a ride on Mammoth.
Someone did something aggravating on Mammoth while we were waiting which
resulted in a ride shutdown and at least one of the gigantic rafts sliding
down to the bottom of the hill. This necessitated a lengthy recovery
process during which the stranded raft was evacuated and lifted off of the
ride with a crane. We see inflatable rubber rafts, and it's easy to forget
that first of all those rafts are quite large, and second, each has a
laminated metal plate in the bottom, so even the Wildebeest rafts are
several hundred pounds empty; I hate to think how heavy the Mammoth rafts
are. Kind of makes you wonder why the weight limits have to be so strict!
By now the day was winding down. We opted for another ride on the Voyage,
and while we waited for our queue entrance window to open, I sneaked a ride
on the rapids ride. I had thought it was not an InLine ride; turns out it
is on InLine but nobody was waiting for it and the attendant let me in
anyway. It's not an especially remarkable rapids ride, and I really only
got wet because someone was dropping quarters into a geyser machine, but it
was far better than simply standing around the Thanksgiving midway waiting
for my ride window to open.
Our final ride of the day was on the Voyage, this time requiring only a
half-hour wait in the actual queue, but still with painfully slow
operations. This time we rode up front, and April and I both agreed that
the ride was running faster than it had been earlier in the day. It's a
shame our day was cut so short; I would have liked to have ridden a lot
more, and we didn't even make it to the Legend. As usual, Holiday World
does a lot of things right, with a top-notch staff that is doing as well as
they can under the circumstances. They have done a remarkable job of
reconfiguring the park so that people can keep their groups safely
separated, although some of the customers don't do a very good job of using
those tools. The one place where things consistently fell apart, though,
was the InLine virtual queue system. I honestly cannot think of a single
good thing to say about it. The system relies heavily on a level of
technology that the park has not yet achieved, as the in-park wifi is
extremely spotty, and April found that the cellular data coverage wasn't
much better. The web site that InLine depends on is actively user hostile
in several different ways; it's difficult to navigate, the overall design
is confusing, and it requires network access that can be difficult to
achieve in the park. The wrist bands that the program uses are...well, the
bands themselves are plenty durable, but the adhesive doesn't stick well to
the laminated surface. Whatever algorithm the system is using to determine
queue arrival times is badly broken meaning that you still spend a
significant amount of time waiting in the normal queue, a queue which quite
frankly is longer than it probably would be without InLine as when you can
see how many people are ahead of you in line, the line lengths tend to
self-limit. And finally, with the system in place there is far too little
to do in the park while waiting for a ride reservation window to open. You
can't even spend the time fighting with the InLine web app because it won't
allow you to make a second reservation until you check in for the first
one. In general the InLine system produces various emotional responses from
its users ranging from "aggravation" to "infuriation". When you combine
that with the added aggravations brought on by both the COVID-19
precautions and your fellow park-goers' frequent willful ignorance of same,
the result really detracts from what should be a wonderful day at the park.
I realize this report contains a lot of unpleasantness, and that's because
our visit was filled with a lot of nagging aggravations that tend to add up
over the course of the day. But a lot of that is because a report like this
is intended to describe what is novel about the visit, and quite frankly
the novelty of this particular visit was about the annoyances. That doesn't
change the fact that Holiday World continues to mature into a beloved
regional park, with a staff that truly cares about achieving the best
experience possible, maintaining some of the best wood coasters on the
planet (and Thunderbird!). I mostly enjoyed myself, I really like Holiday
World and I am more than ready to go back for HoliWood Nights. I'm even
more ready for all of this pandemic nonsense to be behind us, and I truly
hope that once we can all get close enough to each other to wait in line
again, the entire Accesso-driven InLine system is dead, buried, and
forgotten about forever.
---Dave Althoff, Jr.
/X\ _ *** Respect rides. They do not respect you. ***
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