USA Part Three - Six Flags Magic Mountain, Santa Barbara and a journey up the Californian coastline

---

As we had a drive of over two hours to get to Six Flags Magic Mountain, and we wanted to get there for opening, we were up bright and early at around 6am. Once showered, dressed and all packed up, we loaded up the car and left the hotel by around 7am. Thankfully, we didn’t hit any traffic driving through LA – it helped being a Saturday, otherwise we would have been there right in the middle of rush hour – and we got to the park at around 9:30am, half an hour before the park would be opening at 10am.

We had already bought annual thrill passes online - seems silly to buy an annual pass but as we were visiting on two days, it was actually almost $20 cheaper to buy this than two day tickets – so we headed straight to the annual pass processing centre so that we wouldn’t have to interrupt our roller coaster riding once the park was open! We each had our pictures taken for the passes and were handed over our shiny new passes. It’s actually incredible value - $64 for admission into all of the Six Flags theme parks until the end of 2014 – perhaps we will hop over the pond to try one of the other parks next year?!

We got into one of the queues waiting in front of the turnstiles and eventually the music started, they announced that the park was opening and we were in! It was already looking quite busy – it was a Saturday after all, and the park is not open in the week during certain months, including September – but thankfully we had already taken this into account! Most people online recommended the Flash Pass for busy days to make the most of your time, so we had purchased a Gold Flash Pass when we bought our tickets. You basically get a little gadget that allows you to reserve your place in the queue electronically for all rides all day, plus cut the queue time in half. You just select the ride that you wish to go on and the device gives you the return time, and you can just relax or enjoy another ride instead of waiting in the queue! For example, if a ride had a normal queue time of one hour at 11am, the device would list this ride as having a return time of 11:30am. Once you have selected this, you can go have a walk around or go on another ride with a shorter queue, then go straight to the ride at 11:30am and completely skip the queue. We can honestly say that this was completely worth the money, particularly at this park where there are about 18 big roller coasters that all had pretty substantial queues all day. You can only reserve one ride at a time, but once the device has been scanned by the staff member at the Flashpass gate, you can immediately reserve another whilst you are waiting to be loaded onto the ride!

The only rides that were not included in the Flash Pass are the two newest rides – ‘Full Throttle’ and ‘X-2’, although you could add them on to there for an additional $15 per person, per ride – absolute rip off and definitely not worth doing! X-2 was actually closed for the day (pretty gutted about this as we were looking forward to riding this though this just gives us more reason to go back!), so we decided to head straight for ‘Full Throttle’ once the gates opened, then collect the Flash Pass after. It turned out that a lot of people had the same idea of going here first (plus there were some people already in the park having premium passes, etc), but we only had to wait around fifteen minutes to ride. The roller coaster actually has the world’s largest loop, launching you straight into it at the beginning before racing around the track, over a corkscrew, and then launching you backwards, halfway back up the corkscrew and then back down for a final launch over the top of the massive loop! You only have a lap bar (albeit, a very tight and secure one) so it gives you a real sense of freedom, and the loop is so huge that you kind of hang there as you go around it – really makes you appreciate how high that loop is!

Once we were off the ride, we headed straight for the Flash Pass building. We had to watch a short video on how it worked before handing over our voucher and being given our little gadget (which was kind of like a big Tamagotchi!), which Emma clipped on to her belt loop and put in her pocket, though not before checking out the queue times. Already, some rides were showing thirty minute return times, which meant that the actual queues were about an hour, and it was only going to get worse!

Now this will turn into a completely boring read for most people if I just list everything that we did during the day, so I’ll just summarise the rest of the day and the following day and include the highlights! We’re pretty sure that the return times on the Flashpass were actually shorter than they should have been, as some of the queues that we skipped past in the special Flashpass line looked a LOT longer than they allegedly were according to our device – I’ll add that, yes, we did feel pretty smug as we saw some people watch in disgust as we walked straight past them and onto the ride after they had been waiting for so long! The most that we ‘waited’ for any ride was about 30 minutes, which we of course spent nice and relaxed, eating lunch and watching the roller coasters go by! However, the queue looked more like two hours when we saw it snaking back for miles! Hilariously, we actually got handed a voucher for immediate Flashpass entrance for any ride of our choice by some guy after coming off one of the rides. Twix were doing a promotion within the park, and because we chose the left queue (the queue split into two as there were two loading stations), apparently we had chosen the best side! Not sure if they are showing the same adverts in the UK but Twix have started a rivalry between the left and right side, claiming that they are made in separate factories, etc – pretty funny! So yeah, we also got that in addition to our Flashpass, so we reserved a place on one ride whilst walking straight onto another – brilliant!

The weather was incredibly hot both days we were there - over 100 degrees Fahrenheit in fact -which made us more thankful for the Flashpass, as it would have been a killer to be standing around in queues in that heat. I will add, however, that we didn’t actually see anyone queuing out in the sun – they usually stopped the queues at certain points so that people were only queuing in shaded areas, which we thought was really good of them. We kept hydrated by getting free cups of ice water from any kiosk that we passed by! Not many people know this – proven by people paying extortionate prices for bottles of water or cups of soft drinks – but by law, places that serve food (in the US anyway) have to provide free tap water to anyone requesting it, which they will usually put in a cup and fill it with ice. It saved us a ton of money and really cooled us down when we were starting to feel the heat!

Now for the rides! As I said before, Six Flags Magic Mountain is widely known as the thrill capital of the world, with several record-breaking roller coasters and rides. We rode ‘Lex Luthor’s Drop of doom’ - the world’s tallest drop tower – more than double the size of Drayton Manor’s ‘Apocalypse’ at 400 feet high! Attached to this was the ‘Superman – Escape from Krypton’ ride, which launches you backwards at 104mph up that same tower before dropping you back down face-first – awesome! ‘The Green Lantern’ roller coaster was strange – the cars run at the side of the track rather than on top, and the track itself is “stacked” so you kind of make your way down it. Hard to explain and we don’t have a picture (in fact, the only pictures that we got of Six Flags were from the car park before we left as we didn’t take the camera in with us as we would have had to pay for lockers), but Google it if you’re interested. We did find this a little rough though as it really flung you around and caused us both to bang our heads pretty hard so we only rode this once!

There was ‘Tatsu’ – the world’s longest, fastest and tallest flying coaster (riding face-down like ‘Air’ at Alton Towers), which was really good – it included a diving loop which essentially meant you were doing a massive forward roll on a roller coaster! ‘The Riddler’s Revenge’ broke records for the world’s tallest, fastest and longest stand-up rollercoaster, whilst ‘Goliath’ featured a 255 foot drop before whizzing around the track at 85mph with just a lap bar to hold you in. At one point, we both actually went really light-headed from the G-Force as it went around a series of helixes (this never happens to us!), and we’re pretty sure that most people would pass out if it did one more helix. We still both loved this ride and of course rode multiple times over both days!

There was also a hybrid steel-wooden roller coaster called ‘Apocalypse’, which threw you around but not in a painful way, it was just hilarious! There was also a regular wooden roller coaster called ‘Colossus’ which was pretty fun, though shook you about a little more, as older roller coasters tend to do! The other main rides were ‘Batman’ – an inverted coaster like ‘Nemesis’ at Alton Towers which was incredibly intense and caused us to feel really dizzy and disoriented at the end, ‘Ninja’ – the fastest suspended roller coaster in the world, ‘Scream’ – a floorless coaster which was incredibly smooth and had seven inversions, ‘Viper’ – a classic steel roller coaster with several different types of inversions, including what we thought were the three smallest, tightest loops in the world and ‘Gold Rusher’ – a mine train coaster which sped around tree tops and mountainous terrain.

I think that’s pretty much covered all of the main rides! There were a few others that we went on over the course of the two days, such as the rapids (got soaked by a big wave that came over our heads but it was nice and refreshing!) and a water ride called ‘Tidal Wave’ with a huge drop - we didn’t actually get that wet, but which does cause a twenty foot wave which SOAKS any onlookers standing on the bridge opposite! There were also a few filler rides that we went on whilst ‘waiting in queues’ using our Flashpass, such as a gravity wheel and one of those rides that spin in a circle really fast.

Overall, we LOVED our two days at Six Flags. Although we didn’t have the Flashpass on the second day, it turned out that even though it was a Sunday, it was incredibly quiet! We did overhear someone saying that football season had started that day, which may have helped, but the longest we queued all day was about 30 minutes, and this was only because they were only running one train so loading took a while. Everything else was pretty much a walk-on, so we got to ride our favourite rides from the first day multiple times, and got to ride front row on a few of them too – Goliath, Superman and Batman were particularly AMAZING on the front row!

We stayed for one night at a hotel which was a five minute drive from the park, so on the second day there we packed our stuff up and just left it in the car while we went to the park. We then drove straight down to Santa Barbara, where we were staying that night before starting our trip up the California coast. The drive took us past some impressive scenery, which we snapped a few pictures of, before arriving at ‘The Sandman Inn’ on State Street. We really loved this place, the room was lovely and very comfortable, and had everything that you could want in a hotel room! Even the free breakfast was very substantial, with choices of cereal, toast, fruit, juice, tea, coffee, various pastries, muffins and doughnuts, yoghurt, chocolate pudding, chocolate milk – much more than the usual continental breakfast offerings!

We only had the one day in Santa Barbara, which would have to include a drive to our next stop along the coast, so we were up early to make the most of it! We were a little too far up State Street to make use of the little 25 cent shuttle that we caught around last time, so we first drove straight down towards the beach. However, the weather was being a little strange, as although we had literally left the hotel where it was beautiful and sunny just five minutes before, by the time we got down to the beach it had turned completely grey – not really putting us in the mood for a wander along the beach. So we went back up the street to park up and have a walk around the shops instead – it turns out that the nasty weather was just hanging around the coast, as it was lovely and sunny with blue skies just half a mile back up the street! Very weird!

Anyway, we had a walk around the shops for a while, mainly just window shopping and just taking in the awesome atmosphere of Santa Barbara. We then decided to have a drive up to the Santa Barbara Mission – we hadn’t been here previously as it’s a little difficult to get to without a car. Once there, we parked up and had a little walk around the gardens and had a look inside the museum and shop which gave lots of information about the history of the place, though we weren’t quite interested enough to pay the entrance fee to actually go on a tour of the place. Nonetheless, it was pretty cool, and a very beautiful building, particularly with the back drop of the Santa Ynez mountains.

It was time to say goodbye to Santa Barbara, and start our drive up the California coast towards Yosemite. We had arranged a couple of overnight stops along the way to break up the journey a little and allow us to have a much more relaxed journey, where we could stop along the way if we wanted to. Most of the drive followed CA-1 - a highway that literally hugs the ocean, giving spectacular views of the rugged coastline. Though the weather wasn’t always sunny – the strange fog/mist effect experienced in Santa Barbara seemed to continue along a lot of the coast, and if we went a tiny bit inland it would completely disappear – we still really enjoyed the drive and the scenery that we passed. Our first stopover was Morro Bay – it’s most prominent feature being Morro Rock – a 576 foot high rock just off the harbour that is home to the endangered Peregrine Falcon.

The journey also took us past a huge colony of Elephant Seals, which we pulled over to watch for a while as they played in the water and lazed about on the beach, throwing sand onto their backs to keep cool. There are over 15,000 in the colony, and they regularly return to this particular spot at Piedras Blancas. We continued up the coast, driving through the Big Sur – an area along the coastline where the Santa Lucia mountains rise abruptly from the Pacific Ocean, giving more breath-taking views as we drove through. We eventually reached our second stopover at a little town just outside of Monterey called Seaside, before continuing a little further up the coast and then going inland towards Yosemite. For our first two nights near Yosemite, we would be staying in the small town of Jamestown, and we had a relaxed afternoon once arriving there before our full day exploring the park the following day.

---