Arrr me mateys!

Mrs. Awesome and I recently had the joy of visiting Captain Cline’s Pirate Ghost Ride in Virginia Beach, Virginia.  I’ve been wanting to visit this thing for years (actually, when I wanted to visit it originally, it was Captain Cline’s Pirate Adventure Ride) and have always seemed to miss out on it.  Probably because I don’t visit the beach area much during tourist season, and the ride is only open during that time.

But I happened upon it a couple of weeks while it was actually open, and there was no way in hell I was missing it this time! Read the rest of this entry »

Carowinds in Charlotte, North Carolina, is one of the old Paramount parks (like Richmond, Virginia’s Kings Dominion) that was purchased by Cedar Fair when Paramount decided to get out of the theme park business.  You won’t find too many licensed properties (other than Snoopy), but you find a ton of cool roller coasters in parks like these.  I’m actually surprised, that given the hardships so many other companies have faced that the Cedar Fair parks have faired well enough to stay open, considering their closest competitors, Six Flags, seems to be having nothing but issues.

Still, they try to compete in the lucrative Halloween haunt race, with eight haunted houses, three scarezones, and a couple of shows.  Much like Busch Gardens, Scarowinds Halloween Haunt (this year titled Scarowinds X), rather than just recycling props into differently themed houses, actually recycles the majority of the houses from the previous year, and usually injects one or two new houses a year.  Which is a great cost-saving measure, but it kind of makes repeat visits from year to year a little less enticing, as I saw at least two houses that I’d seen from the last time I’d gone there (2 years ago) with very little in the way of change.  Sure, updates were made, but the overall experience was relatively the same.

Still, that was just two of EIGHT haunted houses – was the drive to Scarowinds worth it?  More after the jump. Read the rest of this entry »