Vacation: Days 6 and 7

Saturday. Magic Mountain day. Aaron and I left Morgan with the relations, where he had a blast, so that WE could have a blast. :)
We pre-purchased our tickets for about $55 each. I was getting so excited when we could see the tops of some of the coasters above the tree-line. We love roller-coasters, and this park is packed with some great ones.
Since it was November we were hoping for and expecting the park to be somewhat empty. Like SeaWorld. Boy were we wrong.
As we drove past the entry gate we saw HORDES of people crammed together. Thousands, waiting for admission into the theme park. Oh. Great.
It turns out that there is an organization called Key West club, or something. It consists of thousands of highschool kids from California, New Mexico and Hawaii. And they all went to Magic Mountain the same day that we did.
When we got into the park we hurried over to the closest roller coaster to get in line. We weren't going to even think about the other rides there until all the roller-coastering was done. We were almost to the front of the line when we heard on the speaker. "We're sorry, but we are experiencing some technical difficulties. You are welcome to wait, but we don't know when the ride will be running again." Splendid.
So we worked our way through the throngs of high-schoolers to the next roller coaster. This one happened to be X2, which happens to be very popular. Wow, that pic ended up tiny...
The picture is tiny, but the line wasn't. It was filled with these same-tee-shirt-wearing-teens, who go around in packs of 30. Not only were they ubiquitous, they were very loud and annoying.
One pack in blue shirts would pass a pack in black shirts and start, "We've got spirit, yes we do, we've got spirit, how 'bout you?!" And that wouldn't end. And during that little spirit contest a pack in red shirts would pass the pack in green shirts and someone would say, "Ask me how I feel!" And there would be a response, "How do you feel?" And all 30 would shout at the top of their lungs, "Ooooooh, we feel good, we feel good, we feel good, so good, so good, yeah, we feel fine, we feel fine, we feel fine all of the time, yeah, a booga, a booga, a booga booga booga!"
It got old very fast.

After an hour of standing in it we finally got to where the line is supposed to start. Another hour and we could see the building where you load up. When we were almost in the building, almost to our turn, we heard that loud speaker again. The ride was broken. And we were up. set.
By now it was 1:30, we'd been there since the park opened at 10:30, and we hadn't even got on a ride yet. So our next stop was guest relations, where we lodged a complaint and asked for a refund, cause we just weren't having it.
"No, but we can get you a pass to come back on a day when it won't be so crowded."
Well that wouldn't work, seeing as how the next day we were leaving for our home in Utah.
The best thing they could offer as compensation was two exit passes into different rides. Meaning, we go through the exit instead of waiting in line, and get on the ride without waiting. For only two rides though.
Whatever. We headed off for a different ride. It was about 2:00-2:30 before we got on our first ride. Even with our two walk ons, we still only made on to 6 rides before the park closed at 6:00. But...it didn't really close. The rides kept operating. Apparently a private party rented out the whole park for the evening. There was a point were someone was checking for wrist bands before anyone could pass him into the main part of the park. But...we were already in that part of the park. We saw the roller coaster that we first were in line for, that we never went on, was operating with hardly any line at all. We jumped right in and rode our 7th ride. Then we heard something about green wristbands. We clued into what was going on by now, but we thought we'd try to get onto X2 anyway. Unfortunately there was a worker standing outside the walkway to get there checking for wristbands, which we didn't have. No longer able to play the ignorance card, we exited the park.
It ended up being close to $10 a ride. That's ridiculous. We would never intentionally spend that much on a single ride.
Before heading back to Redlands, we stopped in Longbeach to visit Aaron's other uncle, Kenny, and his family. That was fun too.

The next day we hit the road around 9:00. Vacation over.