Trip Planning

So how was the trip pulled together?

When deciding on a trip we firstly aim to come up with a route that is interesting to everybody. Compromising is important and it really helps to have a group that can do that; not everybody can.

For us the wishlist included:

• New rollercoasters, because everybody wants to get their counts up.
• Historic rollercoasters, for those who like their theme park nostalgia.
• Schwarzkopf coasters, for some of our group this company's rides are must-dos.
• Rocky Mountain coasters, the new boys on the block and having been blown away by Medusa in Mexico we wanted to ride more of these.
• Wooden rollercoasters, a niche interest but these rides are typically more unique and interesting.
• Off the beaten track parks, let's visit some of the more out-of-the-way parks.
• Fairgrounds, because the travelling rides are a nicer catch than the static ones.
• Home made coasters, as these are even rarer than the travelling ones

Outside of the theme parks we've evolved our trips to include more things

• New locations, because there's so much of the world to see why go back to a place you've already done.
• UNESCO sites, because there are some beautiful places out there.
• Movie & TV show locations
• Cirque du Soleil shows, something that I introduced to the group in Canada that we all like.

So a lot of the coaster requirements took us to the state of Texas, home to plenty of wooden coasters and some RMC coasters at the Six Flags parks. Outlaw Run in Silver Dollar City, Missouri was also added. During our Canada trip we hit the Pacific North-West and the trip originally had Lagoon, Utah included but we had to drop it, so vowed next time we visited the US we'd have to include it and we did.

So the trip was already looking to be big with quite a lot of ground to cover. Fortunately two of the group are comfortable driving long distances and were totally up for this. With 2 Six Flags parks already included it made sense to add the third and get the benefits that come with an annual pass. Denver is home to a small collection of parks so we added that, along with a visit to Western Playland in New Mexico and Magic Springs in Arkansas.

Given the amount of driving I thought it would be good to have a base at the end to unwind so suggested putting Vegas in, a destination that I often use as a wind-down location at the end of big holidays. We also threw in Oklahoma and Kansas for some smaller parks there. With those in place we started to form a route and some additional parks such as Cliff's became obvious additions.

To identify other parks that would be on the route we used my Google Earth file, which I've been building for 10 years now. RCDB is a great source as is coaster-count but I've found over time my own research has delivered the best results. 

This is just a subset of data, but using this I was able to identify the parks in the area and using that I compiled a spreadsheet of opening times for every park during June and July, when we were thinking on hitting the parks. Times for 2016 wouldn't have been available in 2015 when we started with but it gave us a good start.

Compiling that we were able to group parks into days and ensure we weren't attempting to visit parks when they weren't open. The path in pink was our chosen option, this had the lowest number of closed parks and minimised us hitting the big parks on weekends. This went through several iterations but helped pull the spine of the trip into place and helped remove some of the long gaps in the trip such as highlighting the inclusion of Wonderland and Joyland in Northern Texas. We also agreed to start the trip in Houston and use San Antonio as a base at the beginning.

As we went through the year we constantly kept an eye on any new coasters and parks that would be appearing on the route. In late 2015 Adventureland in Iowa announced Monster and we quickly agreed to include that, and whilst up there we thought we'd include Nebraska too. On the downside it had become apparent that at 3 weeks in length the trip was going to be a long one and having had some great plans for the 4 of us in Vegas, unfortunately only 2 of us were able to stay out that long, so the Vegas leg became an epilogue to the trip rather than a core part of it.

With the spine in place it was then time to flesh the trip out and this was done through researching various websites for ideas and suggestions. 

• UNESCO for the their sites, and we had 3 but decided to include 2: Carlsbad Caverns which beautifully broke up the long drive to New Mexico and Taos Puebla on the drive up to Denver. The third one Cahokia Mounds, east of St Louis couldn't be packed into an already tight day so we had to drop it.
• For movie and TV locations I just did Google searches. This gave us some places to see in the major cities and highlighted that Breaking Bad was filmed in Albuquerque and with some further digging was able to include some of those.
• Atlas Obscura is a great website for odd and strange things. Their website has a nice front end for showing on a map what is in the area. 
• For this trip I tried to get in touch with some ride makers who were on the route and were successful with some of those too. This also added a great facet to our trip and really made the trip exciting.
• Google Earth has a Panoramio image layer and clusters of images usually highlight places of interest.
• Showman websites and FB pages would sometimes reveal if a showman was going to be in the area. Social media is great for this.

With the trip now full I checked if it was all do-able by building a very detailed itinerary in excel. 

The grids on the right were coloured representations of the detail on the left, orange was travel time, yellow was time in parks and green was sightseeing. From this it was possible to see how each day would look, how early we would start and what time we were likely to reach the hotel. How much time to spend in parks was driven obviously by their opening times and the size of the park. For travel time I took Google estimates and added 50% to cater for stops and to include some contingency. The bottom table was the Google estimates with no contingency. This gave us best case and worst case. I thought it was better to over estimate than under which would have us rushing to parks, which wouldn't have been fair on the group.

The other benefit in producing the itinerary to this detail was that it could become the basis of a trips book, something that I'd also compile as the trip became finalised. However in the final weeks we were still finding things to add and I think I had 8 revisions of that. For a trips logo I tapped into a very talented friend who pulled together the rattlesnake design together. The path of the snake being a simplified version of our route.

With two of us in the UK and two in Germany, collaborating wasn't easy. For this trip I created a private Facebook group which we used to discuss the finer points of the trips. This worked really well and is highly recommended to help facilitate the planning. To make it interesting I'd post a different photo every week that revealed more and more of what we were going to be experiencing; a great way to whet the appetites. 

So it was a lot of work but thoroughly rewarding and whilst it looked way too anal, actually worked a treat.

and this is how the final trip looked; what a crazy route!

It's worth mentioning that 2 of us had done some of the trip before, with the ECC in 2008 and I'd also been to Denver before, but even with that I still had a lot of new stuff and it meant our revisits could be done at a much more leisurely pace whilst those visiting for the first time did the running around.

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