Busch Gardens, Williamsburg Review
My recent vacation to Virginia Beach was very good, but the worst day, by far, was the day I decided the family would visit Busch Gardens, Williamsburg. That was Tuesday, March 30, 2021. I was looking forward to the visit because I had not been there since I was six years old (which was…uh…39 years ago – showing my age). I didn’t like it much then, but I figured we would all like it now. We should have given that it was over $250 to get in the park.
The first indication that something was amiss was the long line to pay for parking. This took a full 20 minutes sitting in the car in line after an hour drive. I had paid for parking ahead of time and had it printed out in the hopes it would speed things up, like the web site said it would. Nope.
Once in the park, things quickly got worse. Hardly any rides were open making for long lines for the rides that were. My wife then looked on her phone online and found that there were only 12 rides open. Obviously, I was disappointed by this. When I purchased, I had seen that a couple of coasters weren’t opening until later in the spring, but nothing about so much of the park being closed.
Another annoyance quickly made itself known – the amusement park maps of old are now gone, at least at Busch Gardens, where it’s all now digital on the phone. I found the online map sucks donkey balls and the small phone screen makes it difficult to orient your direction for such a large park. A decent physical map to stick in your pocket would have been nice.
It didn’t matter anyway, because virtually everything was closed no matter what section of the park you went to. I found the most ludicrous thing to be that all the restaurants were closed, leaving only about one snack shop open in each section. It’s even more absurd considering the park policy is that no food or drink can be brought inside the park:
Since we had gotten there at 11 when the park opened and figured we would eat lunch around 1, this posed a problem. My wife at least wanted a pretzel, but that line appeared to be an hour to an hour and a half long to get a pretzel (seriously).
The dumbest part of the day immediately preceded this and that was when my wife and daughter waited in line for Apollo’s Chariot. Given the long wait they were going to have, my son and I walked around other parts of the park, only to find everything closed, then came back to the small ice cream shop next to Apollo’s Chariot.
When we walked in and started looking at the menu that was right in front of us on the wall, a woman working behind the counter looked at me like I was a giant douchebag. This look is not an uncommon look for me to receive, so I didn’t think much of it. Then when my son and I were deciding what we wanted to get, two teenage girls looked at me like I was a complete asshole (again, not uncommon), acted like we were in their way and rudely exclaimed “This is the exit, the entrance is over there!”
So, we took the ten steps over to a small line at the other end of the shop. I ordered a kid’s sundae for my son and a pantheon for me, which was some sort of alcoholic drink because I figured this day was going to need some alcohol. The guy made the sundae then ignored my order. Given I could see my kid’s sundae was already melting coming out of the machine, I decided not to ask for my drink again and just pay for the melting sundae so that my kid could eat some of it before it completely melted. It was seven fucking dollars for a cup of shitty melting soft serve ice cream.
Unlike most stupid people, I’m self-aware that I’m stupid and wanted to figure out how I went wrong in my thinking that the exit was the entrance to try to make myself smarter and get learnt. As soon as I exited what I originally thought was the entrance, it became clear where my thinking went wrong. In the center of the small building was a double door with a large “EXIT ONLY” sign above it, clearly indicating that should be the exit.
Except it wasn’t and you couldn’t exit from those doors inside the building. The building was clearly meant to have two entrances on either side with the exit in the center, hence the reason there was a menu immediately available on the wall when we walked in the exit on the left side that looked like an entrance.
So I looked at the exit that I thought was an entrance and there was no indication that it was an exit now (like perhaps an “EXIT ONLY” sign above it too), until I saw one of those Covid-era circle stickers down on the pavement outside the exit/entrance stating it was an exit. I had overlooked it because everywhere else in the entire world, including elsewhere at Busch Gardens, these stickers are meant to be placeholders for people to stand six feet apart. Since it looked like it was meant to be a queue and there was no line there I walked right past it without looking at it on the ground.
My son and I agreed this setup was remarkably stupid on their part and then we sat down so he could eat the ice cream, then I had to go back to the shop to grab a ton more napkins because it was melting all over the place. My son was able to get halfway through it before abandoning the soup.
A look at google maps confirms that the way I thought the ice cream shop was setup was indeed the way it was originally setup. It looks different now with a different exit only sign over the center double doors, but it’s the same building:
A while later, we were sitting next to where Apollo’s Chariot ends and I saw that my wife and daughter were done with their ride and had been placed in the front seat of the ride. I thought this was cool and wanted to check out the photo of them. When we got to the photo shop, I looked and looked and there was no photo of them. Then a random patron said that if you take off your mask, then they delete your photo when he heard me wondering aloud where the hell their photo was.
My wife then said her mask was flying off her face because the ride was going so fast, so she had to take it off in order not to lose it. This makes sense since the open air ride’s speed is 70mph and she was in the front seat. At this point I found Busch Gardens to be RE-TAR-DED.
After about 2.5 hours of being in the park, my kids wanted to leave and I told my wife I was halfway there to agreeing with them since there was literally nothing to do or eat. We walked around some more trying to find something to do and there was nothing. We eventually made our way over to Finnegan’s Flyers in the hopes that the kids could ride it and something would be open to eat in that section. The sign said it was a 60-minute wait to get on the ride, so we opted not to get in line. The only thing open to eat was a sweets shop. So, we got a six pack of donuts. I will say that the donuts were very good, but at the same time, donuts were the last thing on my list of things that I wanted to eat for lunch.
We then walked around some more, found nothing to do and my kids said they really wanted to leave. I agreed. My wife cried. We then left after spending only four hours inside the park. Exiting the park, I saw something that my wife said upon entering that I didn’t necessarily believe because it was so stupid – the VIP parking, the parking you pay an extra $20 for on top of the $25 you already have to pay for parking after waiting 20 minutes in the parking line, was three rows away from the regular parking. Busch Gardens is charging an extra $20 so that you don’t have to walk an extra 50 feet in a park where you walk for miles.
It’s tough not to give Busch Gardens, Williamsburg the rare lowest grade possible in this review, especially considering the fact no restaurants were open and the amount of rides not open. I can understand some of each not being open, but not the amount that were closed. With regards to no food available, I’m always perplexed why a business doesn’t want my money. But in this case, it was clear what happened by the end of the time we spent there – Busch Gardens was simply taking $250 of my money up front and running away with it as quickly as possible. They straight up stole my hard-earned cash and 6.5 hours of my family’s life that we’ll never get back (when factoring the drive and the wait for parking). Thus, they have also earned a spot on my permanent blacklist without the possibility of parole.
As for the nonsense that happened due to Covid-related restrictions, I think most of the restrictions are bullshit, but the parks are basically forced to do this. My big problem with it, though, is that Busch Gardens has had OVER A YEAR to prepare to get this shit right but it’s total amateur hour inside the park.
The exit of that ice cream shop could be better marked and there could be a sign or something that says if your mask came off, then there’s no photo of you for the ride instead of having me stand there in people’s way looking like a dumbass for two minutes looking for the photo. Or maybe the person hawking the photos in the booth who deleted it could have told me that rather than relying on a random passerby to tell me? As for the ride lines, I didn’t witness anyone standing six feet apart and many were not wearing masks. I don’t particularly care, but I found it odd that the park didn’t care either – mixed messages are certainly being sent in this regard.
As a sanity check, my wife spoke with someone in line while waiting for a ride. Her family purchased two-day tickets and a hotel room thinking they would need two days in the park only to realize at that time they only needed two hours. Yikes! Also, on the ride home, my wife checked some online reviews on Trip Advisor from people from the day before. They were basically the same as what we experienced:
Grade: F-, **newest blacklist inductee** This includes other Busch properties like Sea World parks. Fuck them.
Mount Trashmore Review
The story of that day doesn’t end there. On the way home, we decided to visit Mount Trashmore park. It looked cool, as there was a giant hill made out of an old landfill and what appeared from the interstate to be a really nice playground.
We parked, climbed up the steps of the giant hill, then my daughter wanted me and her to run down the opposite side of the hill. I told her we had to be careful not to fall because it was very steep. We then ran down the hill and I managed to do it without killing myself. It was fun.
As we approached the back side of the playground on the opposite side of the hill, my wife immediately said it appeared to be closed, likely due to Covid-19. I didn’t believe it, as my state’s playgrounds are open and it’s (regrettably) an even more pro-establishment state than Virginia. Sure enough, the playground was closed, which is RE-TAR-DED:
Out on the front side, we learned the playground is called Kids Cove and its slogan is “a beacon of light for all children”. The sun even shined above for my photo giving that beacon of light for all those non-existent children happily playing.
The irony of this slogan is not lost on me, obviously, as our dear leaders have completely ruined a generation of children for a virus that amounts to a bad flu for the elderly, a nothingburger for children, and a cold for everyone else. Kids Cove is basically a Potemkin Village like North Korea’s Kijong-Dong – a propaganda façade paid for by taxpayer money with the only purpose of looking good, not to be used.
So my kids climbed the steps again, then I did the same looking for them, and we left.
Grade as a park: D-
Grade as a Potemkin Village, its intended purpose: A-
The story of that day still doesn’t end there. The next morning, I could tell something unusual was up with my boys. When I went to the bathroom and dropped my drawers to check them out, I immediately saw what was wrong – my right one was swollen to about 1.5 times the size of the left one, maybe even 2x, making the whole package significantly larger than it already was.
Some quick internet searches told me what to look for to determine if it was serious or not. Checking was easy because I had taken a pair of hedge trimmers to the bush garden prior to the trip because it had all become quite unruly. After a little bit of checking and scanning some other medical articles online, I determined I had injured it somehow and that it was nothing to be too concerned about and would likely go away.
I realized that I had likely injured it either climbing all those steps and/or running down the steep hill at Mount Trashmore the afternoon before (apparently I’m not 20 years old anymore if I understand math correctly). By the following day, the swelling had indeed gone down for the most part and was entirely gone a few days later.
While not Mount Trashmore’s fault, it didn’t help with their grade. I did learn something that morning, though. Fondling your balls for a couple of minutes but thinking you may have testicular cancer for those two minutes is still more fun than going to Busch Gardens, Williamsburg.
