Catching up with Busch Gardens Williamsburg
Jul. 28th, 2025 08:53 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mmcirvinWhen I was a kid living in the DC suburbs, the closest thing we had to a home amusement park was Kings Dominion near Richmond. We went there several times, but we always preferred a couple that were a bit further away: Hersheypark in Pennsylvania, and (once it opened) the brand-new "Busch Gardens: The Old Country" in Williamsburg, VA, which promised to simulate a European vacation close to home. It never quite did that, but it at least had some pretty theming and landscaping. And, over time, it started accumulating impressive rides.
When I went to college in Williamsburg, Busch Gardens Williamsburg very much was my home park, and that was when I started riding their roller coasters. But the last time I was there was in the early 1990s, so the last coaster I'd ridden was the ill-fated Drachen Fire (an exciting but mis-designed ride that beat me up enough that, in hindsight, it put me off riding coasters regularly for decades).
Getting interested in them again in the 2010s, I was aware that BGW had added many impressive new rides. But though I still have family in Virginia, I'd never found the time to go back there. My sister and her family love the place (still much more than they do Kings Dominion) and go often, and she'd had a long-standing offer to take me back to Busch Gardens sometime.
We went down there to hang with family over the past several days, and on Friday, with a smaller party consisting of my sister and my daughter, I finally caught up with Busch Gardens Williamsburg. It was an oppressively hot weekday, so crowds were very light. But it did mean we had to hydrate and pace ourselves. Nevertheless, I managed to ride a lot:
Yeah, I went straight to Pantheon, their massive multi-launch top-hat coaster. None of this working up to things. My rides on coasters with inversions were going to be solo, since the people I was with don't like those, but that's fine. It was nearly a walk-on. I had an interesting conversation with the guy riding next to me, the kind of coaster freak who indulges his hobby while traveling on business (seems to be a common thing).
Apart from its lackluster "Roman" theming and maybe being a bit too short, everything about Pantheon is great: the weirdly banked airtime hills, the forward and backward swing launch with an airtime bump in the middle of it, the way it launches you directly into an inversion out of the station just to show you it means business, the stall that is basically a whole hill taken upside down. What you can't see in the video is that the lap restraint seems designed to give you a lot of room to float around, so my butt was flying off the seat basically the whole time. Good times.
InvadR, the wooden coaster in this Coasterforce video, was the coaster for the whole group, since my kid has decided she likes wooden coasters on this scale and my sister has always liked them. This is the first coaster by manufacturer GCI that I've ridden, though Compounce's Wildcat has GCI trains and Boulder Dash has GCI retrack. It's a modern but smallish ride, 75 feet tall with a tangled twister layout. InvadR is a decent ride, though it has more rattle than some other woodies we've ridden lately. This is in the "New France" section that the park has always had as a sort of Frontierland, fudging the Europe theme a bit. The theming seems vaguely based on ideas of Viking colonization in the New World but seems to imagine the Vikings attacking French Canada? I'm not sure the dates work out. Oh well, it's got some bite, I had back row so I was probably feeling that bite the hardest, and it was fun to be able to ride with everyone.
My sister and I rode the newest one in the park, Big Bad Wolf: The Wolf's Revenge (pictured in this Attraction Source video). It's a nice tribute to the original, defunct Big Bad Wolf, which was a formative ride for me, but it's considerably tamer than the original, with no large drop and inverted but not free-swinging cars. It's built not in the original BBW's space (which is taken up by Verbolten), but in the area formerly occupied by Drachen Fire. The village theming, though, is more elaborate than the original version. Since your legs are dangling free, they can really go to town with foot-chopper illusions, which were rather disconcerting to me, since I'm used to head-choppers but not this.
An unusual thing about it is that unlike many coasters of this type, there isn't any kind of retracting floor to help load and unload in the station, so getting on and off can be quite a hop, which slows things down and will require many smaller riders to be boosted by an adult. The seats are also some of the least accommodating for larger riders. But I can imagine that for many kids, this ride will be a gateway to riding big coasters like the original Wolf was, as long as they can take the idea of dangling below the track. On the day we visited, it was the only coaster for which there was really a signficant wait for me (and that was not very long).
At this point, things were getting downright nostalgic. We took in some lunch and air conditioning in the old Festhaus near BBW: The Wolf's Revenge, and to stay cool we all took a couple of spins on Roman Rapids, which was the first theme-park raft ride I ever rode, depicted here by Canobie Coaster:
It's nothing special as these rides go, though the theming is a little unusual. But my next ride, after some nonsensical struggles with the park's locker system, was a very special trip down memory lane:
The ride, the myth, the Monster. This CoasterForce video shows the refurbished Loch Ness Monster with the audio and theming enhancements they put in last season, including audio on the lift hill, video in the long helix tunnel and a statue of the Monster after the final loop. It's running great and I'm happy to say that it holds up. This was the first looping coaster I ever rode, about 35 years ago; it's outlived some of its successors, and it's great to see the park giving it love.
After a transit ride on the park's wonderful triangular skyride network, I tried a coaster that surprised me--I didn't expect to like it as much as I did, possibly because it's of a type that gets some snobbery from coaster enthusiasts:
Griffon, in the "France" area, is a colossal B&M dive coaster with a very simple layout, shown here by Coasterforce: its main event is a 200-foot, entirely vertical drop, which it first dangles riders over for several seconds like sinners in the hand of an angry God. That leads into a huge swooping Immelmann turn, which leads to... another vertical drop and another Immelmann, as if we didn't get it the first time. Then there's one little airtime hill, culminating in a splashdown effect which is mostly there to wow people watching from off-ride (you don't get wet), and into the brakes.
It seemed like it might be kind of a one-trick pony. But experiencing it in person, you get the full force of its theatrics. Everything about it is outsized. The track and the station and the trains look like they were made for beings several times the size of normal humans. The view from the leisurely turnaround before the first drop is spectacular, skyscraper-worthy. And it makes sure you get a really good long dangle over the abyss, held in only by shoulder restraints. More than any other coaster at BGW, the aim is awe. It really gives you the feeling of being manhandled by inhuman forces. I do think Pantheon is the best ride at the park, but Griffon is a surprisingly close second for me.
Griffon actually had a single-rider line of sorts, which I used, and it got me on the ride almost immediately, on a seat in the front row. I think my brother-in-law had warned me that this usually doesn't work, but I suspect that's on heavier days when the line extends beyond where the single-rider lane branches off.
We had some ice cream in the France area and spent some time listening to a band that did a pretty good cover of Fountains of Wayne's "Stacy's Mom." Then it was some more transiting on the skyride, culminating in a long, hot march to our last ride of the afternoon:
Yeah, I knew we were gonna do Apollo's Chariot (depicted by Coaster Studios there) sooner or later, because my sister likes it, and it's great to be able to ride with somebody. (We'd tried to ride it earlier in the day, but it was broken down then.) My kid declined, but this B&M hypercoaster is the kind of truly massive ride that people who aren't hardcore coaster freaks will actually ride, because it doesn't beat them up and the thrills are just manageable enough. It's a lovely long ride, and it was actually more forceful than I expected--it may have been because I was tired and overheated, or maybe Apollo's Chariot itself was just really warmed up late in a hot day, but I was graying out a little on the turnaround helix. I love that surprise violent dip at the end where they take the on-ride photo.
What didn't I ride? Well, DarKoaster has been broken all season, and I wasn't that interested in Verbolten (dis-recommended by my sister), Tempesto (essentially identical to Phobia Phear Coaster at Lake Compounce--a good ride, but it's not a priority here), or Grover's Alpine Express in the Sesame Street-themed kiddie land (my companions did ride that a couple of times when I was off riding something else).
And I just had to triage out Alpengeist, the giant inverted looper, which would have been one assault too many for my old body in that boiling, busy day. That's a ride I've been interested in for a long time, nevertheless. In a sense it was the ride that started to turn the Busch Gardens I knew as a kid into the park it is today. My brother-in-law doesn't like it, but I'll surely do it if I ever go back.
When I went to college in Williamsburg, Busch Gardens Williamsburg very much was my home park, and that was when I started riding their roller coasters. But the last time I was there was in the early 1990s, so the last coaster I'd ridden was the ill-fated Drachen Fire (an exciting but mis-designed ride that beat me up enough that, in hindsight, it put me off riding coasters regularly for decades).
Getting interested in them again in the 2010s, I was aware that BGW had added many impressive new rides. But though I still have family in Virginia, I'd never found the time to go back there. My sister and her family love the place (still much more than they do Kings Dominion) and go often, and she'd had a long-standing offer to take me back to Busch Gardens sometime.
We went down there to hang with family over the past several days, and on Friday, with a smaller party consisting of my sister and my daughter, I finally caught up with Busch Gardens Williamsburg. It was an oppressively hot weekday, so crowds were very light. But it did mean we had to hydrate and pace ourselves. Nevertheless, I managed to ride a lot:
Yeah, I went straight to Pantheon, their massive multi-launch top-hat coaster. None of this working up to things. My rides on coasters with inversions were going to be solo, since the people I was with don't like those, but that's fine. It was nearly a walk-on. I had an interesting conversation with the guy riding next to me, the kind of coaster freak who indulges his hobby while traveling on business (seems to be a common thing).
Apart from its lackluster "Roman" theming and maybe being a bit too short, everything about Pantheon is great: the weirdly banked airtime hills, the forward and backward swing launch with an airtime bump in the middle of it, the way it launches you directly into an inversion out of the station just to show you it means business, the stall that is basically a whole hill taken upside down. What you can't see in the video is that the lap restraint seems designed to give you a lot of room to float around, so my butt was flying off the seat basically the whole time. Good times.
InvadR, the wooden coaster in this Coasterforce video, was the coaster for the whole group, since my kid has decided she likes wooden coasters on this scale and my sister has always liked them. This is the first coaster by manufacturer GCI that I've ridden, though Compounce's Wildcat has GCI trains and Boulder Dash has GCI retrack. It's a modern but smallish ride, 75 feet tall with a tangled twister layout. InvadR is a decent ride, though it has more rattle than some other woodies we've ridden lately. This is in the "New France" section that the park has always had as a sort of Frontierland, fudging the Europe theme a bit. The theming seems vaguely based on ideas of Viking colonization in the New World but seems to imagine the Vikings attacking French Canada? I'm not sure the dates work out. Oh well, it's got some bite, I had back row so I was probably feeling that bite the hardest, and it was fun to be able to ride with everyone.
My sister and I rode the newest one in the park, Big Bad Wolf: The Wolf's Revenge (pictured in this Attraction Source video). It's a nice tribute to the original, defunct Big Bad Wolf, which was a formative ride for me, but it's considerably tamer than the original, with no large drop and inverted but not free-swinging cars. It's built not in the original BBW's space (which is taken up by Verbolten), but in the area formerly occupied by Drachen Fire. The village theming, though, is more elaborate than the original version. Since your legs are dangling free, they can really go to town with foot-chopper illusions, which were rather disconcerting to me, since I'm used to head-choppers but not this.
An unusual thing about it is that unlike many coasters of this type, there isn't any kind of retracting floor to help load and unload in the station, so getting on and off can be quite a hop, which slows things down and will require many smaller riders to be boosted by an adult. The seats are also some of the least accommodating for larger riders. But I can imagine that for many kids, this ride will be a gateway to riding big coasters like the original Wolf was, as long as they can take the idea of dangling below the track. On the day we visited, it was the only coaster for which there was really a signficant wait for me (and that was not very long).
At this point, things were getting downright nostalgic. We took in some lunch and air conditioning in the old Festhaus near BBW: The Wolf's Revenge, and to stay cool we all took a couple of spins on Roman Rapids, which was the first theme-park raft ride I ever rode, depicted here by Canobie Coaster:
It's nothing special as these rides go, though the theming is a little unusual. But my next ride, after some nonsensical struggles with the park's locker system, was a very special trip down memory lane:
The ride, the myth, the Monster. This CoasterForce video shows the refurbished Loch Ness Monster with the audio and theming enhancements they put in last season, including audio on the lift hill, video in the long helix tunnel and a statue of the Monster after the final loop. It's running great and I'm happy to say that it holds up. This was the first looping coaster I ever rode, about 35 years ago; it's outlived some of its successors, and it's great to see the park giving it love.
After a transit ride on the park's wonderful triangular skyride network, I tried a coaster that surprised me--I didn't expect to like it as much as I did, possibly because it's of a type that gets some snobbery from coaster enthusiasts:
Griffon, in the "France" area, is a colossal B&M dive coaster with a very simple layout, shown here by Coasterforce: its main event is a 200-foot, entirely vertical drop, which it first dangles riders over for several seconds like sinners in the hand of an angry God. That leads into a huge swooping Immelmann turn, which leads to... another vertical drop and another Immelmann, as if we didn't get it the first time. Then there's one little airtime hill, culminating in a splashdown effect which is mostly there to wow people watching from off-ride (you don't get wet), and into the brakes.
It seemed like it might be kind of a one-trick pony. But experiencing it in person, you get the full force of its theatrics. Everything about it is outsized. The track and the station and the trains look like they were made for beings several times the size of normal humans. The view from the leisurely turnaround before the first drop is spectacular, skyscraper-worthy. And it makes sure you get a really good long dangle over the abyss, held in only by shoulder restraints. More than any other coaster at BGW, the aim is awe. It really gives you the feeling of being manhandled by inhuman forces. I do think Pantheon is the best ride at the park, but Griffon is a surprisingly close second for me.
Griffon actually had a single-rider line of sorts, which I used, and it got me on the ride almost immediately, on a seat in the front row. I think my brother-in-law had warned me that this usually doesn't work, but I suspect that's on heavier days when the line extends beyond where the single-rider lane branches off.
We had some ice cream in the France area and spent some time listening to a band that did a pretty good cover of Fountains of Wayne's "Stacy's Mom." Then it was some more transiting on the skyride, culminating in a long, hot march to our last ride of the afternoon:
Yeah, I knew we were gonna do Apollo's Chariot (depicted by Coaster Studios there) sooner or later, because my sister likes it, and it's great to be able to ride with somebody. (We'd tried to ride it earlier in the day, but it was broken down then.) My kid declined, but this B&M hypercoaster is the kind of truly massive ride that people who aren't hardcore coaster freaks will actually ride, because it doesn't beat them up and the thrills are just manageable enough. It's a lovely long ride, and it was actually more forceful than I expected--it may have been because I was tired and overheated, or maybe Apollo's Chariot itself was just really warmed up late in a hot day, but I was graying out a little on the turnaround helix. I love that surprise violent dip at the end where they take the on-ride photo.
What didn't I ride? Well, DarKoaster has been broken all season, and I wasn't that interested in Verbolten (dis-recommended by my sister), Tempesto (essentially identical to Phobia Phear Coaster at Lake Compounce--a good ride, but it's not a priority here), or Grover's Alpine Express in the Sesame Street-themed kiddie land (my companions did ride that a couple of times when I was off riding something else).
And I just had to triage out Alpengeist, the giant inverted looper, which would have been one assault too many for my old body in that boiling, busy day. That's a ride I've been interested in for a long time, nevertheless. In a sense it was the ride that started to turn the Busch Gardens I knew as a kid into the park it is today. My brother-in-law doesn't like it, but I'll surely do it if I ever go back.
