Can you imagine getting that too and having the black and white monsters and the blood red kiss and Godzilla 70th in the lineup that would be fire? That's the only other thing that would make it even more awesome is a black and white Addams family. I would do the whole black and white row at that point. So we're in Indianapolis. It's late, and we're trying to think of things to do. The next day, we were planning on coming through Pigeon Forge, Tennessee, which is just one of my favorite places in the country. But before that, there's a theme park in southern Indiana that we actually haven't been to in like 10 plus years. And it's like one of our favorites. So we decided to go to Holiday World. Now, if you're from the Midwest, I've talked to Jamie and them before. They've been wanting to go check it out. I want to kind of blast this out to everybody just so you're aware. In southern Indiana, there's a little amusement park called Holiday World that everybody needs to check out. You guys know I come from the theme park and coaster hobby. I've known about this place. Since 2000. And we've been going out there since 2003. It is a theme park in the town of Santa Claus, Indiana. Each themed area of the park is themed after a different holiday. So it opened as a Santa Claus land in 1954. Predated Disneyland by one year. Which would technically make it the first theme park But it has a Christmas area as pretty much the entrance part And then they added on Halloween 4th of July this huge Thanksgiving expansion which is where they have the Good Gravy coaster that I played the bump for here at the beginning of this episode. I saw this coaster at IAAPA in November. They had the train there for the reveal. And this is a ride where every car of the coaster train is themed like a gravy boat. and the lead car even has the spout with some gravy spilling out of it. It's just so absurd and so much fun, and I want to make sure people know about this place. Now, imagine my surprise as we're driving down the two hours from Indianapolis to Santa Claus to go to Holiday World when I'm listening to the brand-new pinball show, and Zach is talking all about Holiday World, just so coincidental that we're on our way to the park, and then here's my pinball content also talking about this park that we're going to. he was also hyping up Epic Universe which is like right in my wheelhouse this is the brand new Universal Park that is set to open within the next six months and I'm like you know I'm on high alert for what they call technical rehearsals which is their soft openings and as soon as I hear from employees of the park that that is happening I'm down there in Florida because I can't wait to go check out this area Super Nintendo area Universal Classic Monsters it's like walking through Monster Bash but as a whole theme park land with rides and everything a new Harry Potter area themed after the Ministry of Magic in Paris that transports you to London through the Flu Network and also How to Train Your Dragon area, all in the middle of the Celestial Park, anchored by a giant hotel within the theme park. Like, it's perfect, man. You can walk around a Universal Park, and it's nothing but themes that have also been used in pinball for the same reason, because it's just fun to play in these themed environments. So, yeah, so Zach was talking about that and Holiday World, and I'm on my way to Holiday World, and I thought, you know what? more people need to know about how great this theme park is. So this is a theme park. They've got about five major coasters, three of them wood, two of them steel, plus an entire water park that is just amazing. This water park has four different water coasters. These are water park rides that you ride in either a raft or a kind of long inflatable tube structure. And they have magnetic launching systems that launch your watercraft with you and your crew in it around the course. like they're super nuts and they've got four of them. Um, a lot of parks are lucky if they have one, this park has four. So here's the deal that you need to know with holiday world. First off, it's about $60 to get into a place, which is cheap, right? Um, uh, and the other thing is parking is included. Parking is free, uh, which you don't find anywhere except for Knoebels and E-Laysburg, Pennsylvania and holiday world. Um, not only is the parking free, uh, but soft drinks are free all throughout the park. They have drink stations set up. So included with your admission is unlimited soft drinks. Like none of this pay $18, you know, for a refillable souvenir sipper cup and then drag this disgusting thing around with you all day to fill up. No, no, there's just drink stations set up all over. Just grab a cup, fill it up, drink as much as you want. And it's included. What the park found is when they started doing this, people would stay in the park longer. They'd buy more food. The park ended up making even more money by giving away soda and everybody's happier imagine that you fill a park full of happy people and they tend to spend more and buy more merchandise and buy more food instead of leaving the park to go eat at a mcdonald's or something it makes sense so free parking free soft drinks free sunscreen there's sunscreen stations set up all over the park between the water park and the regular park to just go i mean why not you know just go up and grab those gallon of sunscreen and put some on so you don't burn you know they're not nickeling and diming you for like sunscreen that you forgot and then everybody gets sunburned has a bad time. The water park is included with admission. There's none of those tube rental fees that you find at some places. So it's just like pay one price, come and have fun in Southern Indiana, go and check this place out. We were there for about four and a half hours. And in that time, we wrote every major coaster once or twice, went through the entire water park wrote all the water coasters We went into the what do you call it Splash Lagoon No the wave pool Went to the wave pool and then also played on some of their funnel slides and everything too We got food. We bought merchandise. My kid stuck her head in the big ball of fluff for the Build-A-Bear thing that they had. And I took a picture with a guy in a giant eagle suit. It was fun and fantastic. And we did it all in four and a half hours and got back on the road. So go check out Holiday World if you're anywhere in the southern Indiana area. Even if you're not, it's not that far. It's such a cool place. There was even like there was a fireworks and drone show that night that we didn't even get to stay for. There's a campground attached to the place called Lake Rudolph that you can go camp at. It's just a fun way to go. I can't plug it enough. So we left there and we drove on down to Pigeon Forge. We got here late last night. Pigeon Forge, Tennessee is what happens if you take Kissimmee, Florida and drop in the middle of the Smoky Mountains. And also adjacent to that is Dolly Parton's theme park, Dollywood, which sounds like a complete joke, but I got to tell you, it's a super awesome place. Awesome rides, food. It's a little more expensive to get in, $25 for parking, $100 for a ticket. But like world-class rides, great food and everything. We stepped into the door ready to have such a great time. We got there right at opening. and then we noticed right in the main entrance area there was a flooding situation going on with muddy water percolating up through the concrete. Obviously there was a water main break that happened at the park but we kind of like trudged through the water and then kind of went into the park not thinking much about it. We're about to board their brand new coaster that opened this year. It's a multi-launch family coaster called Big Bear Mountain and then we get the announcement that the entire park is closed. There's no water. It's shut off. Everybody get out. whole park's closed. We were there about a half hour. We're just getting to the front of the line and then boom, everything shuts. So that's a raw deal, man. What the heck? They don't have earthquakes here. What happened? Just a water main just decided to break. There was water percolating up from the flower beds, from the main concrete walkways. They had it all corded off and everything. And I'm like, all right, well, maybe they'll take care of that. And even though it's brown, it didn't smell like sewage. So that had me plussed. I don't want to make a knock against the park. They're promising to reimburse everybody for today, but it was a little bit of staleness. So we turned that into an opportunity to try to have some more fun elsewhere. So we're right outside of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. It's hot and it's humid down here in the South, as it should be in the middle of July. So we went up and into the woods and we found some swimming holes and went and played there for about five hours today, swimming in this river. Tons of people there, rocks to jump off of, kids are floating through the rapids on the inner tubes. just just a fantastic time i'll post some pictures up so you can see what i'm talking about but like get out to the smoky mountains if you can this place is amazing um holiday world is amazing and it's not all about just disney and universal as cool as they are there's other stuff too and encourage everybody to go check it out uh there's also some pinball here too so we're right next to gatlinburg tennessee uh where underneath this mock-up of a space needle that you can go up into as an observation tower uh there's one of those pinball museum places you know so they have like 50 60 machines or something two-thirds of them are probably functional at any one time it's interesting to go into uh we're skipping it this time because last time was kind of lackluster uh but we did find something fun and interesting pinball related today and that is that big daddy's pizzeria in one of their locations in pigeon forge on the strip is a pro standard version of wwe wrestlemania a game that it's really hard to find anybody outside of me or jeng guys that really likes this game but the reason that we headed in to go play it was because i have recently got the wwe limited edition the gold version with hulk hogan's autograph and i wanted to go back now that i own that and i've had some time on it to go back to the regular one and kind of see like what the differences are and like you know there's a lot of games out there where the pro the premium there not a whole lot you know separating them uh bond i thinking of uh deadpool I thinking of Ninja Turtles you know the pros obviously better um other games there tends to be a lot more when you get to the godzillas and the other l ones um but man they really did it up between the standard version of wrestlemania and that limited edition and going back to it again i'm like okay wow first off like as soon as you start playing when you pick your wrestler there's classic wrestlers in the limited edition version that you can play as like hulk hogan you can play as the hulkster and hear his intro music going on um and it's like amazing uh plus like undertaker's in it as well in addition to you know john cena and all the other ones now if you don't care any much about wrestling who the hell cares about this right this game's stupid but if you like it on the level that i do um then that's super fun also there's extra ramps in the game like the the two side drains off of that uh upper wwe ring play field um there's an extra one on the right side as well as an extra flipper on the left that will allow you to knock a ball off of the other wire form the standard wire form on the left into some of the targets across the field there's a spinning disc in the middle of the upper play field as well as the lcd screen the jumbotron playing wrestling footage in color on the play field which is just like you miss it when it's not there and i think this was stern's first instance of an lcd screen in a game so it's so awesome i want to get a topper together where I can find a way to tie into that signal from that LCD screen and put another big Jumbotron up on the top as a topper. I think that'd be super awesome. So I'm having fun with WrestleMania. Not a game for everybody, and that's totally okay. But for me, that game is super fun. I had some great games on it right before the trip, before I came back out here. So I can't wait to get home and put some more time on it, figure out the code, throw some art blades in there, make some mods for it. And man, it's going to be super fun. So I don't know what's up for tomorrow. we have one more day in Pigeon Forge if Dollywood's open tomorrow we got rain checks so we can see if we can pop into the park and at least go on some of their awesome rides that they have there otherwise I'll be heading to Chattanooga Tennessee where there is a pinball area I don't know if it's a pinball museum or what it is but it's a place I've been meaning to go check out so I'm going to check that out there Chattanooga's a town that I thought about moving to a few years ago so I want to spend some time there and then we'll be down in Atlanta ready for the show to start on Friday so there'll be live streams because you know how I like to cover that stuff um they'll be uh hopefully daily uh little recordings that we'll do or we'll talk about everything that we found and saw that day i'm super excited to hear from marco specialties that they're bringing uh godzilla 70th on site just like they did last year with venom it's so cool i'm glad they're doing that uh so i'll get to get my hands on there and give you a hands-on impression uh so yeah i'm just super excited uh today we did some mountain coasters in the region as well uh but yeah go to tennessee if you're at all interested in in themed entertainment fun stuff to do. You want to take a break. You want something fresh and different from Florida, different from Los Angeles. You don't want to go to Cedar Point again for the 10th time in a row. Come down to Dollywood, man. It's totally worth it. Hit up holiday world. Hit me up. If you want some advice and other cool things to do, I'm going to pop off of here, start getting things uploaded. And then I got to talk to Genghis for WAP episode number seven. It's just never stops, man. But yeah, keep giving me feedback. I love that stuff. I'm love that we're active on the discord and I'm checking in as soon as I can, but I'll be on the road for the next week or so until I can finally, you know, get back home. So thanks for being Patreon members. Enjoy this extra content. Talk about it on the discord. You're already doing that. I'm just kind of throwing this stuff out there because I think it's what you're supposed to do at the end of these things. And I'm going to go get myself a Diet Coke. All right. Be cool, guys.