Pandry

I just still think their decision to oversell tix and make us all have to endure those hellish lines every single night made this year a downer. I hate how they rerouted the queues this year, too. I'm assuming that was to assist construction routes and other related movement. Unfortunately my HHN 2012 will be remembered as a long ass wait. However, that made us spend more time in the streets, which were great - as we can all agree.

Like Mr. Black, I too have been going the past 8 years and this is the first year where I don't have the usual postpartum depression. Each season, my GF and I get FFP's. We mainly do it to avoid the peak nights and use the less crowded nights to be able to see most of the houses. We'll typically head over from work at 5pm and stay until 9pm - as we both work at 8am during the week. But our tradition each year is that we take off work the day after the last HHN night. That's our one night of the season to stay until close and go all out. Usually on those nights, it's a sad walk out of the park at midnight knowing it's over. Not so much this year. Lines on Wednesday night were at 1 hour + for all houses, by like 8pm. Probably longer as those times are usually "padded." We didn't have the energy to hang out for 3 or so hours to see if we'd catch the late night/closing time when lines again die down. So unfortunately, this year, we trudged out around 9pm mumbling curses to ourselves. But we did have great scare actor interaction in the streets on the way out. A vampire chased my GF from the start of rip ride rocket all the way to the exit gate. It was great!! That will be our lasting memory for this season. Terrible crowds, but great job from all the scare actors - we definitely appreciated all the hard work you all do..

I was so shocked at the crowds last night. I guess that was par for the course though. We were in once gates opened and went directly to HoH. Already 20 minute wait. On past Wednesdays this year, you could walk right in all those houses. I was all psyched to be able to hit multiple houses, multiple times...not. C'est la vie. If someone has a big house, preferably with a large yard, let's setup some pipe & drape and build our own haunted house. A tide-me-over until next year's HHN.

I really hope there's a valid reason behind it. It seems like the more crowded they allow it to be, the more alcohol is sold, the longer the lines get, the more impatient the drunks get and then it's putting scare actors in a dangerous environment.

As I've lived in Orlando the past 16 years and work in hotels, I know a lot of higher ups at UO. I've been informed (take it for whatever it's worth) that they are purposely overselling tickets this year in order to gauge demand. Demand for what? That I have no idea. I like to think in hopes that they want to go back to two parks next year and need to see if the demand is there for it (it obviously is). It would explain a lot if that's the case, crowd wise, that is. My worry is that they're raking in th dough this year. It's hard for any business to cut revenue streams like that once they see them on quarterly reports.

Last Wednesday was great. Hit TWD first at around 6:30p - zero wait time. After that we hung out for about 10-15 minutes watching the zombies - who were killing it (no pun intended). My girlfriend was getting scared just from watching others be scared! After hanging there we went to HoH, zero wait time, too. Then zero waits for AC (which ended up like a lot of posts on AC I've read where this 2nd time through was 10x better than the first). Zero wait for P&T. So we hit 4 houses in slightly less than an hour. Here's we're we then got greedy: I suggested we hit the sound stages thinking similar short lines. Though not bad, wait times were more. All were listed at 30. I timed DE which we went through and it was a solid 45 minutes. Also someone knocked the barrier fence down which goes along the whole back part of the queue preventing people from seeing cast and crews coming in. It was somewhat humorous to see people trying to problem solve how to set back up. It was like 50 yards of fence. That DE line moved well and really the majority of the wait time was in the back/final part of the queue where you go up and back, up and back. When we were walking through the line, I saw Gothic at a stand still. I estimated that line was over an hour wait by then (even though it read 30 min.) Had we stayed over by the HoH/AC houses, we could've gone through all of those multiple times. I think this Wed., we'll do this in reverse order so we knock out the sound stages first thing. In summary: Wednesday was our best night of the season thus far.

Is this the first sell-out this year? This is my 8th year in a row (2nd with a FFP) and I have to say this is the busiest year I've experienced. With so many packed nights this year, it sounds like it will reach an apex tonight with an official sellout. Best of luck to all the scareactors tonigh.