Back at the front gate, I found an extremely friendly and helpful employee! Wow! They should hire a hundred more just like him! He gave me a Park Map, told me all about the Fright Fest activities, and answered every single one of my questions thoroughly and with enthusiasm.
What I found out is that the Park considers the scary vignettes with the witches, electrocuted skeletons, puking lab aliens, etc to be their �Fright Fest Scares�. So apparently, there weren't ten activities around the park and no one here had heard anything about a Corn Maze. He told me that the Haunted House opens at 6:00 pm and we needed tickets to get in (he gave us each one). The only other Fright Fest activities he knew of were the Pumpkin Painting and he also mentioned there was �a guy dressed as a scarecrow, walking around, greeting people.� Hmmmm not quite the Fright Fest full of activities I read about on the web site, but at least we were informed. With map in hand, we returned to the Enchanted Village end of the park.
Since I never celebrated Halloween as a kid, I thought it might be fun to do a little pumpkin painting. Erik discouraged this as being "just for kids" since it was in the Kids Kingdom section of the park. I told him I just wanted to "go look". So we went in to check it out.
There were a few kids and parents painting pumpkins, but we decided to just take a leisurely tour of the park for now.
Across from the Kids Kingdom and up a steep, steep hill was Captain Andy's Rivertown Review: An Animatronics Show. That's what the sign said anyway. Captain Andy wasn't listed on the map. In fact, the spot where the big show building was located, appeared as a green field with a fence around it. Mysterious! Was Captain Andy an old, defunct attraction? Or something brand new, yet to be opened? The idea of an animal animatronic show seemed pretty 80s Showbiz Pizza to us, but the paint job on the building looked brand new. We watched a more athletic (or maybe just less tired) family hike up the hill to check it out, but they just turned around and came back down immediately, so we figured there was nothing to see.
I really enjoyed checking out the Miniature Car Ride in the Kids Kingdom. I thought I�d read about adults riding this, but the cars looked pretty small and everyone riding in them looked under the age of 6, so I decided to enjoy it from a distance. This was one of my favorite areas of the park because it seemed to be a perfect example of what Enchanted Village had been when I was small. I don�t think they�ve changed it a bit, except to add a new paint job every once in awhile.
The Miniature Car Ride is a very simple version of Disneyland�s Autopia. The cars are tiny and circle around a short track. The ride operator controls them. So, you don�t actually get to steer or control the gas pedal.
