Tales of the Flowers: Summer Coaster Tour - Day 08 - Six Flags Great Adventure New Jersey, Chuck E Cheese, and headed to D.C.

It's the next day of our Summer Coaster road trip! We're still at Six Flags Great Adventure in New Jersey!

Alli does love having lots of options for breakfast. The hotel breakfast here has been pretty tasty. I love the fresh waffles with fruit, whipped cream and sprinkles.

Theresa is going to keep working from the hotel, so the kids and I got an Uber to the park, just like yesterday. Today they did drop us off at the correct location, and we then took a shuttle bus to the front of the park.

It's 10:09 and we're the very first in line at this gate! The park officially opens at 10:30am.

Looking backwards at 10:15am. I see a lot of school groups here.

10:18 and we're scanned in a can run into the park!

We're getting stopped at the end of their main street of course, but we'll have a good head start when 10:30 rolls around and it's time to open the park.

Whew! 10:26 and the crowds have certainly filled in behind us!

The park is officially open! Time to run! And The Flash is open today! Not like yesterday when it opened late!

We were among the first in line and made it into the first train of the day! Before you ride, you have to pull everything in the lockers. Even if you have a zippered pocket, it doesn't matter.

First ride of the day! Yes!

And strangely enough, when we finished, the loading station had a lot of empty rows... Turns out the lockers glitched and people couldn't put their stuff inside, so they couldn't send people up the ramp to ride. That was good for us though because we got to ride again! Sweet!

By the time we got off, the line had ballooned, going past the entrance!

What else didn't we get to do yesterday? Let's go on something new.

Like the Joker coaster!

It's whippy and short, but we think it's fun.

Lunchtime! And Ian's quesadilla place is open today! Hooray!

Alli just wants pasta with red sauce.

Time for more coasters. Yesterday we couldn't ride the Lil' Devil Coaster because they weren't letting teenagers or adults on it. We were hoping there might be a different policy today...

Nope, same policy BUT... if you had a child under a certain height who had to ride with an adult, you could go with them.

Well there just so happened to be a family where the littles outnumbered the adults. We offered to ride with any of them who wanted to ride and they said sure! I rode with a very brave 4 year old who even put their hands up! Now we can count this as another coaster credit! Yay!

And since we're already in the area, might as well ride one of our favorites here. Nitro!

We lean forward to act like we're racing.

And there was no one in our row when we returned to the station, so we got to go again! Yes!

Afterwards we rode the Jersey Devil Coaster.

We're staying hydrated with our free drink plan. Every 15 minutes we can get something new.

Hmm. First time seeing that sign on an Icee machine though.

Theresa is here! She got the room all packed up and drove here to meet us.

Hello T!

Let's do one more ride that was closed most of yesterday. The giant SkyScreamer!

Lifting us 242 feet into the air and spinning us at 40mph!

Got a drink? Theresa grabbed a meal, and we decided that we're pretty satisfied with what we've done today at this park.

It's only 2:45pm but we've got a little drive ahead of us. We'll stop a few fun places along the way though.

Theresa has a free meal though so we might as well grab that before we head out. Theresa got a gyro yesterday and loved it. Today there must be someone new in the kitchen because they put out this abomination.

It was filled with these meat pieces that were so dry and hard that she ended up throwing away most of them. Gross. Glad we're on the dining plan and not paying $20 for these meals, but still, whoever made this needs to be re-trained.

There's a 3:30 hour drive ahead of us today, and that's without any stops.

Out we go from New Jersey. Crossing the Delaware Memorial Bridge into Delaware.

That blurry sign is welcoming us to Maryland!

And now that we're out of New Jersey, we can pump our own gasoline!

I had to do a double-take at the pump. In EVERY other place I've been, green handles mean Diesel. There's even a big green diesel sign under the pump.

Some of the worst Chuck E Cheese restaurants we've been to have been in New Jersey, so we made sure to get out of that state before trying one.

Inside we found a few fun games.

Chuck E Cheese joining us and giving the football game a try.

Some winnable games here. Like Tippin' Bloks. Once you win though, it goes into a harder mode.

Ian will grind on Centipede. It has 10 levels, and when he hits level 9, he'll call us over so everyone can battle the final boss for a chance at 100 tickets. He won!

I'm the best!

But it was all thanks to Ian. Thanks for getting me here buddy.

We earned 1849 tickets on 163 credits, which worked out to be 11.3 tickets per credit, which isn't too bad.

It's dinnertime. What's around here? Arbys? I like Arbys, but it's getting expensive. What's this though? A buy-one-get-one deal? That's more reasonable. How about a half-pound roast beef sandwich? No need to ask "where's the beef?" for this one. That's a lot of meat! But is it 8 ounces?

I happen to have a scale in the Prius (Theresa likes to measure most of her food), so I can actually check it! Including the box and bun, we're at nearly 10 ounces.

And both sandwiches together are 20.5 ounces. Nice.

Continuing our journey to our next stop. We're going to Washington D.C. to the National Zoo tomorrow. T is taking this leg of the drive.

Through the Baltimore Harbor Tunnel.

How about another Chuck E Cheese stop before we go to the hotel? We didn't use all our credits at the last one, so let's see what games they have here.

It's a little small, but maybe they make up for it with good ticket payouts.

Or... not. Alli and I got the Snowball Toss Bonus, beating the high score for the day. Our reward was... 0 tickets! Really? Zero? That has to be a fluke, right?

What about basketball? I can shoot pretty quick and set a high score here. For blowing the old high score out of the water and getting 100 points, I earned myself... 4 tickets.

Going even higher to 108 points, I now earned 5 tickets. Bleh.

Here's a game that'll pay out big though, right? 250 if we get all five milk jugs. Yeah, no.

Instead of getting 50 tickets for 3 jugs, we only got 10. Instead of 100 tickets for 4, we got 15. Yeah, this place is a ripoff.

Surely the Snowball Toss payout of 0 tickets was wrong. Maybe we just weren't watching the screen when the tickets showed up. We tried again and again, nothing. Lame.

Boo to you Laurel Maryland Chuck E Cheese. We're leaving with 367 tickets total. Not sure how many credits that took us, but we were all pretty disappointed with this store.

Before we go to the hotel, let's stop at yet another new Lidl for some snacks for tomorrow.

It's just 4 minutes from our hotel in Bethesda Maryland.

Hey Alli, I think there's an easier way to do that.

Chocolates, crackers, and other treats for the road.

Over at our hotel, the Hyatt Regency Bethesda. I was happy to see a free charger in the hotel parking garage for the Prius! We haven't run on electric since we left Florida!