How many have you got at the moment? I’m currently on 72, and I’ve got a personal goal to reach 100 coasters by the time I turn 20 years old (31st July 2023, for reference), but whether I achieve that or not is another matter entirely, what with COVID still on the loose.
My mum and dad have previously expressed interest in doing a fly and drive holiday on the West Coast of America, so I think that region is definitely somewhere they’d be willing to go (I think this may have been spurred by a trip my great aunt did a few years back, where she started in San Francisco, met up with a relative of ours who lives in America who joined her on the trip and then drove southwards through California before finishing in Las Vegas/Nevada. She even saw Manhattan Express and sent me a picture!).
However, I can almost guarantee you that if I ever went to the West Coast of America with my parents, it would not be a theme park holiday, or at least not in the same vein as a trip to Florida usually is. They would have their sights set on many of California/Western America’s non-coaster landmarks shaping their route, and would probably only want to visit a theme park if it was conveniently placed along the route. From what I can tell, California’s parks are a lot more spaced out than Central Florida’s, thus making a theme park trip somewhat harder, and they’re also not particularly close to any of the area’s major tourist landmarks, on the whole (bar Hollywood/Los Angeles).
California is also a much longer flight than Florida, and the 8-9 hour flight to Florida often exhausts us enough, so I’m not sure how keen they’d be to go on a plane for 50% longer...
This is a nice idea, and something that I myself like the idea of, but it’s not the sort of thing I could see my parents wanting to do, especially looking at the sort of accommodation many people seem to stay in on these kinds of trips. I used to watch Shawn Sanbrooke’s European road trip videos, for example, and get ideas of how you could do that sort of thing cheaply. It looked great to me, but my mum would often disapprove of the types of accommodation he stayed in.
It’s also worth remembering that my parents don’t have bags of money to keep going on all of these lavish, expensive theme park trips all the time, and even if they did, they don’t want to be going to a theme park on every holiday they go on (as much as I would!), and that’s more than fair (especially considering that they’re the ones paying for them). I will probably do these types of trips more once I live on my own and can travel a little more freely.
For now, I’m immensely grateful that my parents take me to theme parks at all!
