Beech Bend Expects 200,000 More Visitors

[GADVwow]

...“That’s what we need to pay for this,” park owner Dallas Jones said Friday in unveiling his plans for the more than $5 million expansion of the water park and improvements to the amusement park.

Jones said he hopes to pull heavily from the Nashville, northern Tennessee area, which could mean overnight visits for area hotels....

Gonzalez said she has been dreaming about the water park expansion for nearly two years.

The three-acre expansion will include a wave pool that will have eight wave chambers and different wave patterns. A lazy river that will encircle the addition will actually run through the wave pool.

Sunscreen, inner tubes and parking will be free for the new attraction, but gate prices are likely to go up, Gonzalez said.

For now, Jones bragged, residents could get one of the best bargains around on a preseason purchase of a pass - $79.95 for an entire season.

Even before the plans for the water park were finalized, Jones already had committed to adding two rides to the park - a family tea cup ride and a quad runner for small children. On Tuesday, he finalized plans to add a new amphitheater....

http://bgdailynews.com/articles/2009/11/14/news/news5.txt

[AV Matt]

Good news for Beech Bend. Hopefully they can keep it up. The park has a lot of potential. It just needs some sprucing up.

[GADVwow]

The topic headline should say 200,000 more visitors.  Hopefully a mod will fix it, since you can't report your own posts here!

I hate it when newspaper headline writers leave out commas!

[rjholla2003]

I'm just curious how the lazy river will go through the wave pool.  That sounds VERY interesting!

[AV Matt]

I'm guessing it goes underneath the wavepool.

[rjholla2003]

I was thinking it might run between the wave channels.  Under is an interesting twist as well.

[AV Matt]

Seems like it would cause all sorts of congestion and safety concerns having it spill into oncoming waves. Only Mt. Olympus would do something like that.

[rjholla2003]

I don't see why it would have to do all that.  The wave channels usually have walls between them anyway.

[B-mac]

Like Dorney?

[Robert T Ackerman]

I can't think of a wavepool that doesn't have walls...

[AV Matt]

Yeah, I don't understand what that is supposed to mean. If the river went through the middle of the wavepool, the waves would cross the river and continue out to the lawn chairs. People on the lazy river would suddenly be hit with oncoming waves and  be pushed into all of the wavepool people, bombarding them with inner-tubes. Sounds like a recipe for chaos and danger to me.

[B-mac]

I think they mean the wave pool is split into two sides and has the river going through the middle of the "two" wavepools. Then and again, we need to see the pics of this to be fully sure what it is.