Went to the park today.
Got two rides on Emperor. They were running one train the day before Thanksgiving.....one train. The wait wasn't terrible for my second ride as I only waited about 35 min and that was for the front row! First time I didn't have to wait long at all as that was the first ride I hit up this morning. I did get a glimpse of the footers going into place for Arctic Rescue. They had the dirt area and footers in place for the supports and track to go in.
Manta had the worst line out of all the rides. Get this: They were only running two trains, but they literally went out of their way to make the ops as crap as possible. They didn't use the exit station but instead had the guests exit out on the entrance station and waited until the second train has hit the final brake run until they finally decide to load the empty train. Remember, they let the entire train sit empty in the station the entire time the second train is dispatched. When guests are finally loading and having their restraints checked, the second car is sitting there waiting at the exit station for the first train to dispatch so they can unload the second train on the exit platform! WTH. They did this the entire time in line which looked like maybe a 30-45 min wait with good ops but turned into nearly two hours.
Oh, it gets better. One of the ride ops in charge of dispatching the trains had to run out of his position to assign rows and decided to assign me to the front row, which already had a stacked wait. He then runs out of the entrance ramp and back to his position to open the gates to dispatch the train. Easily the most grossly inept ops I've ever seen at that park. Other than that, Electric Eel and Atlantis had good ops.
Gonna come back once Arctic Rescue opens. Hopefully they won't be so wildly incompetent with Manta ops this time and Emperor will run two trains.