We had such a good time at Night of the Jack last year, that we were waiting for an opportunity to see Holiday Road as soon as we could. Back in early Nov, I found out that my mother, who just had knee surgery and is currently wheelchair bound, would be making a very rare visit to Los Angeles and thought it would be the perfect time to go see Holiday Road!
Unfortunately, it was A COMPLETE SH*T SHOW. We were so disappointed. We found out it would be raining severely during our planned visit day and we were not available to go any other day, so we contacted the event organizers to see if we could get a refund or trade our tickets for one of next year's events. No such luck. :( We were told we could trade for another day during this year's event, but aside from that, we were stuck with 3 tickets that we would probably not be able to use. I let them know my mother was in need of a wheelchair and inquired if they might have wheelchairs available at the event to rent, but they did not. This would have been a great time for customer service to tell me that the mud would be ankle deep and that a wheelchair would never be able to make it through the parking lot, let alone the rest of the course. Sadly, they failed to do this. We knew it would be muddy, but we just had no idea how bad it would really be.
I had heard that the clouds might part for an hour or two just about the time we planned to attend and we hated to see so much money go to waste, so we decided to make a go of it. Thank goodness we did not bring the wheelchair with us! ..or a walker for that matter. Neither would NEVER have made it through this slippy slide of a mess. As it was, the cane was getting halfway stuck in the mud with every step, which made getting out of the place a nightmare.
There were no boards or planks for visitors to step on in the deepest places, no signs warning about the slipper, squishy conditions, it was just a total bust. On top of that, we saw many of the giant snowflake decorations were cut in half and battered, the Frosty the Snowman blow up decoration was splattered with mud, making it look like someone who had just left a murder scene, one of the bigger decorations that was covered in hundreds of blinking and flashing lights had most of the front facing lights burnt out, about 1/3 of the blow up decorations were completely deflated and the course was super dark so that you could not see if you were about to step into a puddle of water or a patch of squishy slippery mud..Even when we all had our cellphone flashlights on, we could still just barely what we were about to step into. In addition, the music at some of the speaker locations was so loud, we could not hear ourselves calling to each other to watch out for this pothole or that puddle. There were only a handful of vendors there (As compared to what we saw at Night of the Jack), which was especially disappointing. We figured if we had to wait it out in the vendor truck area, at least we could do some shopping, but there was not a lot to see or buy at all.
We were about 3/4 of the way through, when we decided it was too dangerous for my elderly mother with a barely functioning knee to continue on. But she was so concerned about turning back and going back through the puddles, potholes and muck, that she opted against hope that the way forward would get easier. It didn't.
When we finally got to the front near the parking, I stayed with her while my wife went to get the car, which of course got stuck in the mud. We called for help, but were able to rock it back and forth out of the mud before help ever arrived. We were hoping things might clear up enough for us to get through it all without heavy rain. It only sprinkled on us, so that is the one good thing that happened for us. We had hoped not to waste so much money by throwing out the tickets and took a chance, but if we had known how bad it would really be, we would definitely never have gone at all. And that is my main complaint here. There should have been warnings online, in the emails between me and customer service and posted at the entrance to the event, as well as throughout the event that the conditions were so poor. When the customer service rep realized that I was planning to bring somebody in a wheelchair, that person should have spoken up and told us truthfully what the conditions would be. The whole thing was a major fail. It was just really disappointing. read more