In October it will be ten years since Six Flags AstroWorld packed up and left Houston without an amusement park. Next year will also be the year that the highly anticipated Grand Texas Theme Park will open up, promising to be even bigger and better than our dearly departed old rollercoaster haunt.

Still, as excited as I am for the new park next summer, this summer has me a little down in the dumps remembering all the fun times that I used to have at AstroWorld that I'll never get to share with my daughter. Oh sure, AstroWorld had its downsides. The food was bad and overpriced, it was usually dirty, and if you swallowed the Thunder River water by accident you were likely to produce a Thunder River of your own later.

But there were things you could do there you couldn't do anywhere else.

Season Passes There are plenty of places you can go and ride rides and eat fatty foods and make your parents stand in hot lines in and around Houston. The Pleasure Pier, Kemah Boardwalk, and the Downtown Aquarium all offer these things in varying degrees, and the all-day, ride-as-much-as-you-like passes are often extremely reasonably priced.

There's no season pass, though. We got season passes every year when my brother and I were kids, and sometimes my father would drop us off on the way to work as many as three days in a row. For a $10 fee you could store a cooler (Until they did away with that), so we could bring all the non-ridiculously priced food we wanted and spend all day riding over and over again without parental supervision. All for a single, annual ticket. That was value entertainment, and it's gone.

Combination Amusement/Water Park Splashtown is awesome. Don't get me wrong. I love going there, but I loved having the ability to go between AstroWorld and WaterWorld more. Get tired of the Texas Cyclone? Go hit the lazy river. When you get sick of that, head back over to XLR8.

Granted, sometimes getting between the parks involved a ridiculous hike that seemed like a weird plot to tire out swimmers before they got in the water, but the back gate near the Tidal Wave was pretty accessible if you wanted to do AstroWorld first. Plus, they were usually on the same season pass so you were getting not only value but variety. These days you have to pick one or the other.

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