Delicious lunch and inversions

Drouwenerzand Attractiepark

After visiting the Avonturenpark Hellendoorn and the Attractiepark Slagharen, slowly but surely a rather big hunger set in. The general food prices in Slagharen were quite high, so the route was aimed directly at the Drouwenerzand Attractiepark. In addition to the already reduced afternoon prices, the park attracts visitors with its inexpensive catering with Dutch specialities. As in the Wunderland Kalkar, the meals are included in the entrance fee, with the difference that here the infrastructure is also available and you don’t have to queue for hours for a small portion.

The actual theme park consists of two parts, separated by a bridge that connects the associated bungalow park with the reception. In the rear area you will find, among other things, a HUSS Break Dance, which unfortunately is very tame and had a less than great clearance, a ghost train slightly hidden behind it with a queue that hardly moves forward at all, a strange children’s carousel, a trampoline and a horse riding track.

In the front part of the park in Drouwenerzand Attractiepark, on the other hand, you will find most of the rides. In a very small space you can find a small park railway, as well as a small vintage car ride, but also classics like a boat swing, a Twister, a Kontiki, a bumper car or a wave flight. Friends of very interesting and strange rides will be well served with two unique products from KMG as well as a small rotating gondola roller coaster.

Jungle

From the outside, the gondolas of the Jungle roller coaster very roughly resemble the chaises of Maurer Söhne, only with a much simpler technique on a round disc. The track of the Wild Twister ride built by Eos Rides on the other hand only describes a very simple double oval, which has a helix in the middle of the track, providing the only slope of the ride. The turns during the ride are rather slow, but the really interesting thing about the ride is the way the cars are locked towards the end.

XLR-8

A little more exciting and nerve-racking is XLR-8. This ride, designed and built by KMG, can basically only do what its name suggests, namely accelerate, and this in a rather fast way. However, the whole thing only becomes nerve-racking when you consider the disproportionately long travel time and the resulting queue times at this machine. Although you have understood what the device can do by the third time with maximum acceleration, sometimes from a standstill, sometimes while driving, these phases are repeated almost endlessly. The ride becomes so monotonous that one should not be surprised that the ride ends up stationary in a theme park. At the latest after the eighth acceleration phase it even becomes quite exhausting for the body and it feels like sitting a Fabbri Booster at top speed or in a Tivoli remix, after all you can hardly feel your legs and the field of vision slowly but surely becomes more and more restricted. Eventually you are finally released from your restraints; however, a repeat ride is not necessary.

Para Jump

More interesting, however, is the Para Jump, which can ideally be described as a windscreen wiper with rollover gondolas. You sit back to back in three gondolas of four people each. The gondola carrier performs the same movement as the other wipers of the manufacturer, but the passenger performs a back and forth movement, which is intensified by the rotation of the gondola itself. The rollovers result in a thoroughly fast and extremely funny ride, so that it is hard to imagine taking a ride on the only one of its kind.

Pictures Drouwenerzand Attractiepark

Conclusion Drouwenerzand Attractiepark

The Drouwenerzand Attractiepark is a small but interesting amusement park which you should visit for its rare rides. The food included in the entrance fee is, in combination with the already low entrance fee, a nice extra that you should take advantage of.

 

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An Afternoon in South Denmark

Preface

After Tolk-Schau I moved on further north. Just behind the Danish border, there is the Sommerland Syd. As always in Denmark, the park is lacking a good signposting. If you didn’t know that the park existed, you would not even notice it. The first attraction you will see, is the Tornado when driving onto the parking lot. There is an afternoon ticket to the park, interestingly none of the pay offices were opened at my arrival.  

A visit to Sommerland Syd

Family Star

When entering the park, and taking a tour to your right you quickly stand on the site of the former Interpark roller coaster Kaemperutschebanen. This site is occupied by the small Fabbri spinning coaster Family Star by the German showman Alberts. A year before the same place was used by Kinzler’s Wild Mouse. Wonder what will be next…

One of the great strengths of the park is to encase their rides, so that they look integrated into the landscape. The park’s entire botany looks just beautiful and the rides support this image. Playing a game of adventure golf never looked so appealing.

King Kong

For fans of bizarre amusement rides, a ride the Hula Hoop King Kong by the German manufacturer Klaus is a really good choice. The calypso-like ride surprises  by its fast paced motion, which is somehow reduced when the main plate starts to lift. The ride is fun and definitely unique. Unluckily, only a few of these were build.

Afrikaland

If this unique ride is not special enough, you can have fun in Afrikaland – the dark ride next door. This rides features not only very narrow clearance gauges, it also offers a fun descent and lots of (somewhat) trashy scenery. For such a small footprint, this ride is very entertaining, even through it is not as good as the Ocean of Darkness of the Dutch amusement park Attractiepark Slagharen.

Amazonas

If all of this was still not bizarre enough, you can hop to the other side of the park for a ride on the Shoot the Chute Amazonas. To be honest, this ride needs a disclaimer before boarding as not everybody will understand the brilliant cannibalism jokes during the dark rides section of the ride; some kids might also start to cry. Apart from the Danish Humour, the rides features two drops which will get you wet.

Tornado

The most beautiful and largest gem of the park is the Vekoma Invertigo Tornado. It was once installed in the Swedish Tivoli Liseberg where it was removed – although very popular – due to noise issues. Before coming to Sommerland Syd, the ride was relocated to Greece, where it was never been rebuild due to missing permissions.

Back in Scandinavia, the ride offers the perfect occasion for those who always wanted to try ridding the first half of the popular Boomerang coasters backwards. This can even be spiced up a little when looking at your friends and family (or any other park guest) when sitting in the middle sections of the train. The ride itself is smooth and fun. Due to the suspended design of the train, it is also quite thrilling one.

Pictures Sommerland Syd

Conclusion Sommerland Syd

I was very pleased by my visit to Sommerland Syd. The park offers some good rides and even some gems. While the swimming pool of this sommerland is not the biggest, it is perfect enough to just spend some time over there and having fun on the water slides. For children the park is a pure play, climbing and hopping paradise, where you can be sure that they will fall asleep just a few minutes after leaving the parking lot at the end of the day.  Although there are still some places in the park that should be better renewed, I’m in good hope with new owners of the park.

PS: Sommerland Syd closed just one year after my visit. Most of the rides could be sold to the Polish amusement park Legendia, where they support their incredible portfolio. The Invertigo coaster by the dutch manufacturer Vekoma can now be found in the French theme park Bagatelle in the region Hauts-de-France.

 

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A day at Thorpe Park

Preface

Because of a wonderful cheap flight to London (with all fees 16€ for there and back) via Lübeck, I thought it would be time to visit Thorpe Park during the Fright Night event. Soon some more people were found who wanted to do this for a long time and so we could set off.

As with every proper tour, something had to happen and our Stefan, who practically defies all danger, had a small fracture five days before departure. In short: We were only two of us now and our luxury plane from Ryanair took off on schedule. Many thanks to Merlin Entertainments, who refunded our money at Madame Tussauds and sent us a ticket for the next season at Thorpe Park.

After we took the coach from London Stansted to Liverpool Street Station and made our way from there to Waterloo Station, we were already on the train to Staines, where we took the shuttle bus to the park at about 9 am. Quickly we picked up the prepaid Bloody Horrible tickets (Thorpe Park and London Dungeon) and we were ready to go.

Tour of the park

Colossus

The first ride of the day was Colossus. The ride is quite comfortable, but the one or other encounter of head and shoulder restraints in the first two inversion figures could not be avoided. I personally would consider the corkscrews and the last Heartlineroll as the highlight of the course, because the ride feeling of these two is much better than the rest of the course. Colossus is also very photogenic and due to its location wonderfully laid out.

Logger’s Leap

Roller coaster #2 was to become the nearby Eurofighter. Since it was supposed to open a little bit late, we decided to take a ride on the log flume Logger’s Leap. The ride has a pleasant level of wetness, whereas the drop in the dark is quite nasty and soaks you a bit. The double drop that follows later is not so wet, but offers a nice portion of airtime.

Slammer

For dry spinning we went to the nearby Sky Swat Slammer. S&S really did something massive with this machine. The ride is intense and very fun (I would not market this thing as a family ride).

Nemesis Inferno

This was followed by Nemesis Inferno, which alone is very convincing because of the part in front of the lift. But if the queue is empty, you have to zigzag a few times to get to the station (with Tidal Wave the longest queue to be crossed during the day). The ride is quite amusing from my point of view, which is why the ride became the first B&M Coaster that I enjoyed.

Stealth

St.Jimmy now saw the roller coaster of his desire, which is why we immediately set off in the direction of Stealth. Quickly we handed in our luggage and off we went. The launch was nice and the top hat afterwards too. Especially in the front part of the train it is very convincing. The descent is awesome, only the hill that follows is not very pleasant.

Tidal Wave

Since the weather was oddly good and therefore T-shirt weather prevailed, the Spillwater Tidal Wave had to be ridden as well (although it should be done in all weather conditions). The ride itself was great and with Slammer, X:\No Way Out and the new Coaster for the year 2012 the only reason for me to visit the park again.

X:\No Way Out

Let us now come to one of the highlights in the park: X:\No Way Out. You only hear mostly bad things about the ride, but it deserves the appreciation of some fans who enjoy the special. The ride is perfect in what it does, which is why I am so enthusiastic about it. All in all one of the best indoor coasters I ever had the pleasure to ride. Many thanks to Vekoma for this ride.

Saw – The Ride

Since meanwhile also Saw – The Ride ran, we joined the line. The queue was moving quite fast, so it didn’t take us long to get to the station. Again we had to hand in our bags and take a seat in one of the two trains, which are loaded at the same time.

We could experience our first ride in the first row and were immediately taken with the dark ride part. The first drop is pretty intense and the roll after the block brake has a nasty little extra, but I won’t tell you more. The outdoor part can be described very well by one word: fast. Not only does the lift run at top speed, but the car is also just racing down the track. On block brakes no consideration is taken into account, so that one experiences partly extremely positive and negative forces without braking.

Flying Fish

We almost forgot the Powered Coaster Flying Fish, but we still didn’t want to miss this roller coaster. I haven’t ridden the standard model from Mack Rides for a very long time, which made me very happy. Nevertheless I think that there is something missing at the coaster. A tunnel at the end would make the ride much more interesting, but the 4 laps are a lot of fun even without a tunnel. The beautifully designed train does its best for that.

Rush

Let us now come to the S&S Screamin’ Swing Rush. Praised by many we wanted to test this ride of course. It’s fun for a few seconds, but in general the ride is much too short and the rocking motion is not that special.

Samurai

Between Saw and Colossus there is the Mondial Top Scan Samurai. After many years, it was nice to see a Top Scan once again in person. The ride was okay, at least it was better than the rides on the other flat rides in the park.

Detonator

Very close to Nemesis Inferno is the Fabbri Tower Detonator. Like its 40m high brothers (to be found in Attractiepark Slagharen, BonBon-Land, …) this tower offers airtime in masses. The Humpty Dumpty rhyme before the fall is a really nice feature for Halloween.

The waiting times were generally between 0 and 20 minutes during the day. In the meantime it was also necessary to wait 50 minutes for Nemesis Inferno. Because of the Fright Nights, Thorpe Park was open until 8 pm, so some reruns could be done in the dark; after all, most of the English were waiting over 60 minutes for the Mazes.

Pictures Thorpe Park

 


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