Europe 08/20 – Freizeitpark Plohn

Day 5

Freizeitpark Plohn

Today would see us visit a park I’d been eager to get to for a while now. Partly to check out their ride lineup (which just got much more exciting) and partly because thanks to Heartline the park was somewhat of a legend. He had a real miserable time last time he visited the park and I’ve made him recount the stories so many times that I almost feel as if been to the park myself at this point. Well today was the day for me to get my own Plohn experience, could it possibly be as bad as it was for Heartline last time?

Things certainly started terrible, as we got stuck in stand still traffic for half an hour just 5 miles from the park. Thankfully we still managed to make it before opening and were soon walking through Plohn’s newly refurbished entrance building.

Dynamite

And heading straight to the park’s latest and greatest coaster, Dynamite.

Dynamite is Mack’s 2nd attempt at their BigDipper model and it would be an understatement to say that Lost Gravity is a hard act to follow. I absolutely love that coaster, with it’s vicious airtime, violent laterals and snappy inversions. Does Dynamite stand any chance of even coming close to the original?

Well I didn’t think so. After looking at the layout and watching the POV, Dynamite appeared very short, lacking of airtime and not as crazy as Lost Gravity. And then I actually rode it…

I never should have never doubted the Mack boys, because they have absolutely smashed it out of the park with Dynamite, this thing is awesome. Yes, it is very short, but a lot of great things happen in the short amount of ride time.

Much like Lost Gravity, Dynamite is a vicious blend of airtime, crazy laterals and forceful inversions. Unlike Lost Gravity however, because it’s so short and has no mid course brakes, Dynamite throws all it’s violence at you in quick succession. This leads to Dynamite being a more intense experience, if also a much shorter one. This also helps make both coasters feel unique from each other, which is fine because I’ve got more than enough room in my heart for both.

Drachenwirbel

After that very strong start we’d next kill the mood slightly by queuing too long for the park’s SBF spinner.

Raupe

The mood was then saved by the World’s greatest Wacky Worm. The ride operator was loudly listening to the radio, which was propped up on a seat by the control panel. It wasn’t club tunes or chart toppers blaring out though, it was a severly depressed German man breaking down while singing a song that was as tragic as it was catchy. I’ve never laughed this hard on a Wacky Worm before, I probably never will again.

Miniwah

Next up was Miniwah, one of the few highlights from Heartline’s last visit. The attraction is a heavily themed, completely enclosed, modern Mack powered coaster and it’s amazing. You take the first lap slowly to take in all the theming, then you power through the final 2 at full speed. It may be the slower first lap playing tricks but this thing seriously hauled when it got going.

El Toro

Before Mack graced the park with Dynamite, their star attraction was El Toro. El Toro is a GCI woodie that I previously was really excited to try, this was until I rode countless mediocre GCI creations and put myself off the idea.

Thankfully El Toro was the reintroduction to GCI that I’ve been waiting for and is a seriously fantastic wooden coaster. The bull is relentless and determined to keep you anywhere but your seat, hitting you with non stop pops of ejector, while also throwing you from side to side. It’s fast, it’s fun, it’s the reason I fell in love with GCI 5 years ago, why can’t they all be this good?

Plohseidon

The final coaster of the park was Plohseidon and it was here that I got to experience an event similar to what Heartline had promised me. When it was our time to board the ride the operator opened the airgates for us but then walked off to play on his phone. After a while he came back and instructed us to lower our restraints. He then dispatched the coaster without checking the bars and as soon as we left the station he went straight back to playing on his phone…

After a quick lunch in the car we returned for more re-rides on Dynamite and El Toro before calling it a day when we were satisfied. Despite the warnings I managed to have a good day at Freizeitpark Plohn. As a park, today it was fine, if a little unprofessional in places. It’s the Dynamite/El Toro combo that really make the park worth the visit though.

Now it was time to drive to Poland and with that comes a great story.

After crossing the border almost nothing changed visually, other than Zadra billboards every now and again, it remained this way for the whole time we were on the motorway. Then it came to leaving…

Heartline was sure he’d booked a hotel just off the motorway, so we were all a bit surprised when the sat nav said we still had 30 minutes of driving left to do after we left. What followed was 30 minutes of driving on bad roads through small villages that were decreasing in quality and increasing in hostility the further we went.

2 minutes from our destination we entered a village in ruins, with a rabble of large aggressive looking men staring us down as we drove past. Please don’t let the hotel be here…

2 minutes later we apparently arrived at our destination as we drove past a collapsed farm house. Right… I think the sat nav is probably wrong. Let’s check Google Maps. Good news? We aren’t staying near the scary men. Bad news? We’re staying miles away, just off the motorway, where we’ve just come from…

But the story didn’t end there…

We started to follow Google Maps now, which took us on a different set of awful roads to get us back to where we started. These roads were terrible but they were about to get far worse. Out of nowhere the road we were on dropped 2 feet and turned into vicious cobblestones. We didn’t have time to react before we got true ejector air in a car and things got extremely bumpy. Conditions stayed this way for many miles before we finally found our way back to civilization.

After all that the hotel turned out to possibly be the nicest of the entire trip, which is a massive relief when just 30 minutes ago we had already accepted our fate of sleeping in a barn with 20 angry Polish men.

Thanks for reading, click here for the next part of my report, 2 glorious days with Zadra and Hyperion at Energylandia.