Norway 08/23 – Tusenfryd
Back down Oslo way it was time for our supposed revenge with spite: the dragon legend. Things looked rough on arrival as we were directed into an overflow car park I never knew existed before, though actually ended up closer to the gates than the regular car park, with less stairs and better views of the rides, so bonus.
Day 3 (still) – Tusenfryd
Season passes slowly starting to pay off now, for the wrong reasons, we slid in up that classic escalator and headed straight for the main event.
#1 HuriHuri had a bit of a queue, but geography. It’s an underwhelming little spinner type thing that is at least custom or unique, for now, I think.
A touch of rain filled the air as we headed to the actual main event. Will this thing cease operation for the weather again? Better not. Things got ominous with breakdown announcements and operational delays the instant we entered the queue, getting more than a little wet now. Thankfully they fixed whatever teething troubles were going down and after a few overly low capacity cycles we were primed and ready.
Or was I ready? #2 Storm – The Dragon Legend kicks more ass than perhaps it would suggest. It begins with no more than a trundle of a forwards launch and up an incline that has nothing to offer yet, but the backwards part of the triple launch sequence has a surprise kick to it and then, if seated towards the rear of the train, the last inversion has some wicked hangtime to offer. Lap bars, lap bars, lap bars. For some reason I didn’t think Gerstlauer would do it for this, they make all the difference.
The layout proper is short and sweet of course, but each of the three inversion shapings have decent forces to offer and the airtime hill is pretty great. There’s a bit of positive imperfection and character to it that I found too – in the most positive-heavy parts of track, a solid moment of being forced into the seat suddenly turns into an amusing rattle as though it can’t quite handle it.
Overall I thoroughly enjoyed it, and couldn’t help but think that I’d like to see more of this style of attraction, but longer. There’s still an opening for this type of invert to become a gamechanger in the market right now, with Intamin still sleeping on it since Duelling Dragons Someone put some money down, these things have potential.
The rest of the visit didn’t go so well, in true Tusenfryd style. Was spited the dark ride for the third time on the bounce.
Thundercoaster was walk on and I was looking forward to getting reacquainted with the somewhat sleeper hit of a revamped Vekoma woodie. Though they’ve obviously done some retracking recently, it was riding hilariously poorly in the back row, with everyone up in front being visibly assaulted through any high force moments. The vibration was so bad to the point of blurring vision at times, but otherwise not detrimental to health like some woodies can be to me. The good parts were still there in principle, it’s a decent layout, but they were so sapped of energy from the carnage that it was all a bit of a shame.
As was the fact that they broke Speed Monster before we got round to reacquainting with that one too. It never reopened either, so closed the day with a few more flights on the dragon. Some success I guess, but perhaps I can never truly complete this park.