France 09/25 – Mer de Sable + Parc Astérix

The following morning we hit the sands of

Mer de Sable

All the fun of the fééry on the previous day had meant I could land a milestone on #1800 Wild Buffalo. Not too shabby a pick, when your options are limited.

Never mind me though, let us take a moment to congratulate the park on opening their new for 2025 attraction in April. April. Imagine that.

It also recompletes the European woodie set, again. Have to stay on top of these things.

A pleasant queue with some horses and cowboys leads to a stripped back, but functional station. They were only running one train, but it was just about justifiable given the crowd levels.

Appreciate the terrain game going on, and the fact that it’s basically built on sand. There’s a proverb in there somewhere.

Wild Buffalo marks the second wooden coaster in France to commence with audio of a man shouting, in this case yee-haw (except the French spell that weird), rather than tiimmbeerr!
The drop itself is a little stumpy, this one isn’t going for raw thrills, but it’s decent enough towards the back, where the audio is also timed better.

Corners happen, GCI do love themselves a good corner. Airtime is optional.

Overall it’s an interesting, varied and smart layout, that maintains momentum rather well until the end thanks to the use of the terrain.
Nothing to write home about though, potentially your weakest ‘as new’ GCI yet. I could throw some shade at Wicker Man here, but even I have to admit that that’s better.
So I’ll give a shout out to how awful Lightning Racer runs these days instead. Horrible.
It’s a interesting one, in a country blessed with multiple 30ft Gravity Group woodies that kick your ass, this shows off the milder side of what wood can do, I guess. Worth a few laps.

Doo, do-do-do-doo, do-do-do-doo do-do-do-do-do-doo, Chikapas!

Couldn’t come here and not take a spin on the legendary dancing monkey dark ride.
Love a puppeted ride and this one’s pure class.

And that was it for Mer de Sable, have been before and already ridden the other coasters, they’re all cloney +1s.
So the buffalo is great for the park, a solid standout unique attraction, a crowdpleaser, good to see they’re going places, better than a Eurofighter etc. etc.

I particularly enjoy the fact that Mer de Sable can contently co-exist just 10 minutes from

Parc Astérix

As a man who doesn’t revisit places, this parc is now in my top 10 most visited of all time. And that includes back home in the UK.

Seems they’re always getting something to draw me back, in this case #2 Cétautomatix, a spinner that took too long to open. What year is it again?

Potatomatix is the latest spinning coaster attempt from Gerstlauer and the parc have, in keeping up with their standards, made it look very nice indeed.
The queue and surrounding area are very interactive with the ride, there’s plenty of action going on around you most of the time. Being the new attraction it had a bit of a wait, but it moved well and had some theming to look at, inside and out.
They’re obviously trying hard, staff with Ipads were counting dispatch times and the fancy live update queue TV system the park started at Toutatis makes all the guest information nice and accurate. Just needs to be rolled out to the rest of the park at some point.

After a quick indoor scene, something chariot related, you head up the lift hill to the faffing about up high section.

Faff happens, this one didn’t manage to buck the trend of Gerstlauers simply not spinning very much, unfortunately.

There’s a bonus tiny booster wheel boost in this shed (rcdb even acknowledges it, wow), which would usually be a great opportunity to me complain about such things, but I just thought it was funny here.

Then you spin round the queue a bit, experiencing some decent forces in the lower sections. Then you’re done.

S’alright.

To be honest that wasn’t really a draw, beyond the cheeky +1. I was just very excited to ride Toutatis again after it slowly but steadily smashed it’s way into my top 10, what feels like forever ago.

It’s crazy that a full queue for their biggest and best coaster is still only about 30 minutes, as if they actively don’t want it to get disproportionately busy compared to the rest of the park, which I respect.

Can someone please explain what happened to the loose article policy at this parc though? They now pull some of the dumbest shenanigans I have ever witnessed.

Gone are the station cubbies, replaced by several staff members with several trolleys that half-heartedly, or maybe not, ask some people if they want to put their loose articles in said trolley, after they’ve already been batched into the air gates.
The air gates are 3 trains deep however, so it’s very much luck of the draw as to whether you even get access to the trolley, plus there’s a huge question mark over whether you actually want to use it because it’s just parked, out in the open, in the middle of a mass of bodies in the station. A great way to get your stuff stolen.


The ride though, god damn Toutatis. Forgot how crazy even the first section is, with silly hangtime in the first sideways flop and then kicking your ass even into the swing launch.
Pantheon walked so this could run, swing launch is just so damn good with the backwards lurches and surprise airtime.
The trim brake adds to the experience, for once. The designer himself explained it to me once, so I’m a believer now. It’s not poor design, it’s an effect. He says.
Then the rest of the layout kicks ass with an over-correcting stall, that tree still sticking out there to kill you and that airtime hill still there to kill you.
Classic modern sideways hill, because everyone wants to be RMC but not any more, that doesn’t do anything. Mosasaurus Roll. Mini-Kondaa ending. A thigh-slappingly good time on the brake run. Love it.


Back to these trolleys though, seriously why? After leaving the train and the station, you get viciously blocked on the exit path by several more staff members with several more trolleys, while all the guests are faffing around with their stuff, in your face. And I guess, if you’re very lucky, your stuff might be there too.

There are so many better ways to do this, including one they already had. This ain’t it. Especially in stinky Europe.

tl;dr leave valuables with a non-rider or invest in some goony zipped pockets, it’s a bad system.

Anyway, time to chill for a bit. The Epidemais Croisieres boat ride is always good for chilling.

Rerode Trace du Hourra, the Mack Bobsled, because it’s been a lifetime. A harsh lifetime for the both of us, this has not aged well, with an amusing level of brain rumble throughout the entire course. Maybe the baffes-meter was right all along.

Looks good though, can’t deny that. Also runs many, many trains, with multiple on the lift hill, it’s coaster capacity porn up there. And has since been greatly enhanced by backstage views of Toutatis.

Rerode Oziris, used to hate it, then was indifferent to it.

Still am, except this time the trolley lottery didn’t fall in our favour, so ended up sunglass on, not wanting to care, but caring about sunglasses.

Will these iconic towers survive the new land they’re building, or will they only live on through their likeness in an obscure Chinese park?

Went to ride Pégase Express, but it had somehow ended up with an insane queue, so bailed again.

Instead here’s the obligatory upskirt of Zeus.

Tonnerre 2 Zeus was running pretty poorly, thus the golden age of the retrack lasted about 3 years. As did the offering of the backwards facing seats on the train.
The funniest part for me this time is that the ambient noise of the track and audible sounds of guest discomfort was actually louder than the deafening tunnel with themed thunder audio within the layout.
I don’t know what to think any more, the violence of Gravity Group coasters seem to be both their blessing and eventual undoing and I’m scared to ever reride my all-time favourites at this point.

Rode Vol D’Icare because it’s the last in the world, didn’t you know? RIP the UK’s most beloved theme park, apparently, according to that one tabloid, even though no one’s ever heard of it and it was stupidly expensive.
It’s fun, Zierer were on something for this technology back in the day.

In that time, Pégase Express had gone from 90+minutes to walk-on, somehow, so off we go.
For some other strange reason the station staff here came at me at a million miles an hour, like a horror film, then full body-weighted my restraint.
While attempting to relieve my sudden and immense discomfort, it launched, so that sucked.

The ride has picked up a bit of a rattle these days, dare I say the word, but still like how the layout just goes and goes out there, in an unually linear fashion. You get a nice long ride time out of this one. Or at least you would if you weren’t stapled by the restraint.

Medusa now spits on you as you leave the show scene in the shed, or at least I don’t remember her doing that before, so that’s something.


The entire queue must have evacuated to Toutatis at this point as we headed for our final laps. Guests were now doing their very best to break my earlier theorem by queueing well outside the entrance sign and around the corner.

Thus we only got to see it off one more time, but it was glorious.
And take one final laugh at the new trolleys.

The end.