Europe 08/20 – Freizeitpark Plohn

I hit the highest speed I’ve ever done in a car on the way to this park on my previous visit – a sweet 222kph (138mph) in some poxy sporty Renault hire car thing that I didn’t like very much. I set out on this trip with the intention of besting that and it finally happened on almost the same stretch of road – a scary 236kph (146mph), most satisfyingly, in my own vehicle. Autobahns are the best.
Amusingly the packaging for the GB magnet we slapped on the boot claimed it was only rated up to 130, but it held on like a true survivor.
I’m happy with the result, it’s a decent step up but it’s also nice to say that I’ve still been faster on a rollercoaster and I don’t really want to beat that again now unless it’s in a very significant manner (waiting on my company M5).

You know I said I wasn’t overly keen on returning to Tripsdrill? Well I least I haven’t been cursing their very name for many years now. I have for Plohn. The park put me in such a mood last time with their 19th century entrance facilities and shambolic operations but they had to go and get a Mack Big Dipper didn’t they.

Day 5 – Freizeitpark Plohn

And that’s where we shall begin. Their new coaster has been built on the site of former coaster Silver Mine, even sharing the same entrance as before and credit to them, there’s lots of little relics of the old ride kicking around to build a bit of history – pieces of track, signs and props. I appreciate that stuff, even though it used to be a totally unremarkable attraction.

Where the old meets new in the queue, there’s this guy animatedly waffling on about Dynamite and not far beyond that is the station, where a staff member was rocking a Mack rides t-shirt. Good man.
I leapt straight into my comfy winged bucket seat – I’ve been eager for the world to have more of these ever since Lost Gravity existed.

Being a dive drop, the start isn’t quite as vicious as it’s forebearer but it has a certain snap to it and you’re immediately thrust into a surprise, 2ft high, speed hill in a shed, which is brilliant. It whipped the face covering off my left ear every single lap without fail.

The train fires out of that into a weird top hat thing – again, I would have liked it a bit more violent. This is followed by an intense turn back through the shed before violence is restored with a tiny, shouty twisted airtime hill.

Loop de loop and Zero-G and aww, it’s over. I loved Dynamite far more than I had expected to, but it is just as short as I had anticipated and that is inevitably a bit of a downer. Just means you have to ride it more I guess. Fantastic investment for the park.

But that’s not all that’s new, oh no. SBF ‘3 loop’ spinner with a couple of dragon statues? Yes please.
Also the longest queue of the day. Ouch.

One of us needed the cred, so this became my second ever re-ride on a Wacky Worm (and proud) following the one in Great Yarmouth. This was greatly enhanced by a radio in the station that was playing German country music with a gravelly voiced man who was singing his heart out and had clearly experienced a lot of pain in his life. The parallel was comedy gold.

My guilty pleasure from the previous visit was the all indoor powered mine train which is amazingly themed and does the first lap in slow motion to let you soak it all in before cranking it up a few notches for two more. No one screamed this time either, so it was even better.
It’s one of the newest installations of these and it seems the world doesn’t really want to build them any more, which is a shame considering the potential this particular example demonstrates.

The other star attraction which now compliments Dynamite nicely is of course the woodie, the wrong El Toro.
It was just as good as I remembered it being. An aggressive, fast paced ride packed full of little airtime pops that bounce you out of your seat every few seconds – something GCI seems to only be able to deliver on 50% of their builds, for reasons that still evade me. This is why we can’t have nice things.

I’m going to build on the tradition of posting a picture of a goat every time I visit this park which, you know, hopefully never again.

Obviously I liked the place more this time. They’ve entered the 21st century with online ticketing and they’ve doubled their count of kick-ass coasters. The operations were less offensive, though still questionable. It’s a very… easy going/unprofessional atmosphere when they’re checking their Whatsapp in the middle of operating a major ride or simply wandering off to have a chat, leaving nobody paying attention or remotely near an E-stop. The sort of attitude you wish everywhere could have, until it goes wrong of course.

Luckily nothing had gone wrong for us so far. I was now teetering on 4-figure cred territory and it was time to drive to Poland.

I don’t want to be one of those guys who blames the sat nav for everything, but stories have to be told. We had read something on UK government advice about how terribly dangerous the roads in Poland are – they’re made of old bones and everyone who gets in a car dies, the usual propaganda. For the first couple of hours on motorway it was smooth as anything, there were regular billboards advertising Zadra to scream at and I was enjoying the second fastest country in Europe.
Upon leaving the motorway we apparently had another 30 minutes to go. This seemed a little off as, in my head, I had booked a hotel that was ‘just off’ the main road. Perhaps I didn’t look hard enough and there’s no exit nearby or maybe booking.com is being an arse with the map again. Oh well.
As we delved deeper into smaller and smaller villages that started to look like they’d belong next to Plohn, it started to seem less and less likely. It’ll be just round this corner, it’ll be just over that hill. We’ve stayed in weirder places.
You have arrived at your destination.
We were getting funny looks from villagers and there ain’t no hotel here, so I kept driving. The road suddenly became exactly as described by the government and as we opened our mouths to make a joke about this, it immediately got 10 times worse. It came out of nowhere and I hit it far too fast. I was winded with laughter as a result. This country road is made of cobblestones and if I do any more than 20Mph over this we’re going to explode. You know those Top Gear challenges where they’re driving hundreds of miles on rough tracks, shouting in pain and bits of the car falling off every other mile. That.
Google had stepped in to get us out of this emergency and we were a long way from home (well, exactly 30 minutes back to where I thought we should have been). The quality of the road managed to break Google for the remainder of the trip as the satellites were never quite in alignment again.
Fortunately we didn’t die. We saw no other cars apart from another Brit who also seemed lost – I think they took a wrong turn in front of us and might still be there now. We saw lots of old bicycles and got to witness the more colourful side of rural Polish life so, you know, culture.
The hotel was like a beautiful stately home on the outside, modern and professional on the inside, once we actually found it, so that was a relief. My car was now making a resonant rattling sound that it had never done before, but we checked under the bonnet for fire and the noise was gone by the following morning.

Day 6

Europe 08/20 – Geiselwind + many Wiegands

Day 4 – Geiselwind

I remember intentionally skipping this park a few years ago, describing it to myself as ‘£30 for a Boomerang’, and who wants that? Thankfully in a short space of time they’ve doubled their count and introduced a ride type that I’ve been saying I want to try for a good while now, so the time had come to check the place out.

For some reason I had imagined it to be a bit ‘concrete and riiides’ or a glorified funfair, so I was surprised to see how nice the surroundings of each area were.

The rate of expansion seems to be continuing with about 30 shiny new kiddie flat rides multiplying across the left end of the park. With another prompt arrival we had been left to wait for things to open and as the time approached, opted to start strong.

On a Wacky Worm of course. That dog façade doesn’t fool me.

Deep in the forest was the ride I was most eager to experience, if only for sadistic reasons. It’s one of those coasters you hear about being so bad that you simply have to form your own opinion. A ride that was ‘too forceful’ to ever actually open in the US, although they were likely mistaking poor build quality for intensity.
As if to match the reputation, a good number of these installations are located in countries that aren’t the most inviting, so the fact that this travelling one has settled in Germany is a bonus. Aside from that, as ride types go, I really am starting to run out of new things and the legendary Interpark Wild Wind was surprisingly firm in the foreground of significance.

All that went out the window as soon as we boarded though. What fresh hell is this? The awkward seating position that almost isn’t fit for adults, the over the shoulder restraints that are equal parts tough and flimsy and now we’re climbing the lift. Assume the brace position.

I’ve had worse, but it did give my ears a bashing just from how poorly it negotiated the track. This was mostly in the pointless double helix rather than the inversion, which provided a wild wrenching action that wasn’t actually as bad as it looks. As the train powered back into the station I was glad it was over and done with but wait, no, 2 laps? I know it’s short but that’s really not necessary.
This time I opted to lean forward so my skull could take over from the ears and now we can relax. As if that wasn’t headache inducing enough we’ve got a Boomerang to go yet…

For a brief respite, the bog standard layout of the powered mine train was next. We are looking a bit funfair now.

I suppose one advantage of not being able to go anywhere this year is that it’s been 8 months since I’ve ridden one of these.
You know what? Whether it was the Wild Wind talking or the way they’ve looked after their ‘star attraction’ here, it wasn’t actually that offensive. It’s old, so none of that gross instant backwards braking.

Moving onto better things, a second new ride type for me. The world’s one and only Zierer spinner.
It has an identity crisis at the moment, with new signage trying to blend it in with nearby attractions, calling it Piraten Spinner. All the old signs are still up inside the footprint as well though and I think Drehgondelbahn sounds better anyway. More German at least.

I did like this one. The perpetual spinning throughout the whole layout is amusing and as it dives into the indoor tunnel there’s one particularly violent piece of tracking that delivered comedy at different angles for every single one of the 10+ laps.

The final cred is yet another world exclusive Zierer as far as I can tell. Drachen Höhle is one of those coasters in the (half) dark that is more fun than it should be. A few lights and a bit of smoke can go a long way when all you’re doing is corners. The face on the car design helps too of course.

And with that we were 6 for 6. It may not be the strongest of line-ups but at least there’s a good dose of obscurity in there. Great place to spend a morning of credding.

AltmühlBOB

A couple of years ago I remember seeing something about this alpine coaster with massive airtime hills but to be honest I had completely forgotten its existence immediately afterwards.
During my heavy trawling through Germany on coast2coaster, trying to pad the trip out again after losing several countries, I rediscovered this gem in the middle of nowhere.

Turns out the place was super popular and we struggled to park, ending up improvising with a couple of other cars in an overflow field that may or may not have been trespassing. There was a huge, mostly unfathomable queue of guests adjacent to the road for both the rides and ticket window simultaneously and in a very un-German fashion it was poorly organised and signposted, with queue-jumping actually becoming a necessity for people to make it work.

I didn’t actually realise that, though it makes sense, you don’t get to control this bad boy. Just flip the lid, get comfy and let it do its thing to you.

It’s obvious looking at it now that giving someone the power to slow down would lead to disaster.
I loved this thing. All these new experiences in one day – it’s getting a bit overwhelming.
The starting double down wasn’t quite all there but the power of the 3 hills combined with a very vulnerable, almost lying down position and nothing but a car seatbelt made for a cracking ride.
As you come screaming over the final crest you find yourself instinctively scrambling for a brake lever regardless. It hits the fins hard enough to make Stealth blush.

There’s also a traditional Alpine here. It began to rain heavily as we ascended the lift so I don’t remember much beyond hurrying to the bottom to get it over with and then sprinting back to the car before we got bogged down in someone else’s field.

Erlebnisfelsen Pottenstein

There was just enough time for one more park, though we were beginning to get a little worried about last entry rules. Luckily this place was as busy as the one before, the sun was back in the sky and they were even holding people outside of the entrance to keep the numbers down. With the money they’ll be raking in right now, looks like the hours are going to be extended.

Situated atop the hill this time, there’s another Wiegand monopoly going on.

Straight onto another alpine coaster, this one brought the fear back. When I say hill, it’s more of a cliff down there and there’s these unnervingly large drops directly into corners that, once again, surely you can’t go full speed or you’ll just fly off and become a fireball. Do they rely on Darwinism?

The other ride was an older lift hill version of the Hummel Brummel hardware the previous day. I found ‘the witches’ broom’ to be far superior, not least for the fact that you get to push the green dispatch button yourself. That’s a childhood dream come true right there.

As soon as the lift is cleared it started swinging much more than I had come to expect and as the seats enthusiastically wind their way down the hill there’s a trim brake every 5 seconds to stop it getting out of control. I imagine this is what you’d get if you tried to build Ninja at Magic Mountain, in your garden. And I see a point to that.

Day 5

Europe 08/20 – Tripsdrill + Schwaben Park

I wasn’t overly thrilled at the prospect of returning to this place, but the attractive looking Vekoma STC had definitely caught my attention, as much for the ride interaction as well as the relative uniqueness of the ride type so far. We had struggled to make even a morning out of Tripsdrill 5 years ago with mediocre rides and poor weather, so hopefully another couple of attractions and some sunshine could tip the scales in their favour.

Day 3 – Tripsdrill

They weren’t staggering openings as much as previously so the morning began straight away on the newness. It looks like they’ve got great plans for the station next year but at the moment it’s quite amusing to see no roof, bare concrete and a temporary shed for ops as though they literally got to 5pm on the 25th June, told contractors to down tools and leave on the spot. That’ll do lads.

It has a cool name and a cool ride. The trains with their backpack theming are great to both look at and sit in. It rides super smooth and can be forceful in some of the turns.

It didn’t quite deliver what I was expecting though. Foolishly I think I was after something a little more than the ‘family thrill’ that seems to do so well for the park. The ride lacked a certain spark that I can’t quite put my finger on and nothing more seemed to be brought to the table over the bigger SFC layout other than some inversions which are fine at best, if a little repetitive. I appreciate the fact that they chucked in some attempts at airtime hills to break the flow, even if they weren’t particularly prominent.
I’d probably just put it as the best coaster in the park, but that’s faint praise.

The other Vekoma is pretty much finished, other than the end spike which will eventually burst through the other station nicely.

Again I like the train & station details and overall look of this one. The Junior Boomerang layout being much more linear and packed with hills is a welcome change to the usual compact turns and I’d say that makes it a little stronger than others of its type.

Once we had soaked up enough of the new area, it was time to revisit the rest of the park.

The Gerstlauer Bobsled seemed to ride a little better than previous experiences, making the airtime hill section a bit more potent. Love how overgrown this has gotten now and that you can’t even see the track from most angles, it’s becoming a part of nature.

I think I like this woodie a little more than most. Sure it’s underwhelming, but not to the point of being uninteresting. It bounces around with a certain charm and has some decent twisty moments.

Their Gerstlauer Infinity was exactly the same as I remembered it, 900 creds ago – not very good.
It doesn’t ride with the relative grace of newer infinities and the whole layout seems a bit haphazard – a block section killing the speed directly before the only real airtime moment wasn’t the best of ideas.

All the water rides were closed last time so it was nice to try Waschzuber Rafting. The queue is massive and contains a museum about the history of washing clothes, so that’s something. As a ride it was on the timid end of the spectrum.

Also new to me was Badewannen-Fahrt, the infamous log flume themed to baths. This was great fun.
Dark ride sections, a surprise backwards drop and novelty boats – it had it all.

We went back for a couple more laps on the new boy, where I ran into my familiar old bugbear of inconsistent staff rules about glasses. Suddenly someone had decided that it was strictly not allowed and though I politely mentioned that I had been riding fine with them all morning, they got unnecessarily aggressive about it. For someone with a cred tattooed on their arm you’d think they’d be a little more forgiving.

To lighten the mood we tried to recreate our favourite memory from the previous visit – sitting in a quaint little café having a nice toasted sandwich. Unfortunately it was swarming with wasps, there was nowhere to sit, further staff continued to be unfriendly and the takeaway equivalent of the food was terrible.

Well, that’s enough of that then. What else have we got around here?

Schwaben Park

Another revisit with another 2 new creds. With all the other land clearing and construction we had seen a lifetime ago at the far end of the park I didn’t expect both of them to have been stuck out in front of the car park with Force One. It’s eye-catching, I’ll give it that.

Tried the obscure RES Roller Ball first. Although no flipping is involved, watching it from off-ride it looked rather vicious in the way that it was rocking back and forth, throwing people around so I was actually quite nervous going up the lift hill, getting flashbacks to rides like Arashi and Insane which have both tried to kill me in a good and bad way respectively. This was deceptive and unjustified as the ride just doesn’t really do anything. Trims heavily control each stage of the descent, meaning nothing more than a slight jolt downwards every few seconds and it’s all rather awkward as an experience. I left the ride wondering to myself ‘what was the point?’
The chicken song is the most entertaining part – I think it might make the trip playlist.

Another obscure contraption had barely opened before the visit and didn’t even have speakers up yet for the amusing bee soundtrack. They did have time to put some free lockers up front though, to help with the seating and station situation. There doesn’t seem to be enough of them yet, as people were queueing to wait for one to become available, though there was no queue for the actual ride. Spotted a Wiegand guy still on site overseeing the operation and soon we were boarding.
With controls like a bobkart it was arm pedal to the metal, but all this led to was a slight breeze in the hair and some corners. There isn’t much going on here and I think even the marketing speaks for itself – there’s a promo picture up everywhere of two kids riding it and they look thoroughly bored.
I left the ride wondering to myself ‘what was the point?’

Oh well, at least I like their old coaster.
This hasn’t aged well. It was vibrating rather unceremoniously throughout the layout and subsequently all the life seems to have been sucked out of it.
Maybe not then.

A surprise find saved the park. I had spotted what looked like an indoor boat/dark ride on the map and we went to check it out. In this unassuming building lives Azura. The queue was nothing but darkness and a strong smell of gas. Upon boarding, the ride logo is projected onto a waterfall in front of the station. What is this?
It’s essentially a warehouse that you slowly drift around in an oval shape. Sounds fun right? Well in the centre of the oval are fountains, lasers and fire effects and they create some pretty mesmerising sequences. A fireball sitting directly on top of a 10ft water jet is not something I expected to see and they have those bouncing water cannons like you put around pathways on Rollercoaster Tycoon, only the jets are lit up, in a curve, from the inside. Sorcery.
See I do like some simple things, I guess they just have to be shiny.
Never noticed that cat on the far left of the picture in person, so that’s just spooked me out a little. I think we’ll end it there.

Day 4

Europe 08/20 – Hasenhorn Rodelbahn

You don’t need me to tell you that 2020 sucks, but here’s a brief summary of my first world problems when it comes to enthusing this year.

April 2020 – Booked to go to Poland for the RMC and Hyperion, long overdue, no brainer. Cancelled.
June 2020 – Booked to go to the USA for 2 weeks with the intention of riding not just my 1000th coaster but also my 1100th. It was gonna be huge – Cedar Point huge. Before Poland went, the honour would have gone to that weird looking thing, Steel Curtain. After Poland went, it could have been epic – a trimless Voyage @ Holiwood Nights epic. Cancelled.

With over 6 months of no progress at all I started hitting the local +1s to tide the count over but although a good laugh it’s just not the same as doing something… good.
At least one of those trips I mentioned above is accessible by road right?
It was time to act and I booked a slot on the Channel tunnel. As the trip grew nearer the itinerary remained completely fluid and with good reason. Countries started closing left, right and centre.

Eurodemption was born. An adventure of both obscurity and basicness-ity. Plus the usual insanity.

Day 1 – Hasenhorn Rodelbahn

We had originally wanted to tick off Fraispertuis City on the way down but as of one week before, France was no longer an option – cancel the hotel in a vineyard. A brief 7 hour drive and no mingling later we crossed the Rhône/Rhine/Rhein into the bottom left corner of Germany. Even with getting up at 2am there wasn’t much of a day left so there was only really one thing on the cards and that was this.

In a small village nestled between two mountains lies an Alpine coaster that’s longer than Steel Dragon. It’s an unfortunate fact to learn but hey, +1.

To get to the top there’s a ticket window and a ski lift. One of the unnerving kinds that crashes into you from behind and you don’t even have to pull the bar down to stop you from falling out.

Apparently there was a 90 minute queue – what, for this? – but there was nothing else to do and it had been oh so long to get to this point.

It ended up around half that time once up the top, getting sunburnt on a mountain, just like old times. My body has forgotten what real Vitamin D feels like.

It was long. Really long. So long that it started to give me a bad back, turning me into an old man all of a sudden. I’ve never ridden one quite as wild before either. Many sections of straight bumps and hills that you surely can’t take at full speed.

I know there’s upstops on these (you can see underneath them on this clever system that also ski lifts the cars to the top, I believe this is called a nerd shot) but the mortal peril is ever present. The way the track seems arbritrarily chucked together and stacked up on loose pebbles. It’s thrilling pushing it past the edge of what feels comfortable. Almost exhausting.

Good view too.

That was the day really. Stayed in a hotel in a corn field and started drawing up plans for the next day. All on the fly, never done it this way before.

Up next – somewhere we’re not allowed to go as I write this.

Day 2