Germany 06/17 – Hansa Park

Kleine Zar looks like a mighty +1 / I need more Kärnan in my life.
I’ll leave it to the imagination as to what was the real motivation here.

This spare day we now had seemed to be the perfect opportunity to head back over to Germany and tear up some Autobahn.

Day 3 – Hansa Park

I am yet to experience Hansa Park without it being a ghost town, so there’s always a quaint atmosphere to walking around the place, with gardeners outnumbering the guests while they eternally tend to their impressive foliage displays. The quietness also enhances the incredible theming experiences they have on offer here.

A typical morning here starts with a token lap on Nessie Superrollercoaster and Rasender Roland as they always open first. I do love how often the effort is made on despatch time to create the interaction between the two rides, with Roland passing directly through Nessie’s vertical loop.

I wasn’t a fan of this Gerstlauer Eurofighter previously, but was willing to give it a second chance today. If anything, it had only gotten worse.

Both the queue and dark ride sections of the experience are really good and I do enjoy singing along to “Novgoroooooooooooooooooooood”, but it’s just such a poor piece of hardware that doesn’t do itself justice. These trains don’t ride very well at the best of times and the layout is so uninspired after the initial launch and hill, and then again after the vertical lift, it simply judders around doing nothing.
I suppose I like to at least think it was a learning experience and necessary precursor to the ridiculous monster that came after it.

2016

2017
I didn’t particularly have an issue with the old look of the tower because it’s just so overwhelming and I can’t believe it exists. It now looks both ridiculous and amazing.

Schwur des Kärnan blew me away on my first visit. On my very first ride I had the queue, fancy loading sequence and train all to myself and I was shaking so badly from fear and anticipation throughout the entire indoor tower section. I’ve never had that sort of reaction from a ride before.
What have they done to this gamechanging Gerstlauer Infinity since? Made it even more intense of course.

The outdoor queue area has been beefed up with some intense castle theming, full of intricate details and it’s own custom series of documentaries.
There’s a whole new indoor preshow section to the queue with the King of Denmark shouting about many things while effects are going off before you get to the brilliant bag room.

The backwards drop on the lift hill feels much more legitimate after they did some tweaking. It was a very controlled feeling previously that, while insane and unprecedented as a feature on a coaster, didn’t provide much in the way of pure thrill.
It’s just plain scary now, with the power to back it up. This ride toys with you so much in that tower that it almost becomes unbearable, in the best way.

From the first traditional drop onwards, it’s a fantastically violent machine with some very intense moments and all kinds of forces going on.
It’s a tad rough, particularly in the outside seats and the lap bars unavoidably clamp your legs so hard from the moment you leave the tower, but that’s all forgiven for what you get in return.
They’ve also added a little bit of ‘you’ve made your peace with the ride’ music (like the final note on Hex) with some fancy lighting as you walk up the exit path into the ride shop. The full soundtrack is now available in the main shop. So happy.

#1 Kleine Zar is a cute little kids coaster. If you’re gonna get a cheap ride, you might as well put a little effort in around it, and they have.
It also has most ridiculous enforcement of a no glasses rule I’ve ever encountered. If I could tell tales of the things mine have ridden…

Time passed quickly through many encounters with Kärnan and a sit down with a cheap, tasty pizza (I don’t often do food shoutouts, but – Italian place in the middle of the park, highly recommended).
Soon it was time to blast back up to Billund for the flight home.

What a bonus. I loved being able to spontaneously enhance the trip with an extra park visit like that. Seems more often than not that I’m rearranging plans for rides that spite.

Germany 08/16 – Freizeitpark Plohn + Belantis

Broke the land speed record on the early morning weekend autobahn to get to the first park for opening as it was going to be a slightly more packed scehdule than the previous days, later wishing I hadn’t bothered.

Day 6 – Freizeitpark Plohn

Incoming rant:
This place was a joke and far below the standards I had come to expect from the rest of Germany. The queue for entrance tickets upon our arrival was already about 45 minutes with just 2 windows open. This seems to be the ‘new entrance’ as there are another set of fancy gates not in use. It was not possible to purchase anything online, so everyone was buying tickets in person. It was also the final planned cash dealing of the trip for me, cos they’re a backwards bunch of spiters and I had specifically taken the time to verify that I had enough the night before to decide whether I needed to find a cashpoint. I did have enough. Just.
Once we were one group of guests away from paying, I started to dig my money out and accidentally dropped a 2 euro coin which rolled to the family in front. A child picked it up and pocketed it in plain sight of the parents, who then just stared at/through me before entering the park as though nothing had happened. I still just had enough for tickets, but it would now involve some smaller change. The dire old woman at the admissions desk refused to accept a couple of 5 cent coins to make up the final total and I was flatly denied entry to the park with no negotiation or opportunity to speak to anyone else.
I hadn’t driven all this way for nothing, so had to physically force my way back through the massive crowd of people waiting for tickets, no one was willing to give an inch of room – the queue was looking to be at least an hour long by now. Kicking up some serious gravel on the way out, I raced off to the nearest town to find a cashpoint.
With some fresh crisp notes to slap in their face, we finally made it into the park about 2 hours after opening and now had little to no time to enjoy the visit, not that I think I would have.

Powered straight to the GCI woodie to try and remind myself why I had put up with all that nonsense. Mercifully the ride was suffering from Freischütz syndrome and was almost a walk on. One train operations and some questionable staff methods again turned that into a painful experience. A lone bloke in an umbro hoody and tracksuit was running everything by himself as follows:
Check the seatbelts.
Check his phone.
Check the bars.
Check his phone.
Brandish a tatty A4 piece of paper with some rules printed on it and start lecturing everyone in the station for a couple of minutes, also pointing at a pub chalkboard which had the height restrictions written on it, in chalk of course.
Bit late for height restrictions now we’re strapped in, I thought to myself.
Checked his phone.
Dispatch.
What sort of hell have I entered?

The ride itself was good, as I would have expected, but not nearly good enough to justify the current situation. The sad thing is, it was probably the best coaster of the trip as well, packed with a multitude of airtime hills that never came close to matching the height differential of the first drop.

Seems I didn’t even get a good picture of it. Have another goat instead:

On to the next cred. Eh.

The park ungracefully turned from themed Wild West area to a field with a carnival wacky worm on it at this point.

The powered coaster #4 Miniwah was pretty damn sweet and a welcome change for being completely indoors and very well themed. The speed of the ride and level of lighting changes between laps, adding a bit more excitement to proceedings. Don’t see many of these getting built any more, but this was a worthy one to try and a very pleasant surprise.

Zierer family coaster with too big a queue. Eh.

Having blitzed all of the creds, decided there was time for a couple more laps on El Toro before hopefully turning my back on this place forever (until Mack spited me by threatening to build something good here).

With more gravel displaced, it was off to the next park.

Belantis

No issues getting past the friendly staff here. Cards were accepted and there was a cashpoint right next to the counters just for good measure. Shouldn’t have to take any notice of this trivial stuff.

Got the biggest coaster out of the way first. Not a fan of Eurofighters generally and this one is particularly unpleasant in the way that it rides through too many inversions, but not enough to stop me taking a second go just to make sure.

Skipped the kiddy racer cred, too intense (big for it). It pains me to see that these exist, knowing I can never again ride one. Almost as if Gerstlauer designed them with spite in mind.

I’ll forgive them for making another satisfying family ride though. The station here was billowing a lot of nice smelling smoke effect.

Caught this one on a good day it seems. I’ve ridden some of these bobsleds when they’re being a bit underwhelming, but this one was picking up some decent speed before the couple of good hills.

There are far more mad houses in the world than I ever would have expected. Verlies des Grauens was themed to castles and wizards, like most of them. I found it to be one of the better ones for putting up with lack of understanding what’s happening – the preshows didn’t go on too long and the hardware interaction was satisfying.

Fluch des Pharao looked mental to begin with, but still managed to exceed my expectations on intensity. Getting into the boat is struggle as it’s just like a big inflatable dinghy. The floor is so thin you unnervingly feel everything going on beneath your feet – the conveyor, rollers and sloshing of the water, elevator lifts(!), then you start to feel rather vulnerable.

As the boat hits the water after the main drop, there’s a brutal natural braking effect that you have to really brace for in order to not chip a tooth, then it just starts crashing into concrete walls around this whirlpool monstrosity. Fantastic ride.

Love that pun too.

That was about it for the park, it has quite a lot of space and some good old-fashioned themed areas which would imply it has good potential to expand, if the world was like RCT, but it isn’t. I hope they give me a reason to return as I did like the place. It was refreshing in two ways – 1) having lots of misters out along the pathways to help with the heat 2) not being Plohn.

Upon leaving, I found out the parking barrier was supposed to issue me a token when we came in, but it hadn’t. The member of staff I went to for assistance was very understanding and helpful and gave me a free token to get out, saving us the parking cost for the day.
An odd day overall. I had expected Belantis to be a bit crap and Plohn to be nice. Ended up with the complete opposite.

Day 7 was a painful 5 hour crawl back to airport through several hundred miles of constant traffic, along with far too many petrol stops in the still overly thirsty car.
Overall it was successful trip with no particularly standout creds, which I knew would probably be the case, but some very nice places along the way. It’s a shame I’m running out of German parks way too fast.

Germany 08/16 – Zugspitze

Day 5

It would be good to say the entire day was dedicated to the below park of such fine calibre, but it was mostly filled with mountains. Decided to go for Zugspitze: Germany’s highest mountain experience.

Parked up at the station below and jumped on the biggest cablecar I’ve ever seen, both in length and car size. It felt unnaturally huge with only 4 people in it, but still had that characteristic and unnerving bounce when it cleared certain sections.

What made this experience a little more interesting for me was the observation platforms they have near the summit, sticking out over the edge of the abyss.

The metal grilled floor and relatively low glass edges provided an almost paralysing sense of fear in heights in me that I hadn’t really experienced to such a degree before.

I can replicate the sensation best when holding a phone over the edge of an observation deck to take pictures, rather than with my own head, so it’s good to know my internal priorities are straight.

We signed a book at the top of the mountain and then walked down this winding pathway towards another of the cable cars that could take us back down, for a slight change of scenery.

Fear not, there was still time for a cred by the time we reached the car.

Märchenwald im Isartal

Hidden in this forest next to a bottle bank (not quite as glamorous as the previous) is another Gerstlauer family coaster.

Had several fun laps of the nutty squirrel, narrowly avoiding the low clearance trees.

Followed by a wander around many more fairytale forest exhibits.
That’s enough of that.

Day 6

Germany 08/16 – Bayern Park + Rodel- und Freizeitparadies St. Englmar

The lack of crowds for the time of year surprised me on this trip. I had expected to struggle a little on the more medium sized family parks, but it was never really an issue at all.

Day 4 – Bayern Park

Terrifying.

This was particularly apparent here, with their Maurer X-Car being a walk on all morning. Perhaps everyone got lost in the queue, as it is an actual maze at some points. Or perhaps it is true that this ride doesn’t meet the target audience of the rest of the park. Gave it several goes throughout the visit and was left mostly confused.

The inverted top hat was a nice element, but the rest of the layout seemed a bit shakey at times and trivial rather than fun, there were no other stand out moments other than a crushing intensity throughout the loop and following corner.

I find X-cars can be quite hit or miss. At the time, I believed this one to be a miss, but looking back it’s probably more my type of thing than I realised – forceful and a bit of a mould breaker. I just didn’t know it yet.

Ticked off the Tivoli large.

And the Tivoli small. I believe their next investment will be a Tivoli medium.

Had a nice walk through the woods and found a quaint little boat ride with a mouthful of a name – Rundbootfahrt durch Schloss und Grotte (and a dark ride section!)

The questionable rapids ride had a good out of control, tubey drop section where it came close to clearing the side and exploding in a fireball.

Was a little disappointed to find the hardware inside Thaolon, what I had written down as another ‘dark ride drop tower’ was a tad on the small side, with elves and sparkly lights. Could have been worse.

There wasn’t much left to do at this park except get my fill on Freischütz, so headed out earlier than planned to fulfil a few other backup plans.

Voglsam

Which began with a local farm for some Bobkart action. Great fun as always. Why can’t the farms near me have one of these?

Grass is always greener.

Please, let me have a ride.

No.

Rodel- und Freizeitparadies St. Englmar

Final stop of the day was a bit of a mouthful to say.

I admire this neat little place, making sure all the gravity on this big hill doesn’t go to waste.

The new Zierer coaster with its unusual consecutive lifts hills was up first. The use of the terrain resulted in some solid family fun with an interesting layout.

Alpine coasters have their good and bad points. With the brake lever in your hands, you can go full speed with a lot more conviction, but there’s a little something lacking when you’re tied to the rails and aren’t thinking ‘I’m gonna crash this’ in the back of your mind.

The non-alpine coaster alongside it brought that feeling straight back. I particularly like these ones with the big upright backrests for maximum comfort, the backless seats are crippling on a long lift hill.

Day 5

Germany 08/16 – Skyline Park

Arrived bright and early the next morning for the park with the lowest capacity rides ever. Nothing here seats a decent amount of people in one go, so what appears on the surface to be a quiet park can easily get some significant queues.

Day 2 – Skyline Park

This park has become somewhat of a testing ground for Maurer Rides, being home to more than one first-of-their-kind installations. They also have a bit of a repetetive naming system for their attractions.

Nothing opened for the first half hour or so, but a queue began to form outside #1 Sky Rider and we joined in. This unique Caripro Gryoflyer seemed like a fun idea, but wasn’t particularly interesting. The cars have four seats facing in towards a thick metal pole that suspends you from the track. You can spin the car by this pole yourselves, but it looked like too much effort and never really got going in the hands of anyone else, particularly with the limitations of the layout.

I was dreading my first (and the world’s first) Sky Loop as the lift hill inverts before the ride even begins and I particularly hate long periods of being held upside-down (which might seem strange for this hobby, but it’s not actually that common to be held like it). Grabbing the first train of the day meant it was over with quickly.
I was quite surprised by how much this ride didn’t offend me, it was actually reasonably fun once the start was over, which happened to be just on the limit of how much I could bear.

Quite surprised by how much this did offend me. Stock model Maurer spinners seem to lack a certain spark that their custom models often have.

Usually Schwarzkopf have something rather special to offer, seemingly ahead of their time as a manufacturer in the previous century. Sadly this Wildcat model is a rather uninspired layout that rides like a more structurally sound Zyklon Galaxi at best.

Having planned the entire trip around the most offensive ride construction project of all time, I was suitably disappointed to see it wasn’t finished.

Probably should have queued for the Bobkart earlier. It took about an hour for every child in Europe to board. I do love them though, the self controlled burst of acceleration is always surprisingly powerful in what feels like a very exposed environment and this one didn’t disappoint.

Did my first and last Butterfly and Bayern curve in this park too. They don’t count.

Although the rides at Skyline Park were interesting, none of them were particularly good and certainly nothing was worth queuing for again, so we headed out for something that wasn’t a theme park.

The village below Neuschwanstein Castle seems to be about 50% car park, but finding a space was still a painful experience with many signs out front saying full and attendants that were difficult to negotiate with.
From the village, a bus takes you up to the top if you’re on a tight schedule/not an avid mountaineer.

Although not usually my thing, I have to admit it does look great when you get there.

Day 3

Germany 08/16 – Legoland Deutschland

I got addicted to Germany at some point in 2016. There’s something very satisfying about doing road trips over there (autobahn efficiency?)
For this particular jaunt we hired a car in Frankfurt and had 1 night near there, 1 night near Leipzig and did everything else out of Munich, totalling about 2500 miles. For a lengthy hire in which I had gone out of my way to ensure an unlimited mileage option, they decided to provide me with a very thirsty ‘hot hatch’. This left me torn, as it was fun while on the road, but I spent as much time in petrol stations as I did making progress. Bastards.

Day 0 – Holiday Park

Decided to hit the ground running by taking advantage of a late opening day and trying some night rides on the multi award winning Intamin hyper. I imagine most parks would think there was something wrong with you for showing up and paying full price at 9pm, but from previous experience this place seems to have somewhat of a cult following even with the locals, so no eyelids were batted.

I still found it to be a great ride when measured in moments – some of the airtime is rather ridiculous, but I find it a little too much of a one trick pony these days compared to the more recent world beaters. The trims, uneventful corners and everything in between the signature hills just take me out of it a bit.

Day 1 – Legoland Deutschland

54 Legolands in and I’ve almost decided they’re not worthwhile parks to me now. It’s a shame the creative and unique side of their respective Minilands can’t be reflected in the ride line-ups.

Started off with the smallest coaster. Gerstlauer are really good at this size of ride and luckily for me there’s plenty more of that around this region.

Their Dragon coaster was unusually rough compared to clones 10 years its junior, which isn’t a good sign. At least it was running thirty trains at once in true German style.

Unforunately I can’t make the same excuse for #3 Project X – Test Strecke, which behaved considerably worse than other Mack wild mouse models of the exact same age.
You don’t need to know what they look like. My camera didn’t.

Also spent too long in the sun waiting for a 4D cinema show. Can’t remember which film I saw at which Legoland anymore, which shows how much of an impact they make.

Surprise hit of the park was Jungle X-pedition. It featured a dark ride section and a backwards drop. The signs of a quality attraction.

Having the same boats as Valhalla only added to it.

The train around the park offered some rare shade and little else.

The highlight of Miniland.

One of those spiteful fairs with the face of a wacky worm cred on the poster, but nothing when you get there.

They’ve outdone Space World by freezing people in a pool.

Juvelen.

Foreshadowing.

A little disappointed with this Legoland, but I don’t expect much from these parks any more due to having already done most of what they have to offer in other places. Minilands are always fun for about half an hour and the boat ride was nice to see but without any other standout innovations, I can’t see any of the Legolands suprassing Billund’s lineup. Maybe they want to keep it that way, as it is the original.

Day 2