Category: Trips

In September I had a crazy day trip to Ireland, to visit Emerald Park. While it is possible I would really not recommend doing this as a day trip! This was an event with 45 minutes of Exclusive Ride Time, originally planned to be Cú Chulainn (Gravitykraft wooden coaster) and the new for 2024 coasters, Fianna Force (Vekoma STC) and Quest (Vekoma Family Boomerang), however the wooden coaster was closed for the rest of the season shortly before the date of our trip so this was swapped for Dino Dash (Vekoma Family Coaster).

Continue reading “Emerald Park”

In June I went on my second Coaster Breaks tour, taking in plenty of new coasters plus revisiting Liseberg and Grona Lund.

Day 1 – Road trip

The tour started with a ferry from Hull to Rotterdam, followed by a drive to Germany via Drievliet and Slagharen, two pit-stop parks to break up the road trip and get a few creds – the highlight of these two being Gold Rush at Slagharen, a surprising find – a Gerstlauer Infinity Coaster featuring a multi-pass LSM launch.

Continue reading “Germany/Denmark/Sweden”

I have been wanting to go to Cedar Point for a while and, while there are plenty of organised trips which include the park, they are all about 2 weeks long and it’s day after day of travelling and parks. I wanted something a bit more relaxed so decided to take a solo trip for 6 days – 2 days at Kings Island, 2 days at Cedar Point, and 2 full days for travel to/from Sandusky – and starting/ending at Cincinnati airport.

Continue reading “Ohio – Kings Island and Cedar Point”

I had a trip to Alton Towers recently to check out the newly retracked Nemesis Reborn. I went on a week day to avoid the huge queues – on its first day it had a queue of 4h35 at one point. Unfortunately it was having some issues on the day I went so opened late, however the queues were okay at about 30-40 minutes.

Continue reading “Nemesis Reborn”

I can’t believe it’s been a year since I was planning my trips for 2023! I got on 98 new coasters in 2023, would have been over 100 if it wasn’t for a couple which were closed on my visit, a couple where it was too busy to fit them in and one where I wasn’t willing to put myself through the ride (Stampida Red – having already been on the Blue side, those KumbaK trains are awful).

Continue reading “Trip Plans – 2024”

I recently went to the Christmas events at Port Aventura and Parque Warner Madrid, for my first visit to these two Spanish parks. A nice break from the cold weather, and it was very nice to get on some coasters while all the parks closer to home are closed for winter.

Port Aventura

I found Port Aventura to be a nice park – very big but all the various areas really well themed. It was really busy on both days at the park although I had fast track/express lane tickets for the first day which made things a lot more bearable. Some of the coasters also had single rider queues which were useful.

The highlight of the park for me was Shambhala. This was my first B&M hyper coaster and it did not disappoint. So much airtime! Following this there’s Dragon Khan which was a good B&M sit-down coaster (although not ageing that well). I also enjoyed El Diablo, an Arrow mine train from 1995. This just reminded me of the Big One so much – basically the same trains (Arrow hypercoasters basically just use the same train design as their mine trains), just listening to the train come in and park in the station sounded the same. Very odd layout though with 3 lift hills.

Continue reading “Port Aventura and Parque Warner Madrid at Christmas”

I decided on a short break in France around my birthday – because who wants to work on their birthday, right? My plan was a day at Parc Astérix and a day at Parc St Paul, then a flight back home. Unfortunately I messed up Parc St Paul and turned up to locked gates – it was open on the day I had originally planned but not on the actual day (I moved everything back a day to get an early enough flight to be able to collect a hire car….)

Anyway on to Parc Astérix. I went for the Filotomatix Illimité, which is their unlimited fast track, unsure as to how busy it would actually be – but this was my first ever visit to Parc Astérix and as I was going on my own, I didn’t want to be spending any time stood in queues. It turned out to be a good call as the park was rather busy, queues for some of the larger coasters consistently at 1-2 hours for most of the day.

Unfortunately I seem to have lost all the photos and videos I took after 2:30pm, not sure how as they aren’t in the recently deleted folder, but we’ll just go with what I have still got.

Continue reading “Parc Astérix”

At the beginning of June 2023 I went to Sweden for a few days, flying in to Gothenburg. The main reason for this trip was an 11am-10pm day at Liseberg, although I managed to get a few hours in Stockholm too.

On the Friday I took the express train to Stockholm, and went to Gröna Lund. The park was open 4pm-10pm but I had to leave around 7:30pm in order to get back to the hotel near Gothenburg. I was still able to get on all of the coasters except for the really small kids creds, and one of them twice.

Continue reading “Sweden – Gröna Lund and Liseberg”

On the 28th April I went on a European coaster tour covering seven parks, with Coaster Breaks. This was a thoroughly enjoyable trip, with a tour consisting of 7 people plus the tour guide, with all transport, hotels, breakfast and park tickets taken care of.

I’ve been trying to plan a Europe park trip for a while, but I went for Coaster Breaks instead as it was not an easy thing to try to plan, especially only using public transport, and I’d rather experience new parks as part of a small group rather than on my own. The other advantage of going as a group, guided by somebody who has visited the parks numerous times before, is that they know what order to do things to maximise the day and stay ahead of the crowds.

I’ve never visited any of the parks on this trip before, so all the coasters and parks are new to me. I’ll go through each park briefly with what I liked/disliked – I’m not going to cover every coaster as I’d be here forever.

Continue reading “Europe Trip – Belgium, Germany and the Netherlands”

Last week I attended the Microsoft MVP Summit in person, at Microsoft’s campus in Redmond (near Seattle, Washington, USA). It was my first visit to America (and the furthest I’ve ever travelled). An 8 hour time difference meant jet lag hit me hard. My default mode is “sleepy, need sleep” so a 10 hour flight and 8 hour time difference made this even worse. I flew out on Monday, and returned on Friday evening. I had a conference on Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday which left all of Friday morning and a little of the afternoon to go explore.

While everyone was saying I should check out the Space Needle or other things in Seattle, instead I opened Coaster-Count and looked at the map. A couple of parks in reasonable distance, unfortunately the larger park was closed however Washington State Fair in Puyallup was open! Obviously I chose this over looking at some buildings.

I didn’t have a car (I don’t want to even attempt to drive over there, wrong side of the road but also some right turns are allowed even when the lights are on red… confusing) but after a little research, I could reach Puyallup in just over an hour by taking two buses from the Seattle-Tacoma airport, for about $5.25 (or I could get an Uber there for over $100). So I set off to the fair and arrived about 9:50am, just before it opened.

Continue reading “Unexpected America Trip!”