Category: Trips

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!”

Thorpe Park started their 2023 season on Friday 24th March and I took the long trip down there. As usual for me at Thorpe, it was a mixed day – long queues on some rides, poor availability on others (Nemesis Inferno seemed to be down for most of the day). I don’t really like the operations all that much these days – coasters that have operated fine in the rain for well over a decade now close when there’s the slightest bit of water in the air.

Highlights of the trip were getting on The Swarm (twice) – running on two trains which made the queue move quickly. I think it’s an under-rated coaster, I quite like it, and as it’s usually closed, or running on a single train with a huge queue, on my visits it was great to have two goes. Multiple rides were also taken on SAW by way of the single rider queue – they need to bring these back on more rides. I really like SAW although I think this is more to do with the theme rather than the coaster itself – I’ve found back row is fine, front row I end up with a headache.

Continue reading “Thorpe Park and Adventure Island”

Many parks re-opened for the 2023 season today, either with passholder preview days or fully open. Today I went to Blackpool Pleasure Beach, my local park, determined to get on the Big One following its fourth consecutive year of track replacement and see what a difference it has made.

The week building up to opening day has been mostly awful weather – so today we were very lucky to have low wind speed, reasonable temperatures and no rain for the majority of the day. With it being opening day, and a decent forecast, there was quite a crowd gathering from about 10:15am waiting for the park’s 11am opening time. As usual there was people from Team Nick and the costume characters Bradley and Bella dancing for the crowds, before Amanda Thompson said a few words and opened the park for 2023.

Outside the main park, work was progressing on the new Pleasure Beach Store, which is replacing the old ticket centre within the Casino building. It’s nowhere near ready yet – the ticket centre has been cleared out and the new shop has been painted and decorated, but is still waiting for shelving and stock to be put in, but it will be nice to see such a large space filled with the various merch and hopefully it will be open after the park has closed.

Continue reading “Opening Day – 18th March!”

So as I mentioned in my last post, I’m planning to visit quite a few new parks this year, get on a lot of new coasters and this should dramatically impact my top 10s. I don’t necessarily expect the Big One to move much – maybe hard to understand given it isn’t the most exciting layout and there’s not much airtime on the ramps (yeah they are more ramps than hills, admit it), I grew up watching this being built in my home town and it’s one I really like. Plus you can’t beat that first drop.

March	Blackpool Pleasure Beach	Opening day!
	Thorpe Park	Opening day!
	Adventure Island	If it’s open – never been before
	Alton Towers
April	Alton Towers	PBE/Your Experience Guide event
	Emerald Park	Never been
	Blackpool Pleasure Beach	RCCGB Blackpool Bash
	Walibi Belgium	Never been
	Movie Park Germany	Never been
May	Phantasialand	Never been
	Toverland	Never been
	Walibi Holland	Never been
	Efteling	Never been
	Plopsaland De Panne	Never been
	Fantasy Island
	Botton’s Pleasure Beach	Never been
	Blackpool Pleasure Beach	Walk the Big One XL
June	Liseberg	Never been – PBE Event
July
August	Oakwood	RCCGB Mega-GLOW-Mania
September	Alton Towers	RCCGB WOODathon
October	Drayton Manor	RCCGB WOODathon – never been
November	Winter Wonderland

Along with this there’s going to be plenty of unplanned trips to BPB/Alton Towers/Thorpe Park.