Friday 27th August
During the day at work I was quite restless, the excitement for the impending trip of awesomeness was getting too much for me. Luckily work was great and the work load was small (yeah, I'll do a quality control on a film thanks). As soon as 6pm hit I was out of the door, suitcase in tow and I made my way to the annoyingly busy tube station at Oxford Circus. Underground trains + evening rush hour on a Friday = death.
Eventually after what felt like forever but was a mere 10 minutes I was at Kings Cross station. I had yet to purchase my train ticket to Richard's place and the queue for the ticket office was long and just wasn't moving. I started venting my anger/impatientness with an elderly lady that was waiting behind me (you could tell she was one of these old biddies that loved to moan, unfortunately once she started she just didn't stop, so from now on she will be known as Pringles lady).
I ended up moving into the ticket machine queue which was actually moving. While in the queue I made a phone call to Will to track down his location, it appears this is a very hard task as Kings Cross (unbeknown to us) is a maze made of why. I purchased my ticket and ended up meeting Will outside the gate to our trains platform with minutes to spare. We ran and just about managed to get on the train. As it was a Friday evening rush hour train we also had to stand which was unpleasant, especially with suitcases.
The train journey was ok and we managed to talk enough rubbish to make it seem like 10 minutes and not 40. We arrived at Cambridge with a basic set of instructions on how to find the Wetherspoons Richard and Neal were hiding in. It was quite a pleasant little walk and we found them quite easily (well, they were sitting at the table by the front doors
).
We all ate food and had some cider. After our meal we continued with a couple more drinks (apart from Will, who doesn't drink any more). After a while a conversation broke out about Batman films, not sure how it started and then out of nowhere came a ridiculously long argument between Richard and Neal about Batman films. It was a silly argument but funny to watch. After some more time we decided to call it a night and walked to Richard's place. It was a long walk.
When we got there we watched a bit of TV and arranged where we were sleeping. Not long after we were ready to sleep and we would have gone straight off to sleep too if it wasn't for some random babble about F1 (a common theme on this trip).
A couple of hours later...
Saturday 28th August
The alarms went off at something like 3am. Urgh, only a couple hours of sleep and yet we had such a long day ahead of us, how will we cope? Well we got up and ready and left within 30 minutes. We then set off in Richard's Mazda of rage (more on that story soon). We drove straight down to Dover and made it in time for our very early ferry to Dunkerque.
On the ferry we had some breakfast which was nice and it gave us some energy which we definitely lacked at this point. We had a little walk around the ferry before sitting down at a table for the rest of the journey. When we arrived in Dunkerque peeps were clearly very eager to get off the ferry as a mass car horn honking session began much to pretty much everyone's amusement.
We were very awake now and the epic part of the journey began, a long 4 hour drive to Luxembourg. The conversation in the car was very active, especially after Richard put in the magical CD that revealed his new 'Name the CFer' game. It was fantastic fun, basically we just had to name the Coasterforce member who the song may reference in some way It killed that journey extremely well and before we knew it we were in Luxembourg!
We parked up in an underground car park. We wandered over to this cool bridge we saw as we were driving around. It was epic so we walked across it. The views were stunning, we'd been in Luxembourg 5 minutes and we already loved it, it's just such a peaceful and beautiful place.
Richard gets ahead of himself and walks across the road when there is a red man, resulting in drivers rage
Waiting for the green man is a safer idea
After walking back across the bridge and looking out from another area over the lovely scenery we walked into the town centre in search of food. We ended up at a little sandwich and cake place.
We sat on a bench in a park near the car park to eat our foodage. I had something to do with chicken in a baguette, it was nice. The park was really pleasant too, I think it was Neal that pointed out that it was like a rich man wanted a stereotypical English park in the centre of Luxembourg and so created what we were sitting in. We had now eaten and time was a ticking so back to the car to continue our journey.
However on the way out of Luxembourg I spotted a huge ferris wheel and spotted a fun fair sign next to it so we made some huge detour and ended up parking near the fair. We thought it be worth a look, see if there was anything decent around. We were all amazed by the quality of the fair, beats UK fairs by a mile. Neal was happy...
We walked past some great looking flat rides and an amazing looking haunted house. However we were fairly pushed for time and when we arrived at the other end of the fair we became the happiest peeps ever.
HOLLENBLITZ!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Wow, I had heard so many things about this travelling coaster and yet I was still completely blown away. It cost 5 euros to get on and it was every cent. Just the fact it had lots of theming, spins and has a massive waterfall cascading down the front of it was enough for me. The layout was pretty cool and it did go on for some time. There were tonnes of lighting effects inside which I thought were really cool and then fairly near the end we were on a straight bit of track, span round a little bit and .... FIRE! It was so cool.
On the way over to Hollenblitz we had noticed a spinning mouse coaster so Richard and Neal wanted to go on that. It looked quite unpleasant, as do all spinning mouse coasters.
There was only one other ride that had at least one of us interested and that was this random go kart track. I decided to bag lady as I didn't want to spend too much money so early on in the trip. However it did look like fun and both Will and Richard managed to spin on the hill which I thought was quite an achievement.
So, that was our time at the fair in Luxembourg. We now got back in the car and made our 30 minute journey back into France for our first park of the trip, Walygator Parc.
As we got near the park we could see Monster from quite far away which got us all quite excited, well it would wouldn't it, it's a giant B&M. We arrived at the park's gate about 5pm and got our entry straight away. We were also informed that there would be fireworks in the evening (yet they failed to mention what time they were and where lol). The park's layout is a bit of a mess and so it took quite some time to get over to Monster as it's right on the other side of the park. When we arrived there was a horrible queueline. It's clear that they haven't completed the attraction yet as the station is just a basic metal structure and there isn't a proper queueline, just a few metal barriers on a wide pathway. It was a horrible queue as it was so wide it made it easy for peeps to queuejump and annoy us, we then created a human barrier much to the annoyance to some of the other peeps in the queue. However the plan was flawed, when we got to the staircase (which is very thin) it got a bit mad and we were nearly split up. Somehow we managed to stay together though and we were finally on the ride, back row.
It's a great coaster, the first drop is awesome, very similar to Mirabilandia's Katun. I found the inversions intense and fun and the MCBR-but-not gave some great force when we went down the curved drop after it. So I really enjoyed it, yet another B&M that impresses me. It's a shame the area isn't finished and the queue would have benefited from either a fixed queueline and/or the second train that they were painting and putting together lol. Oh well, a great addition to a park that was clearly dying on its arse.
The second biggest attraction in the park is Anaconda, a large wooden coaster. The queue wasn't too bad, moved quite nicely. However the ride itself I found to be horrible, it just shook me around too much and I managed to get quite a horrible headache afterwards. The others seemed to enjoy it though.
There was a third coaster in this area, a little kiddy apple credit. Glad to see the park notices that it is there purely for coaster credit reasons...
Lol, anyways, what can one say about said credit? It's exactly the same as the hundreds of similar rides around the World with added apple of pointlessness.
There was a Michael Jackson show about to start so we ran over to it, annoyingly we missed it by a few minutes. Oh well, it was next to the Vekoma credit, Waly coaster, so all was not lost.
There wasn't much of a queue and as most outdoor Vekomas are evil and rough our expectations weren't high. Surprisingly it wasn't rough and it was really enjoyable, very smooth and just fun to ride.
The next ride on our agenda was the rapids. It was getting quite late now so it was no shock that the ride was basically walk on. It was great fun and Richard got quite wet which is always amusing and it also meant that we discovered Neal's rapids laugh in which he sounds similar to a goat which in turn amuses me and sets me off into a fit of laughter.
We were getting hungry again so we went in search of food. We ended up at a burger place. The food was not of the greatest quality and they used a horrible sauce which myself and Will hated with a passion. The ice cream made up for it though. The price was about average for park food.
Next up was Terror House. We weren't too sure what it was (walk-through or dark ride) but Will didn't like the look of it so opted to be bag lady. There was a bit of a queue but it moved quickly. When we got in we wondered what the hell was going on, it was like a random UV horror walkthrough done extremely badly. Effects were not working/broken and you could see over the maze's walls making it such a laughable experience. We then went through a door and thought "was that it? lol" and then as we got further down the pitch-black stairs we noticed strobe lighting and eerie music coming from the next room, it was clearly not over and I have to admit I was a little scared, because after going through something that amuses straight into a proper walk-through is actually genius. The strobing was going nuts and the first room seemed quite empty bar the scared peeps in front of us. It actually went on for quite some time, some rooms scarier than others, then again it didn't help having either the group in front screaming at nothing or Richard trying to make us all jump lol.
So overall I was very happy about the attraction, putting you into a false sense of security before giving you the proper scares, excellent stuff. Could have done with maybe a bit more in there but it was a good effort in my opinion.
It was getting late and we were getting very sleepy so we headed for one last ride on Monster before we left. On the way we got distracted by a shooty ride but as we got in the pre-show room they closed the attraction for the night, bad times.
The confusion on Will's face says it all and Neal expresses how we all felt
So let down by lack of shooty ride we continued on to Monster. The queue was of a similar size of when we did it earlier in the day. As we got to the stairs it was just horrible and we got split up several times. On the staircase we ended up having a large group of French girls between us and Richard shouting down to me and Will resulted with them laughing and trying to create a conversation with him with very mixed results. At the top of the stairs we asked the ride host if we could wait for front row, he agreed and started up a conversation with Neal and Richard, not sure what about as I couldn't hear.
However after all that faff we were on the front row and climbing up that huge lift hill. It was even more amazing. Absolutely freezing in that night air, especially at the front but it was insane, just intense, fast and just a fantastic ride.
Well we opted to leave the park (was about 9pm, the park closed at midnight). As we were leaving the fireworks show began. They were decent fireworks but we were so tired and our hotel beds were calling. Goodbye Walygator parc, you were interesting.
A short drive and we arrived at our first hotel of the trip. A small Ibis hotel with very standard rooms. The hotel was fully booked due to some event in the area which meant that we had two double rooms and not twins. This meant that Will and Neal had floor based times, but they were given sheets etc. Oh we got off to sleep very easily that night.
And that be it for day one of the trip. More reports from the trip will filter through when I have time to write them and a video will be made sometime in the near future. Congratulations if you read every word of the report. Comments are always appreciated.
During the day at work I was quite restless, the excitement for the impending trip of awesomeness was getting too much for me. Luckily work was great and the work load was small (yeah, I'll do a quality control on a film thanks). As soon as 6pm hit I was out of the door, suitcase in tow and I made my way to the annoyingly busy tube station at Oxford Circus. Underground trains + evening rush hour on a Friday = death.
Eventually after what felt like forever but was a mere 10 minutes I was at Kings Cross station. I had yet to purchase my train ticket to Richard's place and the queue for the ticket office was long and just wasn't moving. I started venting my anger/impatientness with an elderly lady that was waiting behind me (you could tell she was one of these old biddies that loved to moan, unfortunately once she started she just didn't stop, so from now on she will be known as Pringles lady).
I ended up moving into the ticket machine queue which was actually moving. While in the queue I made a phone call to Will to track down his location, it appears this is a very hard task as Kings Cross (unbeknown to us) is a maze made of why. I purchased my ticket and ended up meeting Will outside the gate to our trains platform with minutes to spare. We ran and just about managed to get on the train. As it was a Friday evening rush hour train we also had to stand which was unpleasant, especially with suitcases.
The train journey was ok and we managed to talk enough rubbish to make it seem like 10 minutes and not 40. We arrived at Cambridge with a basic set of instructions on how to find the Wetherspoons Richard and Neal were hiding in. It was quite a pleasant little walk and we found them quite easily (well, they were sitting at the table by the front doors
). We all ate food and had some cider. After our meal we continued with a couple more drinks (apart from Will, who doesn't drink any more). After a while a conversation broke out about Batman films, not sure how it started and then out of nowhere came a ridiculously long argument between Richard and Neal about Batman films. It was a silly argument but funny to watch. After some more time we decided to call it a night and walked to Richard's place. It was a long walk.
When we got there we watched a bit of TV and arranged where we were sleeping. Not long after we were ready to sleep and we would have gone straight off to sleep too if it wasn't for some random babble about F1 (a common theme on this trip).
A couple of hours later...
Saturday 28th August
The alarms went off at something like 3am. Urgh, only a couple hours of sleep and yet we had such a long day ahead of us, how will we cope? Well we got up and ready and left within 30 minutes. We then set off in Richard's Mazda of rage (more on that story soon). We drove straight down to Dover and made it in time for our very early ferry to Dunkerque.
On the ferry we had some breakfast which was nice and it gave us some energy which we definitely lacked at this point. We had a little walk around the ferry before sitting down at a table for the rest of the journey. When we arrived in Dunkerque peeps were clearly very eager to get off the ferry as a mass car horn honking session began much to pretty much everyone's amusement.
We were very awake now and the epic part of the journey began, a long 4 hour drive to Luxembourg. The conversation in the car was very active, especially after Richard put in the magical CD that revealed his new 'Name the CFer' game. It was fantastic fun, basically we just had to name the Coasterforce member who the song may reference in some way
It killed that journey extremely well and before we knew it we were in Luxembourg!We parked up in an underground car park. We wandered over to this cool bridge we saw as we were driving around. It was epic so we walked across it. The views were stunning, we'd been in Luxembourg 5 minutes and we already loved it, it's just such a peaceful and beautiful place.
Richard gets ahead of himself and walks across the road when there is a red man, resulting in drivers rage
Waiting for the green man is a safer idea
After walking back across the bridge and looking out from another area over the lovely scenery we walked into the town centre in search of food. We ended up at a little sandwich and cake place.
We sat on a bench in a park near the car park to eat our foodage. I had something to do with chicken in a baguette, it was nice. The park was really pleasant too, I think it was Neal that pointed out that it was like a rich man wanted a stereotypical English park in the centre of Luxembourg and so created what we were sitting in. We had now eaten and time was a ticking so back to the car to continue our journey.
However on the way out of Luxembourg I spotted a huge ferris wheel and spotted a fun fair sign next to it so we made some huge detour and ended up parking near the fair. We thought it be worth a look, see if there was anything decent around. We were all amazed by the quality of the fair, beats UK fairs by a mile. Neal was happy...
We walked past some great looking flat rides and an amazing looking haunted house. However we were fairly pushed for time and when we arrived at the other end of the fair we became the happiest peeps ever.
HOLLENBLITZ!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Wow, I had heard so many things about this travelling coaster and yet I was still completely blown away. It cost 5 euros to get on and it was every cent. Just the fact it had lots of theming, spins and has a massive waterfall cascading down the front of it was enough for me. The layout was pretty cool and it did go on for some time. There were tonnes of lighting effects inside which I thought were really cool and then fairly near the end we were on a straight bit of track, span round a little bit and .... FIRE! It was so cool.
On the way over to Hollenblitz we had noticed a spinning mouse coaster so Richard and Neal wanted to go on that. It looked quite unpleasant, as do all spinning mouse coasters.
There was only one other ride that had at least one of us interested and that was this random go kart track. I decided to bag lady as I didn't want to spend too much money so early on in the trip. However it did look like fun and both Will and Richard managed to spin on the hill which I thought was quite an achievement.
So, that was our time at the fair in Luxembourg. We now got back in the car and made our 30 minute journey back into France for our first park of the trip, Walygator Parc.
As we got near the park we could see Monster from quite far away which got us all quite excited, well it would wouldn't it, it's a giant B&M. We arrived at the park's gate about 5pm and got our entry straight away. We were also informed that there would be fireworks in the evening (yet they failed to mention what time they were and where lol). The park's layout is a bit of a mess and so it took quite some time to get over to Monster as it's right on the other side of the park. When we arrived there was a horrible queueline. It's clear that they haven't completed the attraction yet as the station is just a basic metal structure and there isn't a proper queueline, just a few metal barriers on a wide pathway. It was a horrible queue as it was so wide it made it easy for peeps to queuejump and annoy us, we then created a human barrier much to the annoyance to some of the other peeps in the queue. However the plan was flawed, when we got to the staircase (which is very thin) it got a bit mad and we were nearly split up. Somehow we managed to stay together though and we were finally on the ride, back row.
It's a great coaster, the first drop is awesome, very similar to Mirabilandia's Katun. I found the inversions intense and fun and the MCBR-but-not gave some great force when we went down the curved drop after it. So I really enjoyed it, yet another B&M that impresses me. It's a shame the area isn't finished and the queue would have benefited from either a fixed queueline and/or the second train that they were painting and putting together lol. Oh well, a great addition to a park that was clearly dying on its arse.
The second biggest attraction in the park is Anaconda, a large wooden coaster. The queue wasn't too bad, moved quite nicely. However the ride itself I found to be horrible, it just shook me around too much and I managed to get quite a horrible headache afterwards. The others seemed to enjoy it though.
There was a third coaster in this area, a little kiddy apple credit. Glad to see the park notices that it is there purely for coaster credit reasons...
Lol, anyways, what can one say about said credit? It's exactly the same as the hundreds of similar rides around the World with added apple of pointlessness.
There was a Michael Jackson show about to start so we ran over to it, annoyingly we missed it by a few minutes. Oh well, it was next to the Vekoma credit, Waly coaster, so all was not lost.
There wasn't much of a queue and as most outdoor Vekomas are evil and rough our expectations weren't high. Surprisingly it wasn't rough and it was really enjoyable, very smooth and just fun to ride.
The next ride on our agenda was the rapids. It was getting quite late now so it was no shock that the ride was basically walk on. It was great fun and Richard got quite wet which is always amusing and it also meant that we discovered Neal's rapids laugh in which he sounds similar to a goat which in turn amuses me and sets me off into a fit of laughter.
We were getting hungry again so we went in search of food. We ended up at a burger place. The food was not of the greatest quality and they used a horrible sauce which myself and Will hated with a passion. The ice cream made up for it though. The price was about average for park food.
Next up was Terror House. We weren't too sure what it was (walk-through or dark ride) but Will didn't like the look of it so opted to be bag lady. There was a bit of a queue but it moved quickly. When we got in we wondered what the hell was going on, it was like a random UV horror walkthrough done extremely badly. Effects were not working/broken and you could see over the maze's walls making it such a laughable experience. We then went through a door and thought "was that it? lol" and then as we got further down the pitch-black stairs we noticed strobe lighting and eerie music coming from the next room, it was clearly not over and I have to admit I was a little scared, because after going through something that amuses straight into a proper walk-through is actually genius. The strobing was going nuts and the first room seemed quite empty bar the scared peeps in front of us. It actually went on for quite some time, some rooms scarier than others, then again it didn't help having either the group in front screaming at nothing or Richard trying to make us all jump lol.
So overall I was very happy about the attraction, putting you into a false sense of security before giving you the proper scares, excellent stuff. Could have done with maybe a bit more in there but it was a good effort in my opinion.
It was getting late and we were getting very sleepy so we headed for one last ride on Monster before we left. On the way we got distracted by a shooty ride but as we got in the pre-show room they closed the attraction for the night, bad times.
The confusion on Will's face says it all and Neal expresses how we all felt
So let down by lack of shooty ride we continued on to Monster. The queue was of a similar size of when we did it earlier in the day. As we got to the stairs it was just horrible and we got split up several times. On the staircase we ended up having a large group of French girls between us and Richard shouting down to me and Will resulted with them laughing and trying to create a conversation with him with very mixed results. At the top of the stairs we asked the ride host if we could wait for front row, he agreed and started up a conversation with Neal and Richard, not sure what about as I couldn't hear.
However after all that faff we were on the front row and climbing up that huge lift hill. It was even more amazing. Absolutely freezing in that night air, especially at the front but it was insane, just intense, fast and just a fantastic ride.
Well we opted to leave the park (was about 9pm, the park closed at midnight). As we were leaving the fireworks show began. They were decent fireworks but we were so tired and our hotel beds were calling. Goodbye Walygator parc, you were interesting.
A short drive and we arrived at our first hotel of the trip. A small Ibis hotel with very standard rooms. The hotel was fully booked due to some event in the area which meant that we had two double rooms and not twins. This meant that Will and Neal had floor based times, but they were given sheets etc. Oh we got off to sleep very easily that night.
And that be it for day one of the trip. More reports from the trip will filter through when I have time to write them and a video will be made sometime in the near future. Congratulations if you read every word of the report. Comments are always appreciated.
