witchfinder
Hyper Poster
Mrs Witchfinder (Anna) and I booked a short break in the Netherlands, with a couple of days at theme parks (one coinciding with Ghosterforce) then followed by a couple of days in Amsterdam.
I could go into detail about all the hassle we had with our hire car at the airport and how it made us very late checking into our B&B in Rhenoy, but I won’t bore you with all that. Just suffice to say my recommendation is don’t book Dollar car rental at Amsterdam!
Efteling – Friday 19th October
This was our first visit to Efteling and it was listed as a busy day on the park website, so we bougt the ‘Ticket Extra’ for 10 Euros each, which gets you lunch and a snack at selected outlets, 20% off a souvenir and most importantly entry to the park at 9:30. The food is worth the 10 Euros so it’s a bit of a no-brainer! We got there around that time, got all our vouchers for the various add-ons and headed into the park.
There are a few rides open early (they’re listed on the website) but none of them were of great interest and the best use of our early entry was to get in the queue for Bob, as we knew this would have one of the longest queues once the park properly opened. Turns out we weren’t the only ones with that idea!
Once the ride opened just after 10am, we were on within 10 minutes and there was already a huge queue behind us so it was the right move.
Bob was decent start to the day. Nothing too thrilling but these Bobsled coasters are fun and it was a nice bonus cred as it had been closed for so long I was assuming we wouldn’t get to ride it, so I’m glad we got the chance before they close it next year. I’d rate it second out of the four bobsleds I’ve done, behind Avalanche but ahead of the ones at Parc Asterix and The Great Escape.
With that out of the way we hit the main coaster area of the park, which looks gorgeous with all the creds set around the lake, and it’s also super convenient of course!
All the queue times were pretty low at this point in the day so we just made our way round the lake in the obvious order. First up was Baron 1898.
Loved the steampunk-esque theming on this one, and the haunted mine theme was great overall. I was also impressed by the super organised operations on this, with separate queues for front row right from the off and the little tickets they give out for the other rows.
Ride-wise this was my favourite of the three B&M dive coasters I’ve ridden, despite being the smallest. I think the smaller cars give a bit more flexibility in the layout and both the inversions and the helix take advantage of this. It probably lacks a bit of intensity compared to Oblivion and Sheikra but it’s a lot more fun, and the theming is superb.
Next up should’ve been De Vliegende Hollander but it was temporarily closed so we moved on to Python, which was making use of the handy ‘Boarding Pass’ virtual queue system. Handily the next available time slot was only a few minutes away so I booked us in on the Efteling app and we sat down for a few minutes until our slot came around.
Once we were in the queue, just as promised it was only a 10-15 minute wait until our ride, so hats off to Efteling for putting this system in and not charging extra for it. Hopefully it may soon be added to other rides at this and other parks that want to improve the guest experience. So not Merlin parks, obviously!
I’d obviously not ridden Python prior to the re-tracking but I’ve ridden enough rough Vekomas to know that this had certainly been improved. It was still a bit rattly in places but certainly not rough, and the vest style restraints probably helped too.
They clearly have huge fondness for the ride at the park given the expense it must have taken to re-track, but to be honest it’s pretty bland by modern standards. Things have come a long way since a modest drop, two loops and two corkscrews was considered an exciting layout! Also the lift hill has to be one of the slowest I’ve ever encountered.
Moving on around the lake, it was time to get some wood Joris en de Draak was proving quite busy and the queue was over half an hour, but we joined it anyway and enjoyed watching the two coasters duelling through the layout whilst we waited. We chose the Water side first, getting a row fairly close to the back. I’ll save my opinion for now as we didn’t ride Fire till later…
After our ride we went to take a closer look at the Dragon. Funny, but doesn’t this seem rather like a coaster that fuses wood and fire? More reliably than Merlin’s supposed world first does too!
With De Vliegende Hollander still down we took a break from coasters and continued our circuit of the lake, arriving at Pirana, the rapids. Didn’t get much in the way of photos here but they were really good, with plenty of splashing moments and the opportunity for boats to bump or even overtake one another. Great theming on them too, as you’d expect.
We disembarked to rapids to find that De Vliegende Hollander was finally open, but we were now about as far from the entrance as you can get while still being by the lake! A brisk walk past Baron 1898 completed a full lap of the lake and found us waiting outside the ride, whose queue time had already doubled since the time we noticed it was open.
This was undoubtedly my most anticipated ride on this trip. Back in 2015 when I started to get enthusiastic about coasters again and began looking at the parks across Europe, De Vliegende Hollander was something that really attracted my attention. It just seemed so unusual and elaborate to have a dark ride, coaster and splash boat combined into one experience, so I was relieved it had opened and was really excited to ride it.
I’m happy to say it didn’t disappoint! I had watched POVs in the past but luckily they never revealed what the queue line or station were like. Much like the queues at Universal, this was a joy to walk through with so many great items to look at, and then when you reach the station/harbour – wow! That was a real jaw dropping moment.
We were super excited even before we got on board the ride, but the ride itself was great. It’s not the best dark ride, nor the best coaster, nor the best splash boat, but the whole thing combined is an incredibly fun and immersive experience.
With all but one coaster done, we had a break for lunch before getting on the cute steam train for a journey to the opposite end of the park. Initially the plan was to ride Droomvlucht but I noticed that the queue for Symbolica had dropped below 30 minutes for the first time that day so we headed to that instead.
It certainly looked impressive, with an amazingly themed building. The queue line was a bit messy with lots of cattlepens that weren’t in use, but eventually we got to the front and made our way into the building. The pre-show was fun, though we didn’t really know what was going on due to the language barrier, and the queue line within the building was great. We chose the Musical journey mainly because it had a shorter queue.
I know I’m in the minority here, but honestly I thought Symbolica was a bit crap. I mean, the ride system was really clever and obviously a lot of effort had gone into the theming, but I just found the whole thing a bit cheesy. I guess the big issue here is that I’m not really enthralled by the whole fairy tale theme that the park has, but most of the animatronics seemed a bit lifeless and predictable, the interactive elements were confusing and the whole thing just went by in a blur. When you compare it to the big dark rides at Universal, it all seemed a bit dated which isn’t great considering it’s a brand new ride. So that was disappointing, but I’m sure the kids loved it.
After that we decided not to bother waiting over half an hour for any more fairy tale themed dark rides, so Droomvlucht was ditched and instead we went to watch the live show Raveleijn. We didn’t bother with the headsets for translation but it didn’t really matter because it was an amazing spectacle and we got the gist of things pretty easily. We loved it!
We then had a nice stroll back across the park (the weather was lovely for the time of year btw), passed the spiteful, under-maintenance Vogel Rok and stopped off for another sit down with some fab views on Pagode.
It was about 4pm by this point and the queues for all the coasters were pretty short, so we headed back over to the back of the park, with Joris being the first target. Obviously we had to ride Fire this time, and this turned out to be our favourite of the two trains. It’s a close call but this one gave a slightly wilder ride with a bit more airtime than Water I reckon.
We’d ended up losing both rides to that point so immediately went for another ride on Fire and won on this attempt, which helped cement its place as the best of the two and the best ride in the park in my opinion. Both coasters are great fun, wild but not rough and with plenty of airtime, especially on the drops, and obviously the duelling element makes them even more enjoyable.
We then grabbed another ride on De Vliegende Hollander, which was again really good fun, followed by another on Baron 1898 which was also really enjoyable. After that it was about 6pm and we went to eat pancakes at Polles Keuken. It was rather busy and we waited about 20 minutes to get in, which pretty much wiped out the chance of any last minute rides. The pancakes were good but they do get a bit much after a while, and we definitely had better ones during our trip. The restaurant itself was really cool though.
We left just after 7pm with the park now shrouded in darkness, just in time to catch the fireworks show on the lake. We watched for a few minutes and it looked great, but we decided to beat the queues getting out so headed to the exit, and less than ten minutes later we were out of the park and on our way to our hotel in Eindhoven.
Now we may not have been fans of the fairy tale theme, and we certainly missed a lot of the park, but we both loved Efteling. Such a gorgeous park with all the greenery, amazingly themed rides and areas, and some fantastic operations that made a supposedly busy day seem far from it. Most importantly the creds are all great fun – there’s nothing there I would call Top Ten material, but with the exception of Python they’re all nicely themed and very re-ridable. Even Anna, who is pretty picky when it comes to coasters, not only rode them all but enjoyed most of them enough to go on again, and there are very few parks where that happens.
The only real niggle I have is the assigned seating on coasters, which I guess helps with operations but is annoying when you want a front or back row ride, but that’s a pretty minor complaint. Overall it was a great day and we never even saw the Fairytale Forest or experienced the likes of Vogel Rok, Fata Morgana and Spookslot, so there’s already a reason to go back even before they add new creds.
To finish off, here’s a few random photos from the park that most of you will have seen numerous times before.
I could go into detail about all the hassle we had with our hire car at the airport and how it made us very late checking into our B&B in Rhenoy, but I won’t bore you with all that. Just suffice to say my recommendation is don’t book Dollar car rental at Amsterdam!
Efteling – Friday 19th October
This was our first visit to Efteling and it was listed as a busy day on the park website, so we bougt the ‘Ticket Extra’ for 10 Euros each, which gets you lunch and a snack at selected outlets, 20% off a souvenir and most importantly entry to the park at 9:30. The food is worth the 10 Euros so it’s a bit of a no-brainer! We got there around that time, got all our vouchers for the various add-ons and headed into the park.
There are a few rides open early (they’re listed on the website) but none of them were of great interest and the best use of our early entry was to get in the queue for Bob, as we knew this would have one of the longest queues once the park properly opened. Turns out we weren’t the only ones with that idea!
Once the ride opened just after 10am, we were on within 10 minutes and there was already a huge queue behind us so it was the right move.
Bob was decent start to the day. Nothing too thrilling but these Bobsled coasters are fun and it was a nice bonus cred as it had been closed for so long I was assuming we wouldn’t get to ride it, so I’m glad we got the chance before they close it next year. I’d rate it second out of the four bobsleds I’ve done, behind Avalanche but ahead of the ones at Parc Asterix and The Great Escape.
With that out of the way we hit the main coaster area of the park, which looks gorgeous with all the creds set around the lake, and it’s also super convenient of course!
All the queue times were pretty low at this point in the day so we just made our way round the lake in the obvious order. First up was Baron 1898.
Loved the steampunk-esque theming on this one, and the haunted mine theme was great overall. I was also impressed by the super organised operations on this, with separate queues for front row right from the off and the little tickets they give out for the other rows.
Ride-wise this was my favourite of the three B&M dive coasters I’ve ridden, despite being the smallest. I think the smaller cars give a bit more flexibility in the layout and both the inversions and the helix take advantage of this. It probably lacks a bit of intensity compared to Oblivion and Sheikra but it’s a lot more fun, and the theming is superb.
Next up should’ve been De Vliegende Hollander but it was temporarily closed so we moved on to Python, which was making use of the handy ‘Boarding Pass’ virtual queue system. Handily the next available time slot was only a few minutes away so I booked us in on the Efteling app and we sat down for a few minutes until our slot came around.
Once we were in the queue, just as promised it was only a 10-15 minute wait until our ride, so hats off to Efteling for putting this system in and not charging extra for it. Hopefully it may soon be added to other rides at this and other parks that want to improve the guest experience. So not Merlin parks, obviously!
I’d obviously not ridden Python prior to the re-tracking but I’ve ridden enough rough Vekomas to know that this had certainly been improved. It was still a bit rattly in places but certainly not rough, and the vest style restraints probably helped too.
They clearly have huge fondness for the ride at the park given the expense it must have taken to re-track, but to be honest it’s pretty bland by modern standards. Things have come a long way since a modest drop, two loops and two corkscrews was considered an exciting layout! Also the lift hill has to be one of the slowest I’ve ever encountered.
Moving on around the lake, it was time to get some wood Joris en de Draak was proving quite busy and the queue was over half an hour, but we joined it anyway and enjoyed watching the two coasters duelling through the layout whilst we waited. We chose the Water side first, getting a row fairly close to the back. I’ll save my opinion for now as we didn’t ride Fire till later…
After our ride we went to take a closer look at the Dragon. Funny, but doesn’t this seem rather like a coaster that fuses wood and fire? More reliably than Merlin’s supposed world first does too!
With De Vliegende Hollander still down we took a break from coasters and continued our circuit of the lake, arriving at Pirana, the rapids. Didn’t get much in the way of photos here but they were really good, with plenty of splashing moments and the opportunity for boats to bump or even overtake one another. Great theming on them too, as you’d expect.
We disembarked to rapids to find that De Vliegende Hollander was finally open, but we were now about as far from the entrance as you can get while still being by the lake! A brisk walk past Baron 1898 completed a full lap of the lake and found us waiting outside the ride, whose queue time had already doubled since the time we noticed it was open.
This was undoubtedly my most anticipated ride on this trip. Back in 2015 when I started to get enthusiastic about coasters again and began looking at the parks across Europe, De Vliegende Hollander was something that really attracted my attention. It just seemed so unusual and elaborate to have a dark ride, coaster and splash boat combined into one experience, so I was relieved it had opened and was really excited to ride it.
I’m happy to say it didn’t disappoint! I had watched POVs in the past but luckily they never revealed what the queue line or station were like. Much like the queues at Universal, this was a joy to walk through with so many great items to look at, and then when you reach the station/harbour – wow! That was a real jaw dropping moment.
We were super excited even before we got on board the ride, but the ride itself was great. It’s not the best dark ride, nor the best coaster, nor the best splash boat, but the whole thing combined is an incredibly fun and immersive experience.
With all but one coaster done, we had a break for lunch before getting on the cute steam train for a journey to the opposite end of the park. Initially the plan was to ride Droomvlucht but I noticed that the queue for Symbolica had dropped below 30 minutes for the first time that day so we headed to that instead.
It certainly looked impressive, with an amazingly themed building. The queue line was a bit messy with lots of cattlepens that weren’t in use, but eventually we got to the front and made our way into the building. The pre-show was fun, though we didn’t really know what was going on due to the language barrier, and the queue line within the building was great. We chose the Musical journey mainly because it had a shorter queue.
I know I’m in the minority here, but honestly I thought Symbolica was a bit crap. I mean, the ride system was really clever and obviously a lot of effort had gone into the theming, but I just found the whole thing a bit cheesy. I guess the big issue here is that I’m not really enthralled by the whole fairy tale theme that the park has, but most of the animatronics seemed a bit lifeless and predictable, the interactive elements were confusing and the whole thing just went by in a blur. When you compare it to the big dark rides at Universal, it all seemed a bit dated which isn’t great considering it’s a brand new ride. So that was disappointing, but I’m sure the kids loved it.
After that we decided not to bother waiting over half an hour for any more fairy tale themed dark rides, so Droomvlucht was ditched and instead we went to watch the live show Raveleijn. We didn’t bother with the headsets for translation but it didn’t really matter because it was an amazing spectacle and we got the gist of things pretty easily. We loved it!
We then had a nice stroll back across the park (the weather was lovely for the time of year btw), passed the spiteful, under-maintenance Vogel Rok and stopped off for another sit down with some fab views on Pagode.
It was about 4pm by this point and the queues for all the coasters were pretty short, so we headed back over to the back of the park, with Joris being the first target. Obviously we had to ride Fire this time, and this turned out to be our favourite of the two trains. It’s a close call but this one gave a slightly wilder ride with a bit more airtime than Water I reckon.
We’d ended up losing both rides to that point so immediately went for another ride on Fire and won on this attempt, which helped cement its place as the best of the two and the best ride in the park in my opinion. Both coasters are great fun, wild but not rough and with plenty of airtime, especially on the drops, and obviously the duelling element makes them even more enjoyable.
We then grabbed another ride on De Vliegende Hollander, which was again really good fun, followed by another on Baron 1898 which was also really enjoyable. After that it was about 6pm and we went to eat pancakes at Polles Keuken. It was rather busy and we waited about 20 minutes to get in, which pretty much wiped out the chance of any last minute rides. The pancakes were good but they do get a bit much after a while, and we definitely had better ones during our trip. The restaurant itself was really cool though.
We left just after 7pm with the park now shrouded in darkness, just in time to catch the fireworks show on the lake. We watched for a few minutes and it looked great, but we decided to beat the queues getting out so headed to the exit, and less than ten minutes later we were out of the park and on our way to our hotel in Eindhoven.
Now we may not have been fans of the fairy tale theme, and we certainly missed a lot of the park, but we both loved Efteling. Such a gorgeous park with all the greenery, amazingly themed rides and areas, and some fantastic operations that made a supposedly busy day seem far from it. Most importantly the creds are all great fun – there’s nothing there I would call Top Ten material, but with the exception of Python they’re all nicely themed and very re-ridable. Even Anna, who is pretty picky when it comes to coasters, not only rode them all but enjoyed most of them enough to go on again, and there are very few parks where that happens.
The only real niggle I have is the assigned seating on coasters, which I guess helps with operations but is annoying when you want a front or back row ride, but that’s a pretty minor complaint. Overall it was a great day and we never even saw the Fairytale Forest or experienced the likes of Vogel Rok, Fata Morgana and Spookslot, so there’s already a reason to go back even before they add new creds.
To finish off, here’s a few random photos from the park that most of you will have seen numerous times before.
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