Fantastic start to this year in theme parks for me. I've got nothing better to do now, so here's a trip report.
Katy and I arrived at the park at about 8.40, making our first queue for the day the one at the entrance. I used this time to talk to Nicky and Enigma Shadow which was fun because I have not talked to CFers since the Drayton non-live last year. Nice to see new faces here this year, and fantastic that you seemed to fit into the group so well.
Rainy times ensued as we went down to do ERT on Nemesis. But Nemesis broke, so we did Air instead. Meh. Since Air was rubbish and took ages on a small queue, we had to leave and go back to the entrance to meet the second load of people. More chatting happened, and we then headed off to Th13teen.
The silly lady doing the queue told us that the queue was over two hours long, and ended up being over by almost an hour. General conversation, filming, balloons and diabolo made this queue quite interesting and CF proves once again its queue busting awesomeness. Th134567teen broke down for 5 minutes, which amused me. When I got on Thi-three-teen, I had a quite fun ride, and my thoughts on that were mainly positive and can be viewed in Ian's General Discussions topic. Suddenly I spotted John Wardley, which was awesome. I didn't talk or have a picture but it was nice to see him at the opening of the ride.
After 13 was Oblivion. While I queued, I realised Thorpe Park had done something to Alton Towers, because Oblivion broke down as well. This breakdown did not amuse me, but irritated me instead. bad times. Oblivion in the rain is quite fun but annoying coming out of the tunnel.
Instead of having lunch, I broke off with Slayed and Enigma Shadow and co. to do Hex. Enigma Shadow provided me with Galaxy, which pleased me greatly. Hex was good as usual. Unfortunately, this did not leave us with time for lunch, so we just met up with S&M-Ghost_Furie (who came up with that one?) and everyone else for Nemesis. Nemesis + rain = awesomecrazy! Duel was done afterwards, but my gun wasn't clocking up points, so I ended up with about 200 for half the ride, then 1500 at the end (still need to beat my high score with 50500). Instead of doing Runaway Mine Train, I joined Peter and Martyn on a quest to find food. My quest ended in some poor chips from the Mutiny Bay place. The hot dog place was closed, so Peter and Martyn had to settle for Burger King.
The group passed, so I joined them, but since I'd done Hex already, I decided to pass and instead, ran to do Rita on SRQ. I would have done another ride, but CF finished Hex before I got a chance, so I left the queue and joined the queue proper. Rita was very good as usual, but on todays visit, not running as well as Nemesis.
Then it was 4:00, so I had to leave to get to my concert. I wish I could have stayed the rest of the day, but I couldn't.
So overall, a very fun day. Alton has a reputation of being hard work and not condusive to a good CF-Live, but today was fun and worked very well. Drayton tomorrow should be awesome as Drayton usually is for CF-Lives (let's forget 2008 shall we). Crap theme park, but group days out always seem to work really well.
edit: that took me about 10 minutes to type. Where does UC get all his time from?
