I had another relatively weird theme park dream last night…
I was visiting “Oakwood Theme Park in Wales” (as usual, the name is in inverted commas, as the park I visited bore little resemblance to the real life Oakwood). The park was somewhat more extravagant than the actual Oakwood!
I started my day on “Treetops”, which was more like Thirteen at Alton Towers than the humble Zierer Tivoli that graced Oakwood’s woods for 35 years! The key difference is that instead of all the theming in the drop track area, the train went into some sort of backstage freezer area with staff casually staring at us as the track dropped! I also left my bag in the hold on here by accident… but when I went back to retrieve it later, they wouldn’t give it back to me until they’d performed DNA sequencing on both me and the bag to check we were a match!
I then bizarrely rode “Detonator”, which was some sort of dementedly forceful frog hopper style ride instead of the actual Fabbri drop tower at Thorpe Park, before moving onto “Megafobia”… which, instead of a CCI wooden coaster, was an exact clone of Shambhala, Chinese theming and all!
I then went onto some sort of haunted house that was somewhat of a bizarre mix between The Curse at Alton Manor and the Neverland walkthrough at Oakwood… I walked into the indoor queue, and there was a blue screen of death projected onto the wall. I muttered to myself “This thing could do with a revamp” before the projector suddenly flickered to life and showed “DID YOU SAY I NEED A REVAMP?” on the wall in angry white writing, with lightning flash sound effects in the background. I got out of there pretty sharpish!
Out of nowhere, I bumped into
@Hixee, and we chatted for a bit before riding “Speed” together. Now unlike the other rides I’ve described so far, Speed was actually the Gerstlauer Euro-Fighter from the real Oakwood, but it had seatbelts. And this proved to be an interesting bone of contention for Hixee… the ride had a bizarre mixture of B&M and Intamin seatbelts, and I sat down in a seat with a B&M seatbelt. But Hixee said to me “Move over! I’m only sitting in a seat with the mighty B&M seatbelt; I don’t trust those flimsy Intamin ones!”… so I swiftly moved over to a seat with an Intamin seatbelt so that he could sit in a seat with a B&M seatbelt.
After that, we bizarrely decided to go to an in-park bar together and order alcohol (this is where you know it’s a dream, given that I don’t drink in real life!). On the one hand, this bar was really luxurious, somewhat like that French showboat or similar bars at Europa Park… but on the other hand, it was also like some sort of teen nightclub, selling cheap rounds of shots and playing dance music in one section! We initially started with cocktails, but we then had the bright idea of ordering a big tray of shots! At this point, Hixee was still moaning about the seatbelts on Speed… so I gave him the ultimatum of “every time you moan about seatbelts, we take a shot!”, and as such, the whole tray ended up being downed between us!
When we exited the bar (somehow still sober even after all that alcohol!)… it turned out that the rest of the park had transitioned into party mode, as it was “Happy Hour” for the final hour of the day, where dance music was being played loudly over all of the speakers and the ride operators were giving out free alcohol to everyone on every ride! Resultantly, a second ride on each of Megafobia and Speed saw us down multiple cocktails and shots (and bizarrely, this alcohol was “coaster-ready alcohol”, as promoted by the park, that defied gravity and made it round all of the rides intact apart from anything you drank during the ride!).
At that point, I bade Hixee goodbye before trying to head out of the park… but I then met my newfound enthusiast friend from university that I mentioned in the happy thread a couple of weeks back! We chatted for a bit and then stayed together to go to a central area of the park for Oakwood’s equivalent of a nighttime show to represent the end of the day… everyone linking arms around a bonfire and belting out Auld Lang Syne, despite it not being New Year! And of course, the park plied us with more free alcohol as we left…
That was an utterly bizarre dream that took many unexpected turns… not least the unexpectedly boozy turn it took given that I don’t even drink in real life!