nadroJ
CF Legend
So a trip was being arranged for a few days in the wonderful country of Germany over the Easter Bank Holiday weekend. Not wanting to return to the disappointment-fest that is Heide Park, Conor and I (mostly me) decided to do a few days mopping up some +1s around the border crossover points of Germany, Belgium and the Netherlands.
We started off at, as Serena would say, Goon O’Clock for our grotesquely early morning flight from the ever convenient Stansted airport (no sarcasm intended, it’s actually ridiculously close to my house <3) and landed in Cologne-Bonn airport, which I’ve weirdly never flown into despite having visited Phantasialand twice previously. Conor did his Irish thing and we got a double upgrade on our car, meaning we were now driving an Opal Mocca, complete with bum-warmers built into the seats. Luxury! Luckily the machine also had a built in SatNav as mine decided not to play. Trés annoying.
We were soon on our way along the Goon map, upon which I had plotted various +1s, the first of which could be found in Landgraaf, Netherlands. The website made Mondo Verde look like a lovely tropical garden with some rides and animals. In reality the place is a grotty garden centre on the outskirts of a non-descript Dutch town, the perfect habitat for a dirty old kiddie cred then! Annoyingly they didn’t take Visa (what is this, Dutch CFers, what does your country have against Visa?!) so had to faff around for an hour trying to find a cash machine. An illegal parking manoeuvre and a sausage roll later we had everything sorted and were finally in the gates, heading Credwards! We had been a little apprehensive about the thing being open as the park was mostly deserted, but we managed to track down a greasy teen who was operating the rides who informed us that they were just waiting for the brakes to dry and she’d be up and running. Excellent! This was also the birth oh ‘he knows’ in the style of disgusting misogynist Dapper Laughs, but instead of referring to a girl wanting to have sex with us, we used it to reference the fact that the ride op clearly knows we are dirty, filthy enthusiasts. In the meantime we had a wander around the rest of the park, whose map had promised a tropical paradise and some Nautic Jets. I’m sure the place is lovely in full bloom but there’s something about wandering around a bunch of dead plants and tacky ‘Roman’ statues that left me cold. We annoyed some donkeys and satanic sheep before cred anxiety got the better of me and we rushed back over, got the cred and **** off onto the next place.
Annoyingly because of all the Visa faff we’d eaten quite a lot into our allocated cred-time and so had to skip the fairly epic looking alpine coaster at a nearby ski centre. Spite. The next shame-centre on our list was Kinderstad Heerlen, an indoor cred at a nearby childrens play centre full of kids birthday parties. I was fully expecting to be turned away as this is definitely not somewhere you want grown adults wandering around unaccompanied. In true European style nobody gave a **** and we wandered through the tin shed filled with hyperactive children and parents wondering how it’d all gone so wrong that they’d ended up spending their Saturday in a corrugated iron can that smelled of vomit surrounded by screaming toddlers towards the very back where our second +1 of the trip sat in all her glory. Conor had to ride with a kid who was too small to ride alone. I laughed. Then an angry mum appeared. I laughed some more, and we left hastily before child services arrived to question us.
Back in the car then and swiftly round the corner to de Valkenier, which is possibly the most depressing place on earth. We paid an obscene €5 to park (huergh <//3) and then paid to enter. The place is a city park, a completely charmless concrete nightmare when rides come to die and Dutch teens come to work their Saturday wishing they were anywhere but here. Honestly, I don’t think I’ve ever visited a worse ‘pay to enter’ attraction. It had the low quality of a UK gypsy fair, toilets you had to pay to use and, at the centre of it all, a pub where the neglectful parents who actually BRING their children to this dump can ignore their responsibilities while the kids likely get hepatitis from the water slide. Vile. We went in, got the cred, did a lap to be polite and quickly sashayed away. Gross.
Luckily the day ended with the fabness that is Plopsa Indoor Hasselt. I don’t understand why something like this doesn’t exist in the UK, it would make SUCH a fortune! OK, so the place is clearly not for the likes of me as I think the cred was the only thing we could actually go on, but the effort they’ve gone to is brilliant. As a rule I don’t really like the Plopsa characters, but this place had a different feel to it and brought with it a certain charm. Everything was clean and well looked after and was just a wonderful relief from the succession of **** we’d just subjected ourselves to in the name of cred whoring. We rode the coaster which is the fab Viking themed Wickie Coaster that is half enclosed in a skull mountain. Cool! I do find it slightly annoying that Plopsa literally copy and paste their theming into all of their parks (we saw exactly the same Wickie models the next day at Plopsa Coo) but I’ll forgive them that for the awesomeness of their product. It is weird to me that someone would even bother spending so much time and effort on creating a high quality product for an age group that would literally be just as happy playing in a cardboard box, but then I guess that’s what makes a good brand. We decided to sit on a bench and have some quiet WiFi time when we were rudely interrrupted by the end-of-the-day show, whose madness culminated with confetti canons. So much for a quiet five minutes then.
We then had a pleasant drive down into the beautiful Ardennes to our hotel which was a gorgeous little chalet by the river. It came with a proper kitchen so we decided to head to a supermarket to get some food to bring back to cook, only to find that once again we’d been Europe-spited and nothing was **** open. We had to drive about a 40 mile round trip to an open supermarket and once we’d picked up a few bits we were so knackered we lumped for a McEurope and made our way back to the chalet.
We started off at, as Serena would say, Goon O’Clock for our grotesquely early morning flight from the ever convenient Stansted airport (no sarcasm intended, it’s actually ridiculously close to my house <3) and landed in Cologne-Bonn airport, which I’ve weirdly never flown into despite having visited Phantasialand twice previously. Conor did his Irish thing and we got a double upgrade on our car, meaning we were now driving an Opal Mocca, complete with bum-warmers built into the seats. Luxury! Luckily the machine also had a built in SatNav as mine decided not to play. Trés annoying.
We were soon on our way along the Goon map, upon which I had plotted various +1s, the first of which could be found in Landgraaf, Netherlands. The website made Mondo Verde look like a lovely tropical garden with some rides and animals. In reality the place is a grotty garden centre on the outskirts of a non-descript Dutch town, the perfect habitat for a dirty old kiddie cred then! Annoyingly they didn’t take Visa (what is this, Dutch CFers, what does your country have against Visa?!) so had to faff around for an hour trying to find a cash machine. An illegal parking manoeuvre and a sausage roll later we had everything sorted and were finally in the gates, heading Credwards! We had been a little apprehensive about the thing being open as the park was mostly deserted, but we managed to track down a greasy teen who was operating the rides who informed us that they were just waiting for the brakes to dry and she’d be up and running. Excellent! This was also the birth oh ‘he knows’ in the style of disgusting misogynist Dapper Laughs, but instead of referring to a girl wanting to have sex with us, we used it to reference the fact that the ride op clearly knows we are dirty, filthy enthusiasts. In the meantime we had a wander around the rest of the park, whose map had promised a tropical paradise and some Nautic Jets. I’m sure the place is lovely in full bloom but there’s something about wandering around a bunch of dead plants and tacky ‘Roman’ statues that left me cold. We annoyed some donkeys and satanic sheep before cred anxiety got the better of me and we rushed back over, got the cred and **** off onto the next place.
Annoyingly because of all the Visa faff we’d eaten quite a lot into our allocated cred-time and so had to skip the fairly epic looking alpine coaster at a nearby ski centre. Spite. The next shame-centre on our list was Kinderstad Heerlen, an indoor cred at a nearby childrens play centre full of kids birthday parties. I was fully expecting to be turned away as this is definitely not somewhere you want grown adults wandering around unaccompanied. In true European style nobody gave a **** and we wandered through the tin shed filled with hyperactive children and parents wondering how it’d all gone so wrong that they’d ended up spending their Saturday in a corrugated iron can that smelled of vomit surrounded by screaming toddlers towards the very back where our second +1 of the trip sat in all her glory. Conor had to ride with a kid who was too small to ride alone. I laughed. Then an angry mum appeared. I laughed some more, and we left hastily before child services arrived to question us.
Back in the car then and swiftly round the corner to de Valkenier, which is possibly the most depressing place on earth. We paid an obscene €5 to park (huergh <//3) and then paid to enter. The place is a city park, a completely charmless concrete nightmare when rides come to die and Dutch teens come to work their Saturday wishing they were anywhere but here. Honestly, I don’t think I’ve ever visited a worse ‘pay to enter’ attraction. It had the low quality of a UK gypsy fair, toilets you had to pay to use and, at the centre of it all, a pub where the neglectful parents who actually BRING their children to this dump can ignore their responsibilities while the kids likely get hepatitis from the water slide. Vile. We went in, got the cred, did a lap to be polite and quickly sashayed away. Gross.
Luckily the day ended with the fabness that is Plopsa Indoor Hasselt. I don’t understand why something like this doesn’t exist in the UK, it would make SUCH a fortune! OK, so the place is clearly not for the likes of me as I think the cred was the only thing we could actually go on, but the effort they’ve gone to is brilliant. As a rule I don’t really like the Plopsa characters, but this place had a different feel to it and brought with it a certain charm. Everything was clean and well looked after and was just a wonderful relief from the succession of **** we’d just subjected ourselves to in the name of cred whoring. We rode the coaster which is the fab Viking themed Wickie Coaster that is half enclosed in a skull mountain. Cool! I do find it slightly annoying that Plopsa literally copy and paste their theming into all of their parks (we saw exactly the same Wickie models the next day at Plopsa Coo) but I’ll forgive them that for the awesomeness of their product. It is weird to me that someone would even bother spending so much time and effort on creating a high quality product for an age group that would literally be just as happy playing in a cardboard box, but then I guess that’s what makes a good brand. We decided to sit on a bench and have some quiet WiFi time when we were rudely interrrupted by the end-of-the-day show, whose madness culminated with confetti canons. So much for a quiet five minutes then.
We then had a pleasant drive down into the beautiful Ardennes to our hotel which was a gorgeous little chalet by the river. It came with a proper kitchen so we decided to head to a supermarket to get some food to bring back to cook, only to find that once again we’d been Europe-spited and nothing was **** open. We had to drive about a 40 mile round trip to an open supermarket and once we’d picked up a few bits we were so knackered we lumped for a McEurope and made our way back to the chalet.
