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The C. View

A blog by JoshC. in General

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About this blog

Detailed, sometimes rambling, entries about rides and attractions..

Entries in this blog

How do you Solve a Problem like Fastrack?

This is a blog entry that relates to the hot topic of Fastrack and Fastrack sales. So why's it in here, and not in that topic? The aim here is to illustrate how Fastrack sales affect the main queue of a ride, and demonstrate what many bring up - those who pay for the premium service (Fastrack) negatively affect the service of those who do not pay for such a service (those who use the main queue). Unfortunately, this will be quite mathematically thought out, will ramble on a bit, and uses many
JoshC.

JoshC.

2

BelGerAnd Days 6-7 - Efteling

Better late than never ey? I've condensed down this entry so that it's easier for me to write / more people read it / I actually decide to write it... With Baron already ridden, and 2 full days (10-8) at Efteling left, we knew we'd be able to take our time with the park, and were in no rush to do anything straight away. We covered the whole park easily within those two days, and had plenty of time to reride our favourites too. So, to cut to the chase, I adored Efteling. I wasn't expecting to lo
JoshC.

JoshC.

2

JoshC.'s Review of the Thorpe Season - 2015

Yeah, I'm doing this thing again. It's my 5th season doing a 'season review', and it's interesting seeing not only how the park has changed, but also how my general views of the park have changed, in that time. Here's some links to 2011, 2012, 2013 and 2014's reviews if you're interested. This entry will be a lot less photo-heavy than the rest, mostly because I've taken less pictures this season, so I'll try and keep the writing to a minimum too. With the boring points out of the way, "prepare f
JoshC.

JoshC.

2

BelGerAnd2 - Holland

Walibi Holland was the only new-for-me park of the trip, and there were two obvious draws for visiting:  the new Mack coaster Lost Gravity, and Goliath, the Intamin mega coaster.  We seemed to get lucky with our visit, as the park was very quiet, and we didn't queue over 15 minutes for anything if memory serves me correctly.  Overall impressions of the park are quite mixed for me; there's some great attractions around the park (and of higher quality to Walibi Belgium's offerings), but there's st
JoshC.

JoshC.

2

15 Years of Fear

Fright Nights might be over, and it might be closed season, but I'm doing a belated 15 Years of Fear Celebration!  I've been fortunate enough to visit every Fright Nights, and do all but one Fright Nights maze-style attraction, so I'm going to do a quick worst-to-best ranking (16 to 1) of all those mazes.  Naturally, mazes change year-on-year, and even one run through can be dramatically different to another on the same night, so I'm being nice and judging these off my best runthroughs.  A
JoshC.

JoshC.

2

Ninjago - The Brief Review

It's been a while since I dedicated a whole blog post to a ride review, but this seems like a suitable time to do one.   WARNING:  There will spoilers.  If you don't know what the ride system is, or want to completely avoid knowing what some of the effects used in the ride are, turn back now.       For those completely unaware, it is a 3D-screen based shooter ride, where you use hand motion to 'fire'.  Sitting in rows of four, with your 3D glasses, a lap bar comes d
JoshC.

JoshC.

2

FreBelGerAnd - Movie Park Germany

So I'm skipping Phantasialand because everyone knows I think it's the best and I'm behind on writing TRs and stuff.  So yeah, do excuse the delay and what will be rushed TRs, which will largely just be reviews of rides in no particular order of riding them...   Movie Park was a park I had reasonably low expectations about.  There wasn't many raved about, and any reviews of the park I had read always mentioned long queues, that their Fastrack was a saviour and people always having a sou
JoshC.

JoshC.

2

FreBelGerAnd - Efteling

Only taken me 3 and a half months to finish this TR...   We spent 2 and a half days at Efteling this year, and there was bucketloads of stuff going on during that time.  We stayed at the newly opened Loonsche Land Hotel, experienced Symbolica on it's opening day (along with all the pomp and faff to accompany it), and had a 14 hour day on park thanks to their summer festival event starting.  So I could probably pad this part of the trip into 2 or 3 blogs itself (and I kind of have alrea
JoshC.

JoshC.

2

Liseberg

So I visited Liseberg back in July, and I just wanted to share a few thoughts on the park...  Majority of my photos were like so bad so I'm just stealing photos from the park's website to break things up.   Ultimately, I was left a bit...unfulfilled? by the park.  I don't know how to describe it.  The quality of some of the attractions at the park is really good, but the park itself just do 'it' for me.   Helix Let's get this out the way.  Helix is truly fantastic.  It's
JoshC.

JoshC.

2

The Swarm - Forwards vs Backwards

As we know, following a poor response to marketing of Swarm last year, Thorpe decided to "revisit" Swarm's image and increase the "'thrill factor' for visitors". This was despite very positive reviews for Swarm as it stood last year. So, along with the new billboard theming elements, the back two rows have been turned backwards. Now, in a way, it's very hard to do a comparison between the two. They are, essentially, the same ride - they follow the same layout, you more or less experience th
JoshC.

JoshC.

1

Premiere Soquet Grilling - Days 1-2, Parc du Bocasse & Festyland

With the 'new normal' in full swing and parks open again, I'd been itching for a European trip again. With my Heide/Hansa trip back in April cancelled, and my June Europa trip delayed before I booked, the Covid situation had dented some big plans for new parks for me.However, wanting to remain cautious, I didn't want to swing into big parks, and risk not visiting them in case something happened (having to self-isolate, a park randomly closing, etc). So something I bit smaller was needed. Back in
JoshC.

JoshC.

1

10 Years of Afterburn

10 years ago, Thorpe Park were graced with the introduction of Nemesis Inferno. It was B&M's 22nd Inverted coaster, a type of roller coaster which had proven most popular over the previous ten years. Billed as 'the world's greatest roller coaster experience' and having a name that obviously was leading itself to be a successor to the extremely popular Nemesis, the ride had a lot to live up to. Unfortunately, Inferno didn't live up to hype. From what I can gather, it's not a particularly
JoshC.

JoshC.

1

Breaking Free from the Merlin Machine - Drayton Manor

For the first in about 10 or 11 years, I visited a non-Merlin theme park. It's been a long time coming, and anywhere was a start. And that start was to be Drayton Manor. After such a beautiful week, Saturday decided to take a turn for the worst, and give us rain, thunder, lightning (though with a couple of breaks of sunshine during the day!). Adam picked me up and we arrived at Drayton around 9ish. Even though we were early, we could tell it was gonna be quiet day, and thank goodness, aft
JoshC.

JoshC.

1

5 Rides Which Deserve a Bit More Attention

It's been a long while since I've done a proper blog post, but I've dusted off my keyboard to do one I'd been thinking about for a while..   Over the past couple of years, there's some rides I've done which are a ton of fun, but don't really seem to get the attention they deserve. Mostly for reasons that they're rides in parks that aren't high up people's lists, or there's better rides at those parks. So I figured I'd just throw a little list out there.   This isn't going to
JoshC.

JoshC.

1

BelGerAnd Day 2 - Bellewaerde

Day 2 of the trip got off to a slightly bad start, with no where around our French hotel seemingly being open for us to buy breakfast (despite the internet and shop signs saying they would be open..). After much wandering around, we found a nice little bakery where I couldn't resist getting anything other than a croissant. After food was sorted, and a nice 30 minute car journey was had, we arrived at our second park , Bellewaerde. Now, before I start, I should probably confess that I hadn't rea
JoshC.

JoshC.

1

BelGerAnd Day 5 - Hello Netherlands

*Once again, a long time between entries into this trip - sorry to anyone who is still reading this! Reports will probably be shorter from now on so I can finish this thing before Christmas...* After a nice sleep in Dusseldorf, we said out goodbyes to Germany and ventured into The Netherlands. Out first stop was Toverland, which, despite being a relatively small park, was one I was looking forward to a lot. The 10-6 opening time would surely give plenty of time to give everything a couple of ri
JoshC.

JoshC.

1

BelGerAnd Day 8 - Bobbejaanland

The last day of BelGerAnd is here! And unfortunately it's not ending with a bang, but rather a slur of 'b's and 'a's in one word - Bobbejaanland. For those curious, it's pronounced Bob-e-yan-land (we didn't fully know this until about half way through the day). Being close to the park meant that after our free breakfast, we arrived with plenty of time for the 10am opening. We got there at about 9:45 and let through the main gates, where we were immediately bombarded by a costumed character a
JoshC.

JoshC.

1

2015 Containment Review

Captain Obvious Alert - This blog may contain spoilers. So on Sunday, I did Containment, the new escape experience at Thorpe. I've never done one of these escape room things, and I've always been a bit sceptical about the idea - so many things can go wrong which can ruin the experience. But nonetheless, I was still excited to try it out... One thing which is worth noting was our group was made up of only 6 people (4 TPMers and 2 randomers), rather than the full 10. This was at the 4pm slot, so
JoshC.

JoshC.

1

BelGerAnd2 - Germany

I've wanted to complete my BelGerAnd2 "trip report" for a while, mostly for sake of completion, but I've really struggled to figure out what to say about Phantasialand.  It's easy to sing the praises for the park, and most of those praises would see me reiterate myself.  So let's get those out of the way...   Maus au Chocolat and Chiapas are the perfect examples of how to a shooting dark ride and water ride respectively.  Black Mamba is a great coaster that really turns into a beast in
JoshC.

JoshC.

1

Premiere Soquet Grilling - Day 3, Parc Saint Paul & Jardin d'Acclimatation

"Day 3? What happened to Day 2 though Josh? Have I missed a magnificent report of a wonderfully obscure French park that most people don't care about?" I hear no one ask.  Well, it's been edited into my previous blog entry, to save me hogging all the blog entry space     When this trip was planned, it was prior to the Formule incident at Parc Saint Paul. For those who don't know: a woman fell out of one of their roller coasters (Formule1), dying. The ride has a poor history, also
JoshC.

JoshC.

1

Symbolica Review

To me, Symbolica was the biggest new European attraction for 2017 for theme parks. It's not exactly a difficult feat to achieve, with little of note actually happening this year. But I found the prospect of Efteling, a park known for creating highly detailed and love dark rides, investing their biggest sum in a ride ever, much more exciting than Port Aventura sticking Ferrari Land at the edge of their park and adding a taller and faster Stealth to their line up.   It's difficult to rev
JoshC.

JoshC.

1

The Walking Dead - The Review

So, I figured I may as well give a bit more insight about my views on The Walking Dead - The Ride.   I know plenty of people have pretty much written it off already, and it's almost trendy to hate the idea, but I do think it's worth going into this with an open mind.  The overall experience is good, well themed, and does justice to what the ride and building was designed to achieve.     The entrance portal is nice.  It is standard run down Thorpe style, but it is still good. 
JoshC.

JoshC.

1

Ich bin ein Doughnut: Little Big City and Strawberries

Last weekend, I visited Berlin and Leipzig for a quick cred run and culture trip. I had originally planned to go to Finland and hit up Linnanmaki this month, but since Taiga opens next month, we opted for something a little different.. After arriving in Berlin Friday morning, the first port of call was Little Big City. Owned by Merlin, LBC is one of their newer midway brands, and is basically a miniature village which goes through the history of Berlin. This one opened up about 2 years ago, a
JoshC.

JoshC.

1

Ich bin ein Doughnut: Belantis

After a day spent doing some random stuff in Berlin, the weekend was the main reason for the trip: the two random small parks just outside Leipzig. The first one was Belantis; a medium-sized park owned by Parque Reunidos (who also own the likes of Movie Park Germany, Bobbejaanaland, Mirabilandia,...). It was sadly an extremely wet day, with showers pretty much non-stop from about 8 in the morning. Fortunately, it meant the park was dead, and the park didn't close anything major in the weather. S
JoshC.

JoshC.

1

Premiere Soquet Grilling - Day 5, Dennlys Parc (The End)

And Day 5 brings an end to the trip, where we spend a few hours at Dennlys Parc, which is about an hour from Calais...   Covid MeasuresFace coverings on rides if you're over the age of 11. Some queues had social distancing markers I think, and people kept at a sensible enough distance. The visit was the day after face coverings has become compulsory in shops again across the whole of France, so I expect that the idea of social distancing might have been on people's minds a bit if it was
JoshC.

JoshC.

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