Germany Road(works) Trip - Day 3 - Flight of the Jahreskarte
Entry posted by Benin
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Ah Heide, the weird red-headed step-child of the Merlin machine from my last visit, with its strange mixture of music and atmosphere seemingly stolen from other parks. It lured me back with the prospect of completing the European B&M collection (of course, until Garda and Efteling’s ones open next year), and an attempt to ride Colossos again to see if I can actually like it.
First thing was first though, and that was to collect our German MAPs. The reasons for this were for the free entry to Gardaland and the complimentary Q-Bot at both Heide and Legoland Germany. Considering how busy Heide was looking prior to opening, this was a good choice.
Passes and Q-Bot acquired, we moved straight over to Flug von Damenon. Unlike Swarm, this has a sensible queue-line, the splits just before the batching point, has enough space in the station for 2 trains worth of people AND most importantly has a rotating bag holder at each row. How this logic never made it to Thorpe I’ll never know, because it runs a lot more efficiently.
However, the ride itself is unfortunately lacklustre, and I’m still not sure if I place it above or below Swarm. The layout is quite good, and with a bit more speed might not have the sort of dead spots that you see in Swarm’s over-sized flat turnaround and the finale. But it is quite slow and lumbering, and even worse, has an awful, awful bounce already. The bounce is what ruins the ride really, it’s so strange that a brand new ride can have that so early in its life. Perhaps the design of the ride and the layout being quite tight (Raptor and Swarm are both drawn out) means that there are higher levels of force acting upon the train, and because of the vibration that naturally happens anyway on these train styles, it just becomes more noticeable under heavier force.
Either way, a bitter disappointment, and Raptor is still quite easily the best Wing-Rider I’ve experienced.
One positive for Flug is the single rider queue, which when combined with a reasonably epic batcher man, went quickly. After the second ride it was time to ride Krake with the finished boat section. I still liked it a lot from my first rides, especially as it amazed the Germans from the visual perspective. It still does that, and it delivers a fair whack of airtime after the inversion nowadays. They’ve also added a dedicated front row queue to it, which is a slight improvement, but a real improvement would have been to batch it all in, especially given how Q-Bots enter the station building in an awkward fashion.
We had some Crepes whilst we waited for our next booking, Colossos. I distinctly remember being completely non-plussed about this ride on my previous visit, soul-less rubbish I called it. After my recent enjoyment of Balder I thought however that this viewpoint could well change, and to see if it was accurate the back row was chosen.
My viewpoint on Colossos has not changed. The first drop is wonderful, but everything else just seems poor. Just found it extremely difficult to actually enjoy the hills, the corners are duller than Balder’s and that long helix is really rattly. It just simply doesn’t do anything for me and I doubt it ever will.
Grottenblitz was next, one of my least favourite Mack Powered coasters, before we broke for lunch at Pizza Pasta. I forget how much it was, but the pizza slices are quite simply ridiculous. I spent some time afterwards taking photos from the terrace outside.
Straight after lunch was time for Desert Race, the slightly better version of Rita (again, damning with faint praise), before it was time to see the Madagascar Circus Show.
Unlike Chessie’s version, this one is indoors, and as a result you need to acquire a ticket for the next showing. A good idea really, as it prevents mass crowds building up and then having to close off the building and disappointing guests. Also unlike Chessie’s version, this one is actually good, as it more appears to be a circus show that just so happens to have a Madagascar related storyline to tie it all together. It also had fire.
It was time to whore out the Q-Bot some more (although Heide have a rubbish tier system of either having select rides depending on your choice, but a decent idea in limiting the amount of times you can use it on each ride, so we had 2 goes on every major coaster but Flug). So we rode Krake, Flug and Schweizer Bobbahn, which wasn’t very good, before riding Desert Race again.
There was a long gap for Colossos so we used it riding the two water rides in the middle of the park. They were a well deserved rest in amongst the constant cred riding it must be said. Colossos was still a disappointment.
The random Pirate Show was next, which was extremely weird and random. Didn’t really get it so we ran away early for our Krake time slot before two last goes on Flug to finish off the day.
Heide is such a weird park, I don’t really know if I like it or not. The rides don’t really do that much for me (Krake being the best, Scream was closed all day) and the park is a weird mish-mash of half-arsed theming attempts and some completely closed off areas. They have started to get an unique identity to themselves with the addition of several IMAScore music dotted around the park to remove old Tussauds themes, but there’s still a lot of flaws around the park. Their ents budget has also seemingly been slashed to bits as one arena stood empty.
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