Wrote this a few days ago then lost it so it's taken a while to find the motivation, but here we are...
FRIENDS AND FAMILY DAY YO. ~09/03/13~
I never know how to start these properly, so let's get straight to the point. The Swarm backwards blah blah terrible queueing system blah blah another merlin cock up blahhh. The ride itself is good, but only because The Swarm was a brilliant ride to begin with. All the inversions were still very enjoyable backwards, but the bits in between were fairly dead in comparison to going forwards. That said, I've only ridden it once backwards so I'll have to go again before I could call it a waste of time, but either way at least it adds another variety of experience. Later in the day however, I managed two rides on it forwards and it absolutely blew me away. Every part of it was sensational. I really hope the fire is working more often this season, because it complements the new near miss perfectly. After years of experience it's hard for a single ride to have such an effect, especially one I'd already done many times before, but I actually let out an involuntary 'woah' as soon as we hit the brakes. It was in masterful form.
Nemesis Inferno. If Thorpe Park's the closest thing to my 'home' park, I would consider this the closest thing to my 'home' ride, so I was genuinely delighted to see it doing so well. Whilst the outside volcano is a bit dirty in places now, the station was fantastic. New lights along the queue line and surrounding the trains, new boarding announcements and the dispatch theme was back and perfectly timed too. Factor all that in with enthusiastic staff and it was a great place to be. And then the tunnel, oh my. Lights all working and mist so thick you couldn't see where it ended. There was so much of it it drifted beyond the service road and covered Monks Walk. The ride was its wonderful, whippy self.
Detonator followed, and it's still the best flat ride in the park. From Detonator we could see that Stealth had only just opened, so naturally... Front-row Stealth was excellent. Maybe it's just because I haven't been on it so frequently in the last two years as I used to but it was so much better than I remembered. I can't remember the order of the rides from here on so I'll just write what I remember first. Slammer was running (whaaat) and with a solid 10 or so riders per ride (this isn't a knock at Slammer though, the park was very dead). Crazy to think it's now the last of its kind, and as a ride experience it's still going strong. Rush is still a favourite of mine, but the cycles were really short. We only had one top swing on each side and then it was over, which was odd considering it was barely loading half of its capacity each ride.
Onto SawwwwwwwwwwwowowowowOW OW OW. OW. The Ride. Ohhh dear. It still hurts just to think about it, but it's really trying to rival Furius Baco for catastrophically awful. Next...
Colossus kept closing every time we went near it, so I was forced onto we went for Samurai. All the rides I'd had on it last year had been of 'ok' standard, but this was pathetic. It gave us a normal ride for about 40 seconds and then lumbered about for a few minutes. Running out of ways to describe rides now, so Loggers was erm, good? The lack of tunnel wasn't too bad and didn't change much for me, although I think it would have been if you dropped into the entrance of the tunnel rather than it now being a fairly pointless afterthought. I'm sure they took that into consideration, but maybe it's something they can look it in the future. Vortex was also throwing a tantrum all day, so Quantum... yep, Quantum. Still makes me feel a bit ~off~ afterwards. Somewhere along the line we did Rumba too. As you can see, writing a trip report like this twice can lead me to slack off a bit towards the end. Not much else to say here.
Ridecounts'ralwayscool:
Nemesis Inferno x4
The Swarm x3
Detonator x1
Stealth x1
Rush x1
Loggers Leap x1
Slammer x1
Saw - The Ride x1
Samurai x1
Rumba Rapids x1
Quantum x1
Yay.
