JoshC.

How dare you! (The October trip is the trip after my next trip...)

I'm travelling the 12th and would only be able to make for a couple of hours (assuming Ryanair don't delay me), so the 13th would be better for me!

Ded End??

Touch scares are a tricky one. For some people, there's a huge fear of what could happen: a lot of people worry about being touched and having their personal space invaded. But once that wall is broken, some can lose that fear (because you realise being touched isn't that bad). There's then the other side that when touching is allowed, actors can become over-reliant on it. Even for people who don't like it, you can quickly become desensitised to it, and ultimately it loses its value. Plus, touching doesn't always ramp up scars factor. Sometimes it can take away from the experience, take you out of the story ("why is this butcher who wants to take me away, kill me and sell my meat only stroking my head?" For example). It has to have a reason and be timed rightly. Personally, I reckon touching works best when it's a bit more full-on (say, Sub Species style, where you can be forced to go in certain ways, etc). Anything less than that rarely increases scare factor imo

Start of September has been when they've announced new mazes the past 2 years, so sometime next week seems like a good shout.

Yeah, don't do that. Please don't do that. As for the entrance, if I remember correctly they have two of those Platform 15 signs: one at the end of queue (just before you're batched into groups) and one where it's currently placed now. So I'd imagine the queue entrance is the same. Given that Dead Creek Woods isn't returning this year but Blair Witch is, I hope they use the full route for Blair Witch. That would be nice.

As much as is sensationalist garbage with people putting on compo faces, they do have two good points: -Being stuck in the air with no shade on a 30C isn't pleasant. -Plenty of people will question, or at least raise an eyebrow, when they see staff evacuating them wearing full harnesses whilst they themselves don't wear full harnesses (assuming of course that's what happened; I don't know what the procedure is for Dragon?) Doesn't justify the ridiculousness of the article, but sadly woven in there is two reasonable irrefutable points. A normal, reasonable person would deal with these with the park and 99% of the time an acceptable resolution would be reached. Shame someone has had to go to the papers.

And a time lapse video from the park, along with details of construction: Around 24secs you see the damage caused by the storm; shows how significant it was and really puts it into perspective!

I'm a fan of the word play. Maze feels like it has potential to be quite different to the other mazes in terms of theme and style; hope they work with that and really diversify the line up.

Some concept art: https://content.sixflags.com/qiddiya/about-the-park/ Falcon's Flight, the world's tallest, fastest, longest ride: New-gen Vekoma tilt(!): General:

Intamin call them swing launches, Mack call them halfpipe launches and Gerstlauer just call them triple launches. So take your pick! I think swing launch is the most fun name so I stick with that haha

In an out-of-the-blue announcement, Six Flags have announced a park for Saudia Arabia, in Riyadh, more specifically, Qiddiyah, an entertainment project trying to revolutionise the country. https://qiddiya.com/en/press-release/six-flags-qiddiya-unveils-park-design The highlight of the announcement is the world's tallest, fastest and longest coaster, with the only seemingly-publicly confirmed stat bring a max speed of 156mph. Oh, and it's not a launch coaster. The park will also include: -A swing launch coaster -A Vekoma Orkanen SFC -A Mack Poseidon water coaster -A new style GCI hybrid coaster -Drop track coaster -World's tallest drop tower -And whatever else they're dreaming of. The plan is for the park to open in 2023. Somehow, I don't think so. But we'll see...

Could possibly be that the park have done research or received feedback that people sometimes want to buy non-Thorpe tat? The Merlin parks are actually part of a minority which sell park-exclusive (and stuff related to rides) merchandise. Plenty of parks sell just general tat and stuff from shows and films and stuff, with the logic being they can capitalise on people having money to spend, and being more likely to spend it on stuff they recognise. So it could be Thorpe trailing it just to see if it works? If there's an opportunity, always worth exploring it I guess. Not a fan of it being in the Inferno shop mind. Ride shops should focus on the ride in question and just general stuff (drinks, snacks, etc). Anything else feels a bit jarring to me personally.

To my knowledge they are still working on it (scaffolding is a good sign!) and they don't have any plans to remove it yet. But I believe the technical term to describe Quantum's state right now is "It's f#¢k€d"

Ah, I didn't realise it was still there tbh. There's no effort made to advertise it (aside from one sign I guess?), and it's probably hardly ever used. Just assumed due to lack of use they'd given up with it!

There are no more SRQs at Thorpe. They were gotten rid off a good 5-6 years ago, before randomly reappearing on Samurai a couple of years back. That didn't last long and I don't expect the park to reintroduce them any time soon.

The park removed their rapids ride this year and are investing $27m in opening a new in 2020: https://www.silverdollarcity.com/theme-park/2020 -2100ft long -5m30sec ride time -82ft tall vertical tower -45ft drop Exciting!

Dreamworld Australia, the park where there was the rapids incident in 2016 killing 4, is getting a new roller coaster. The park was (and still is) rumoured to be in quite an unstable position following the incident, not helped by some stiff competition theme park-wise on the Gold Coast. So some see this as perhaps a last roll of the dice in trying to stay afloat. The coaster will be a near Blue-Fire clone from Mack, but starts of with a swing launch (launch forward, backward, forwards into circuit) with a curved spike, a slightly higher top speed, and the final car will be one of Mack's Xtreme Spinning Cars (in a similar to fashion to how it was tested on the original Blue Fire a few years back): This is part of a wider AUS$70m (~£38m) expansion for the park as well, which will see a couple of smaller rides introduced, and some freshen ups of existing rides. The coaster will open in late 2020.

Yep. Yet when Ghost Train was closed for less than 48 hours, the park made a huge deal out of it. Very odd. Maybe. It certainly does struggle due to the unreliability of the ride type, and summer is usually when it's hit worst

Annnd it's now officially open, having opened at 2pm local after a press/fan event. A back seat POV can be found here: The park was originally only meant to be open until 8pm, but decided on the day to extend to 9.30pm (likely due to Zadra's afternoon opening and the waves of fans and press there). I'm related, a drone got caught in Zadra's track. It didn't end well for the drone: Don't take your drones to theme parks, kids.

I don't think so, but I grant you it's a bit suss that two accelerators are experiencing extending periods of downtime at the same time.

I would expect it to be closed for a long period of time from what I've heard. Frankly, I find it crazy that Thorpe haven't confirmed that on their website or social media in any way. I get that no park likes confirming a long-term closure, but surely from a customer service perspective it's better than saying nothing?

No, they shouldn't. This is precisely the point I'm trying to make. The resources, motivation and set up of Europa Park is completely unlike any other park. No park should see them as an example to work towards, because they cannot operate like them and cannot achieve their successes in the same way. Lessons can be learned, but they're obvious and basic ones. It wouldn't. There would be a small period of downtime, to fix/replace chain (whatever is more appropriate) and, because it's the UK, reassure the public that everything is safe. But there would be no need for the HSE to force an extended closure (especially given no one was injured).

Oh, definitely - credit where credit is due, Europa do what they do very well. There's no denying that. All I'm saying is it's easy to take for granted the unique situation the park is in, and how much that effects the operation of the park. They have a vested interest to run their Mack rides in the best way possible, meaning they can throw money at getting high level of staff, and high quality staff, to run the rides, along with expert engineers. And that naturally means any non-Mack rides have to be in the same position. Few parks could justify the level of investment it takes to upkeep the park to the standard Europa are able to, nor the way the park operates on a day-to-day basis. That's not to take away from what Europa do; they're brilliant and tick all the rights boxes. But still, they are the exception to the rule.

Let's keep in mind that Europa have access to a vast amount of engineering power, and have a space to keep a huge amount of spare parts / resources (thanks to being Mack). Very few parks in the world have that option, and I'm sure many parks envy the position they're in. Equally, it's incredible from a H&S perspective that they're in a position to reopen the ride less than 24hrs later - even if a UK park, for example, were able to replace and test a chain in such a time frame, a H&S investigation would delay a reopening. --- In a slightly more light hearted accident, Billybird Park in Zeelandsedijk, Netherlands, has had to close down a recently opened slide in their park, following a few incidents like this: Just looking at the slide, you have to wonder how this wasn't foreseen...