ThorpeAddict

I liked the idea of it, but I think that looks awful to be honest

Towers have removed social distancing on a number of rides as part of a 1 week trial. Wicker man and thirteen leaving no gaps and the Smiler filling all available seats. This is great to see and is clearly having a big impact on queues, Wicker man is currently only half an hour!

I really hope so too, as you said there is demand for it and the 1 hour really does make a difference. The only thing that makes me think otherwise is with the 9pm closes there is 20 hours knocked off Fright Nights, and exactly 20 hours have been added to Oktoberfest (+2 hours on 5 Fridays and Saturdays) which makes me think they didn't get any extra budget for opening hours for Oktoberfest and have simply moved the hours from Fright Nights.

Good to see them extending hours again, I imagine this will just continue getting extended and we will see the park close at 7 throughout the summer holidays + weekends. Really hoping we'll get 10pm Fright Nights back, but looks like they've used them hours on Fridays / Saturdays during Oktoberfest instead which is a shame.

The capacity has been reduced, but pre covid the park never really hit capacity anyway. So even though the capacity has been reduced, there is pretty much the same amount of people they would get on a standard weekend. Mix that in with the reduced capacity on rides and social distancing, the park looks and feels busier than pre covid. I really don't think they should be advertising the fact they have a reduced capacity, same with all the merlin parks. It's giving people the wrong idea that the parks are going to be less crowded when in reality, there is pretty much the same crowds

Ghost train and Black mirror are both still open, I assume they have been taken off the app as they are pre book only so do not display a queue time

Here's the link, will only work in the morning when the park opens

Tidal Wave, Flying Fish and Samurai have all been removed from the app over the last few days so I assume they will all be down for some time. Shame as they need as many rides available as possible this week, and Tidal Wave is a huge loss with the weather we have had this week. I agree the '90 mins +' is an awful idea and is just going to result in more complaints. Its quite clear that all the merlin parks across the board have had there capacities increased this year, and while they are still running reduced capacities on a lot of rides this is a problem. Hopefully socia

The summer event is 21st June - 25th July, so over a month long I would also love to see Summer Nights return, its a shame seeing the park close at 6 or 7 when the parks still busy

Nice to see they've extended the opening hours over the holidays, defiantly needed. Thorpe arguably has the worst opening hours out of the 4 merlin parks in the last year so hopefully more extensions to come. Evening, I personally would never pay for unlimited fast track but that's up to you really. It's hard to predict really how busy it'll be, its a weekday the week after school holidays so should be off peak. But with social distancing and unis/colleges breaking up it may be busy.

I really hope the coaster is different to what's shown on the plans there. A boomerang style coaster is not a high throughput coaster that the park desperately needs. Also a weird decision if they go for a 1.4m coaster considering Chessingtons target market.

Yep that was her!

They have been on the last couple of days, apart from the 1 broken light of course Stealth was flying round the final bend on Tuesday morning which was fun

They were doing some filming on it today, so maybe they'll post something soon. There was someone (probably who has been on love island or only way is Essex, not a clue) standing outside with a filming crew saying they were going to be the first ones on it. I do agree its odd they don't seem to be promoting it apart from the signs outside saying its opening on the 21st.

Good to hear. As I said on the whole the park sounded great, there was only very few spots with no audio like Dragons Fury and broken speakers on Kobra. Oh that is odd. The operator said he's not aloud to use it at the moment due to covid but that doesn't make sense if they were using it last year. Who knows