Thorpe Park

Today was the first time I've been to Thorpe Park for donkies*. About 12 years? And boy, has it grown up (as, evidently, have I). As I lived only 10 mins from its door, I used to go most weekends as a kid with my friend Fiona. Back in those days, the highlights were Cinema 180 (predecessor to the IMAX), the tame-by-today's-standards-but-we-thought-it-was-great Space Station Zero (roller coaster in the semi-dark), the Magic Mill (a sedantry jaunt in a boat which went past a load of dodgy fibreglass animals and pixies), Phantom Phantasia (you sat in a shell and slowly went round some 'scary' exhibits, including a skeleton ball and Henry VIII sat having dinner as his wives slowly appeared and disappeared around him - I was once chucked off this because my date, Lee Ayers, was spitting at the waxworks). But I suppose in this day and age, these things just wouldn't cut it.

Despite my nostalgia for such shoddy nonsense, the new rides are fabulous. And so they ruddy well should be for the £32 entrance fee, which left me breathless before we'd even seen a ride. Thank God I had a BOGOF voucher but even so: is it just me who is endlessly fascinated by the extent to which we're being fleeced at these things? In addition, inside the park you could buy 'Fastrack vouchers', which allowed you to jump the queue at the big rides. I have to admit, I balked at first at the thought of paying £9 more than I strictly needed to but as we were limited in the time we had there, bypassing the queues at 4 of the biggest rides was well worth the money! Oh the leisure of it all, wandering past all of the waiting crowds and waltzing pretty much straight on.

Colossus, the world's first 10 loop rollercoaster, was good. Nemesis Inferno was amazing. Tidal Wave was, as you might expect, very wet. X:/No Way Out (though, given that I'm here to blog another day, I think you can guess that there was one) was a bit weird, what with being the world's only backwards rollercoaster which takes place in the pitch black. I believe there's a reason why no one else has made one, and why we had to delay our entrance until they'd cleared up some vomit.

But Stealth. Oh but Stealth.

0-80 mph in under 2 seconds. A vertical climb to (and, naturally, descent from) 205 feet. Breathtaking isn't the word - it's so fast you don't have time to breathe. The acceleration takes place using a series of electromagnets - same as those superfast trains we're hearing all about but will probably never see in Britain - which makes it so smooth you might as well be be sat on a giant knife and wearing trousers made from butter. We paid yet another £6 each to Fastrack (about £1 for every 1.5 second of the ride) to Pole Position (i.e. the front seat) but it really was worth every penny.

Given the huge expense we'd already incurred, we didn't buy any of the pictures that we were so kindly offered by Thorpe Park for an additional extortionate fee. We decided it was cheaper to recreate them for your viewing pleasure instead.

So here is David & I on Nemesis Inferno:



Here we are coping with the massive acceleration on Stealth:


And here was us trying to avoid getting too wet on Tidal Wave:


*but this time they made me