The Coastercrazy European Tour 2017 - Phantasialand Update

[mkingy]

The Coastercrazy European Tour 2017 - Germany

Coastercrazians descended upon Germany from all over the world for this special meet up which began in the wonderful Europa Park and travelled north through Germany, with a brief visit to the Netherlands to the coastal park of Hansa Park. Naturally the trip was eventful, filled with awesome coasters and varying weather and hopefully this report will be fairly comprehensive of the our trip, with a few (personal) opinions of the parks and coasters we rode!

Firstly however it's important to say thanks to Jammy and Seth for putting the legwork in to getting this trip out there, we made a few ammendments to the plans but having the base to work with was great, and Hansa Park were really kind to us too!

Secondly I'd like to say big thanks to everyone who attended the meet up - truely wouldn't have been the same without everyone being at all the different parks and it's great to know there's people around the world I can share a beer with if I'm in town!

Finally thanks to Burbs for helping get us to Europa Park in the first place, and for ensuring that I ticked off all the credits and more (strictly speaking) at Europa in just 1 day - I really appreciate that!

Links
> Europa Park <
> Tripsdill <
> Holiday Park <
> Phantasialand <
> Toverland <
> Movie Park Germany <
> Cranger Kirmes <
> Heide Park <
> Hansa Park <
> Connor_the_collosus - Trip Report <

My Trip Awards
Personal
Most times stapled into their seat - Connor_The_Collosus
Most times asked to remove glases on rides - Slosprint
Latest entry to a park - dukelukeem arriving at Heide Park 1.5 hours before closing thanks to horrendous traffic
Most selfies - Dirk_Erman
Most social media mistakes - mkingy. Wrong pictures, wrong dates, appauling spelling and everyone else took the group pictures haha

Park / Ride
Most lived up to expectations
Ride: Expedition Geforce
Park: Phantasialand

Least lived up to expectations
Ride: Desert Race
Park: Movie Park Germany

Most Surprising
Ride: Schwur des K??rnan (just ahead of a metric tonne of familly coasters that were great fun)
Park: Tripsdrill

Other
Worst road in Germany: The A1 - I think everyone was delayed on it at one point or another during the trip

[mkingy]

Europa Park
> Dropbox Gallary <

Forewarning - I must admit due to the constrained nature of my visit at Europa taking photos wasn't a priority and such there's limited from the park.

Me, Jammy and Burbs arrived on the Sunday evening having endured a 15 hour journey from the West Midlands. Google reliably tells me I could probably driven it in 10 hours straight, but given that'd bump my total milage from 1100 miles to 1700 miles the journey was very reasonable!

Europa Park Main Street

Everyone else had already had a day in the park lovingly sending across pictures of Europa Park in all it's glory, hitting up credits so that left me with a challenging 1 day to smash as much of Europa Park into a single day, in beautiful sunshine, 29 degrees celcius and a park at pretty much capacity. This is where Europa Park really shines though. People (especially Burbs) will point to the amazing themeing and immersion that the park offers but what really struck me was the operations and customer orientated feel of the park. Opening hours extended to accomodate more guests, no queue over 1 hour (including water rides) due to unreal dispatch times and the park almost never felt crowded. The thing that highlighted this the most was Silver Star dispatching every 65 seconds. That's not a theorectical capacity listed on RCDB, this actually achieves it.

Another Scenic Picture at Europa Park!

My first ride on Blue Fire included Connor stretching to grab the tree on Blue Fire and instead taking a handful of the rockwork just after the launch... we decided from here on in that perhaps tunnel tests weren't such a huge deal in Germany, they trust you not to try and punch a rock feature.

If you look closely you can see part of Connor's hand in the back of the picture...

Europa Park has too many rides to really go into depth so I'm just going to pick a choice few to write down my thoughts:

Silver Star
Classic B&M, first half of the layout is glorious floater airtime with butter smooth transitions, the second half packs more of a punch with ejector straight out of the MCBR. Trims really hurt the hill before the MCBR but by no means ruin the entire ride.

Wonderful Wodan!

Wodan Timbur Coaster
My first GCI certainly wasn't going be my last after riding it. Huge amounts of fun, great laterals, pacing was brilliant with some snappy transitions and a nice queue line. Provides a fantastic ride both front and back.

Blue Fire's Loop

Blue Fire
I wish I hadn't ridden Helix first.

Euromir aka Russian pop-techno

Voletarium
I've never experienced a flying theatre but this really wowed me (I felt like a GP). I thought the sensation, smells and visuals were all really amazing. I felt engrossed in the experience and I'm really glad I gave this ride a chance!

Atlantica Supersplash!

I ended my time at Europa Park sat outside the door of the Guesthouse Host waiting for her to emerge as me and her didn't have the same understanding of "early checkout". Turns out I picked the car up a day late too!

Arthur - the [not a rollercoaster] ride

Glad you awarded me for my struggles with stapling! I still think about that ride-op on Expedition GeForce who Dirk says has worked there since opening season. That guy almost ruined my whole day...

[Paradox]

Don't forget about the woman on Silver Star that made us go as far back into the seat as possible and still wasn't happy with that.

Yeah, she was actually worse. The timing of the GeForce thing was funnier because I had just finished telling everyone about "staple star," then the very next ride op did the same thing!

[mkingy]

Tripsdrill
> Dropbox Gallary <

After a mini nightmare with the Guest House owner (between my broken German / her broken English) the difference between breakfast and check out I was running a little late to Tripsdill, Paradox, Slosprint, Connor, Afro85 and GeCoDe were already at the park. Kjell was running a little late due to doing his best impression of The Ultimate at Lightwater Valley and killing a deer. Kjell described to me this holiday as being lots of carying ups and downs, apt for a rollercoaster trip but perhaps not preferential...

Early morning walking the wrong way to the ride

This was the first pleasant surprise of the trip, Tripsdill is a lovely little park which feels well laid out, well maintained and whilst lightly themed there is an abundance of flora which helps the park feel really welcoming and friendly.

Somewhere near here was the Gerstlauer jerk!

I caught up with the guys as they were leaving Mammut for the first time having gotten my first ride on Karacho - more on that later. The area that a good majority of the rides share has a giant open field which hopefully they'll look to develop into something awesome - something I don't doubt they are capable of after Karacho!

If only this had some great lats over that turn

Particular highlight of the park is that the splash zone for the final drop on the Log Flume is a part of the queue line as Paradox found out The log flume also has a typically European indoor section... perhaps a prime opportunity for live actors at Haloween.

The staple of German Theme Parks - The log flume

Tripsdill's Top 3

Karacho
Oh how I wish Smiler had lapbars. You knew this had the rattle and jamming typical of every Infinity/Eurofighter ever made, but the lapbars completely neutered this problem. The ride had some great positives and inversions, good launch and the dive loop was a particulary good part of the ride! Plus the top hat sways like mad.

Overview of most of the layout

G'sengte Sau
This really was an exemplary family coaster for me. Loads of fun, nice interaction with the castle and the log flume and provided some really nice photo opportunities. This is what a wild mouse should feel like!

Peek-a-boo!

Mammut

Not what a woodie should be. Minimal airtime, no real lats, didn't feel out of control. Possibly branded as a family coaster but really I'm not even sure it was that. Probably helped by the fact we didn't get to ride Collosus.

The most exciting part (taking pictures of it that is...)

[Dirk_Ermen]

Yes! I got the most selfies award! It was a phenomenal trip, too bad I couldn't join in on all the days but I sure did had a lot of fun on those few days!

[gouldy]

Does anyone have the group photo that we took at Phantasialand? Was it taken on Kjell's camera?

[mkingy]

Think so, Kjell said he's going to process all the group pictures first

Can't be more jealous! This is totally awesome - glad you guys made it happen, the parks look incredible.

[mkingy]

Holiday Park
> Dropbox Gallary <

There's one giant, orange reason to visit Holiday Park and that's Expedition Geforce! We met with jf Coasters, Dirk_Erman and Der LK 7531 at this point during the trip, and saw them again at Toverland (onto that later!). I am however truely jealous of how close you guys are to this park!

Park Entrance

The park was quite small, but had a nice feel to it. Very flora heavy which gave the park a nice atmoshpere. We got a pretty awesome ride on the Sky Fly - with varying degrees of spinning sucess! The log flume is also really cool, it has a double drop which is fairly rare in the theme park world as far as I know! The park also has a Premier Sky Rocket II - which was my first of this clone. I can see the attraction of the ride, space wise it's very compact and the idea behind it is quite good, however I just didn't enjoy the ride that much. Perhaps tainted by riding Expedition Geforce beforehand but I felt the ride just didn't really do a huge amount.

Double Drop Logflume

Expedition Geforce
The first drop on this thing is the perfect set up to the ride. The key here is how the lateral ejector is executed, it feels controlled, deliberate and as a result it felt consistantly good. There was no need to "learn how to ride" Expedition Geforce like some other rides (Taron included to an extent), it was engineered to the point where you could go limp (Slosprint did) without risking some bizzare twisting injury, yet it kept a huge amount of intensity.

Ascending...

The middle section mixed fast overbanks and a S-hill made 100x better if you swung your arms around with the motion of the ride (an Expedition Geforce tradition it seemed) sandwhiched by ejector airtime hills which were consistantly forceful. This pretty much allowed you to somewhat recover and enjoy the ride inbetween the intense sections.

Orange Machine.

I think this ride takes my number 1 spot. I came to realise during the trip I had favourite rollercoasters, such as Nemesis at Alton Towers that weren't necessarily the best coasters I had ridden. This ride ticks both boxes as it is on par with Helix as a coaster, but it does everything I want a ride to do and I've wanted to ride this for so long - it's on par with Nemesis as a favourite coaster too.

Pure joy.

[Dirk_Ermen]

*looks at the post and still sees tripsdrill at the top of the post.

Short but great review of this fun little park. I do hope they'll get some more rides/coasters at the back of the park. As that's still quite an empty area.

[mkingy]

^^ I guess that you were having a blast on Expedition GeForce! The photo shows that moment! BTW who are those guys behind you?

Thanks for the happy images!

[mkingy]

lol240 wrote:

^^ I guess that you were having a blast on Expedition GeForce! The photo shows that moment! BTW who are those guys behind you?

Thanks for the happy images!

Me -- Random Guy we didn't know
jf Coasters -- Slosprint
Dirk_ermen -- Connor_the_Collosus (hair)

[Paradox]

Alberto and I missed the rerides, but we did get a pretty nice ride on the drop tower though.

[mkingy]

Yeah it would've been nice to spend a full day here and at Tripsdrill just to experience everything and get a tonne of rerides!

[mkingy]

Phantasialand
> Gallary <

With the arrival of Gouldy, Herman, Postwagon, thisisrandom and Silvarret this part of the trip was the most well attended, and I think most anticipated park.

This park does themeing especially well (despite the non centralised wave swinger) but in a noiticably different way to Europa Park. Europa Park has themeing on a grand scale, where Phantsialand is themed with such detail, crammed into small spaces creating pockets of immersion which quickly switch between themes after a reletivly short walk. Where you could spend an entire day at Europa Park and not see half the park, you could easily cover the entirity of Phantasialand in half a day.

The first day actually started with a bit of a disappointing first ride on Taron. After huge hype and fanfare, queueing up half an hour before the ride even opened the ride really didn't live up to expectations. Theming was excellent, but where was the ride? The ride, it turned out, isn't best experienced in the morning. Later in the day and after riding it enough to erase any preconceptions about the ride it really began to shine as a coaster for me. Great use of laterals, two really fun launches, bursts of airtime and some great positives all whilst elegantly navigating the surrounding scenery. The only let down was the finale, with the over trimmed hills into the final turn (yay - more lats). It is an incredibly re-ridable experience too - mixing a good dose of intensity with fun elements nad having several little nuances that you begin to notice the more you ride (such as the flat entry to one of the sweeping turns). You can walk around the entire ride getting so many great angles too, a truely photogenic ride. This is all helped by the new trains Intamin designed for the ride which give an really comfortable ride, and the elevated position of the seats provide additional laterals and a very open experience.

Chipias, Black Mamba, Talocan, Winjas all followed up Taron and all provided a different experieence - united by how excellent they were. Chipias for instance is the best log flume style ride I've ever ridden - a true family experience which got you "the right amount of wet", great drops, a party cave and a layout that felt like it spread across the park, despite being crammed into such a small area!

Getting a good imbalance (to generate spinning) was key to an enjoyable ride on both sides of winjas and I enjoyed the party tricks - I personally didn't feel they killed the pacing especially. The ride comes across as very peicemeal and such I don't think it matters to much to break it up as such.

Talocan sits happily at the top of my #1 of permanent flat rides, only beaten by the various Cranger Kirmes fair rides we rode later in the trip. A really intense programme enhanced by some great fire effects too. The huge backdrop scenic peice is also fantastic, providing an elevated veiw for those hiding behind the windows to the ride, infact the entire ride is somewhat of a spectacle with one of paths opposite constantly filled with spectators - so much so they needed to build another walkway to get to Black Mamba because of the congestion!

Black Mamba was a completely different experience from the only other 2 B&M inverts I've ridden (Nemesis & it's brother). The ride was graceful, forceful but not as intense. I quite simply didn't realise it was possible to shape a wingover to feel so gloriousely smooth. It doesn't top Nemesis for me but it's the complete package. The queueline was probably one of the most enjoyable queuelines I've been in - the sense of never seeing more than a little bit of the coaster - always hearing it long before it sped past you made the queue line immersive and got you involved with the coaster and the experience. It truely feels like you are descending into the Black Mamba pit before the ride.

The second day consisted of more of the same rides, with the addition of a few more of the flat rides and the final coaster - Temple of The Nighthawk. This ride was touted to be a complete borefest, and whilst this isn't strictly true, it's certainly in need of some sort of renovation / light package. The ride itself was pretty long and it had a fair amount of track, just the lack of forces and riding a coaster in absolute pitch black didn't really make for a fun experience. I think with some rework this ride could be an alright family ride, or perhaps they should just replace it with something more worthy of the giant space this ride occupies.

The other notable rides we rode we're Mystery Castle (both cycles), Maus au Chocolat (fun little shotting mechanic), Raik (unremarkable vekoma junior boomerag) and Colorado Adventure (multiple rerides - worth it!).

I am so pissed that Talocan was down when I went - seems like you really enjoyed the park though, despite the apparent rain! I almost joined you guys, lmfao.

[mkingy]

Yeah Talocan was great, shame you couldn't join us though!

Glad you mentioned Taron's trains. I forgot to in mine. I think they're a match for B&M hyper trains as the best in the industry. It's basically the Mack megacoaster train with a more comfortable seatback and a lighter lapbar that doesn't self-staple.

[Paradox]

Taron doesn't have seatbelts

[mkingy]

Seatback, as in the back of the seat. Not seatbelt.

[Paradox]

Excuse my internet dyslexia