Okay. After long four weeks, I am back from my trip. Now that I can sit in front of a computer instead of a phone, I can give a more detailed report.
So on my trip, I have visited BPPB, Alton, Thorpe, Chessington, Disneyland Paris (Both parks), Parc Asterix, and Rainbow Magicland. I kind of skimmed through BPPB, but if you want me to go more into detail about the park (Or even any other parks I will bring up), I'm happy to elaborate or answer any questions you have. So here we go: Gonna talk about Alton.
While I was planning for the trip, I discovered how isolated this park is from basically all transportation. I was too intimidated to drive in the UK to drive up to the resort as I relied heavily on the train and bus systems (Which are fantastic, I might add) to get from location to location. What I did was take the bus from Blackpool to Stoke-on-Trent (The closest stop to AT) and hoped and prayed there would be an Uber to get me there. When I got there, there was one that happened to be nearby. I have discovered though that Uber in Europe is a little steep. It was £30 to drive a half hour to Alton. It cost me only $50 to get from LAX to my place coming back, and that was an hour drive, and definately further distance from the stop to Alton. The thing I didn't realize was there there was absolutely no Uber service coming from Alton, at all. Coming from LA, that was a culture shock to me, so I had to shell out some cash to get a Taxi. It was around the same price as it was to get an Uber to get there, but I had to use an ATM which charged me $15 for foreign currency, so that was annoying. Getting to and from was a hard dive into cold water, especially coming back when I was under time pressure to catch a pre-booked train, but I had a great two days at the park. I'm going to be as short and to-the-point as possible as I love to give detail, but not to the point to where it's too much to read. So here we go:
Stayed at the resort and took the monorail to get there. Upon entering, I was blown away at how freaking MASSIVE this park is. Like, holy chuck-knuckles. It felt like the Huntington in Pasadena but double the size with a mix of Busch Gardens and Legoland. I also felt like I was walking through a park in Roller Coaster Tycoon. That should be no surprise as Chris Sawyer is a Brit himself and used this game as an inspiration for designing that game. As of now, this may be the most beautiful, most lush park I have ever been through. It was cloudy and raining both days I was there, so I can't imagine how amazing it would look on a clear day. There were so many areas of the park you could walk through and explore with no one around. It was weird. It felt like I was exploring a closed park all on my own it would be so deserted. Not all of it was made the way it would have to be done in America (I.e. everything having to be ADA compliant). Lots of stairs and slanted pathways all around. It was really cool being able to wind through the gardens with barely anyone around.
So my first ride I went on was Smiler. I got seven rides on that thing and it is, by far, my favorite coaster in the UK. It is #10 right now on my top 10 coasters list. I'm usually very put-off by OTSRs on any coaster, but the way it was designed was totally comfortable. Although I certainly would've preferred the big lap bars that Hangtime has, I don't recall having any issue with head-banging on the ride. the restraints were wide and flexible, and surprisingly comfortable. Right when the ride starts, you start off in a tight-turn drop in the dark and a barrel roll. Right off the bat, the ride is awesome and with some great hang time in that barrel roll. There were two good airtime hills on the ride and the inversions were loads of fun. Smooth ride. Enjoyed the heck out of that ride.
Oblivion was my next credit. I had low expectations given the gimmicky layout and it being the prototype dive coaster, but it was really fun! It's my third favorite coaster in the park, even over Rita. Just the hang time on the drop was worth it. My only experience on a B&M dive coaster was Valravyn at Cedar Point. That was fun, but the vest restraints kinda ruined the airtime. I even enjoyed this more than Valravyn despite that being a much longer ride. While I have yet to do Griffon or Shei-Kra at both Busch Gardens, Oblivion is my favorite B&M dive for now. One thing I will also add is that the drop is deceptively much higher than it actually looks. The awesome tunel element really hids how big that drop is and it makes it far more unique and thrilling. I love how you can be right there in front of the drop right where it dives into the hole. It's a great opportunity for some pictures. The queue line did feel like it was stuck in 1999 as it still had those old-boxy TVs in the queue.
Went over to Rita next. It's a fun ride with nice small pops of airtime, but not quite enjoyable enough to make anyone's top 20 list. I liked it, but it wasn't amazing. That's really all I have to say about it.
Thirteen was next. This was a bit high on my anticipation list despite the bad reviews. This was because this was my first ever drop-track coaster. I was really curious about the experience. While the ride was very boring and slow, the drop sequence was very gimmicky and not very enjoyable. I thought it would be a fun air-time, Tower of Terr0r-esque drop experience, but it was over in just an uncomfortable split second. It didn't help that on my first ride (Got two rides out of it), I was totally unprepared for the jarring stop and the bottom and ended up banging my left elbow when the drop stopped. That didn't help my experience. After my first experience on a drop track coaster, I'm not anxious for SoCal to get a ride like that....unless Hagrid's does it right. I'm going to hopefully see for myself this Fall if Hagrid's will make that element worthwhile, but this was my least favorite coaster with Cebeebies coaster being dead last. I will say that the theming in the queue was nice, but that loud electrical shock thingy device trying to create jumpscares was super obnoxious.
Next, I did some credit-whoring on Ceebebies coaster. Vekoma roller skater. Bland coaster for kids. It's a credit. Okay, next!
Spinball Whizzer was a really fun spinner coaster. Spinning was fairly intense and it was fun. Not much to say here. After realizing every park in Europe has a spinning coaster, it kinda got old. But still it's fun.
While I was in the area, I decided to take a break from the cold rain and do an indoor ride. This was another highly-anticipated ride as this would be my first exposure to a Vekoma madhouse. I hit up Hex since that was fairly close by and it had like, zero line. I really loved how the used the already-existing infrastructure of the towers to design the queue and the ride itself. You can tell by the pre-show videos it's a bit old and stuck in the 90's, but because the footage the show takes place in the 19th century to tell the story, it works and still holds up well. I did this three times and of the three Madhouse rides I've done on the trip (Out of this, Caesar at Parc Asterix, and Houdini at Rainbow Magicland), this is my favorite one and probably the most intense one. I never realized before riding that the seats are on a seperate axis that swings left and right. The ride started off with the room rotating with the seats; that way you would feel the sensation of the room tilting while not seeing any sign of motion, which made it super disorienting and trippy. The swinging was intense enough to where when the room spins upside down, you really feel like you're spinning upside down when you're really just at a steep incline. The theming was really great in the room, I might add. It was a great experience and hope that Knott's or Universal picks up a ride like this. I'm really surprised none of the major park chains here have picked up on this concept. This would be perfect for Universal as it takes up a small footprint, would be more unique and thrilling than a motion simulator, and opens up a lot of great story opportunities with theming and potential digital mapping effects. Universal should jump on putting this in Parisian.
I took this opportunity to take the sky ride to get to the other side. The Sky ride was a life saver getting around this massive park and offered some fantastic views on the landscape. I wanted to make Nemesis my #200 coaster, but it broke down. I was going to settle for Wicker Man bing my #200, but that broke down too. I wasn't going to make the mine train my 200th credit. So after being tired of walking, back and forth wasting precious time, I decided to do Duel. It was kind of obvious that this was previously just a haunted house dark ride that was retro-fitted into a shooting ride. The queue was pretty cool and the entire indoor queue line path was slopped at an angle. That sort of thing would never fly in the US as it was totally not ADA-compliant. Seeing that was a novelty for me. The ride was a cool spooky ride. The targeting system was really good, but I hated how there was no reaction to the targets. It made the ride feel a bit more bland. But for a first-time rider, it was a tad startling on some areas.
So Nemesis finally reopened and I was able to make that my 200th roller coaster. My absolute favorite B&M invert right now. Since they can't build above tree height, they really maximize the limitations and use the close scenery to their advantage. The close-calls you get from the surrounding rockwork and trees make this a truly one-of-a-kind roller coaster. I would have liked a front row on it, but it was raining, the line for the front was long, and I didn't feel like getting plastered.