Spent two days in Germany visiting Movie Park on Saturday and Phantasialand on Sunday and thanks to the unbelievably nice weather had a weekend that will be hard to top during the rest of the season.
Movie Park, with it’s many squares and wide paths, quiet areas and excellent music everywhere was very relaxing (like it always is) even though it was pretty busy. We were finally able to witness all the new things they built during last winter and quite a few (Dutch) construction workers were still working on getting the new Santa Monica Pier area ready. Sometime during may, a new Zamperla Disko Coaster can be found there and even though I’m not particularly fond of this ride (or Zamperla rides in general) it will be fun to finally see one of these things in real life. The whole area will be themed with a beach setting (and a pier of course) and judging by the new park map it will be pretty spectacular in the end. Right now it’s mainly a huge construction site and doesn’t look like much so I’m pretty anxious to see if the job will be done by the end of May and how it will turn out.
Unfortunately though, Zamperla was able to deliver the Disko and some other rides in that area on time for this season which means that the Stargate Atlantis ride (which was announced last year) is postponed to next season in favor of the Santa Monica Pier area. For the park this is probably a good thing as a new area will attract and accommodate a lot more visitors than a single ride would but for me this was a disappointment.
On the way back from Movie Park we made a quick stop at Toverland to get some footage of the progress on Troy. The ride that I’m looking forward to since early last season but unfortunately it will not open until somewhere during summer. From what is visible I fully expect this reasonably sized American woody to rock. It will definitely be the largest woody in the Benelux and the only comparing ride that can be found nearby is The Bandit in Movie Park which is slightly longer and was built by a different manufacturer. GCI has gained somewhat of a legendary status when it comes to woodies and when I read that it will be higher, longer and faster than the new Renegade GCI in Valleyfair (America) and comes with the GCI hallmark station fly-through it almost makes me shed tears for joy.
Phantasialand is confined, has almost no decent squares and a lot of very narrow paths which means that it is always busy. Of course, sometimes it’s less busy than other times but always busy. There are people, buggies, staff and dogs (yes, dogs are allowed) everywhere and you really need to be prepared for this (as we found out the first time we visited this park) or you might want to leave instantly. On the other hand, the park is so wonderful that the desire to linger a little longer will most likely be stronger.
The selection of rides in this park is the best I’ve witnessed so far and this will only increase a lot when Talocan, the suspended topspin (Europe’s first) will be ready in two months. But not only is the selection awesome and varied – where this park really shines is in presentation. Every attraction and especially the newer ones (including Black Mamba, a massive B&M inverted coaster) is beautifully themed and all coasters and almost all other attractions are hidden from direct view by because they are completely indoors or simply obscured by an extraordinary amount of scenery.
I experimented a lot with taking pictures with the new cam and found out that you can make nice pictures but, they are two screens wide so I’ll definitely have to resize them before uploading them to Flickr. Making this mistake and further screwing with the Flickr upload lost me some valuable 20 of my 100 megabytes of bandwidth for this month yesterday and I was pretty pissed off by that. Since uploading the pics of last weekend I have used up most of my bandwidth and there are still two weekends to go this month!
