One of the best parts of my job is the travel, and this past week I was in the UK for training. The weather was actually pretty nice all week, and I was lucky enough to visit Thorpe Park and Chessington World of Adventures in the suburbs of London. As you will see from the pictures, the weather at Thorpe was total crap, but the next day was beyond perfect.
Little background: Thorpe is dubbed as England's thrill capital, as most of its investments in the past 6-8 years have been thrill based, and Chessington is more of a family park, sporting a zoo for families to walk through as well.
On to the pictures. Hope to curb your offseason a bit before SFGAm opens for ya'll again:
Welcome to Thorpe! The park is surrounded pretty much by water, and you need to walk over a bridge to get into the park after the admissions booths.
Thorpe sports Nemesis: Inferno. A B&M invert which once sent an entire train of naked people through its course. Go ahead kids, google it and see the boobies.
Despite the weather being crap, all the water rides were running, and usually had people on them. Keep in mind it was about 4 degrees C outside and raining. What's that I spot in the background?
Stealth: Basically Kindga Ka after you subtract 250 feet and 40 mph. Has the tophat and hill afterwards. With lines what they were, we did this a few times during the day. It was flying over the tophat (probably revved it up since they were running in the rain) which proved thrilling.
Friends thought it'd be a great idea to take a spin on the "new" water ride, which was transplanted from Cypress Gardens. Looked fun, but not when I'm already freezing. I enjoyed taking the pictures.
YAY!
It's right before I took this picture when I think they realized how awful of an idea that actually was. Not that it mattered much in the end, because within 2 hours we were all soaked anyway. Fun side note: I thought it was interesting that Thorpe ran every ride in the steady rain with multiple train operation. I know coasters can run in the rain, but you see lots of parks in the US close certain coasters in the rain that Thorpe kept running, especially Stealth and Nemesis. I did get peed on with rust going up Nemesis' lift though.
MOVING ON
Nemesis was a solid coaster. Thought it was similar to BTR but a little longer. Not the end all be all of inverts, but certainly not a bad coaster either.
My god, these donuts were the greatest thing I ate all week. They were still gooey on the inside, and to eat that when you are freezing cold was glorious. Pure glory. I felt like a Spartan after.
Refueled after donuts!
side note: you should eat more than donuts for lunch. this was a mistake when dinner rolled around.
What?
Well hello there.
Colossus sports ten inversions. You may have heard of it before.
I'm going to be honest here, the other 3 I was with loved this ride, but I thought it was awful. May have just been the seat I was in, but I got the hell beat out of me. Violent headbanging throughout, to the point where Iron Wolf looked tame. I happen to think I don't mind rough roller coasters very much either. I even thought Manhattan Express in Las Vegas wasn't that bad (boring, but not awfully rough), but Colossus was awful. The only part I enjoyed was the 4 rolls in a row, and that's because it was going slow enough where I could keep my head in one place.
Fun.
The park also had a screamin swing, along with a few other big flats that pack quite the punch. So while they only have 7 coasters, they have enough big rides to fit a whole day in.
Ahh, a Eurofighter to save my day.
Say what you may about the theme, but I thought Saw was incredible. The theming was really good from the queue to the beginning of the lift. The ride had a pre-lift portion I didn't even know about, so after looking at the creepy puppet from Saw talk to us suddenly there was a 90 degree drop and a roll before the lift. There was interactive stuff in the queue, and even a freaking haunted house attached to the ride. For being free, it beats the pants off any of the haunted houses Six Flags puts up during Fright Fest. Loved it all.
So that was Thorpe. Once we got back to the hotel there was a brilliant sunset and all. Packed and crashed for the night.
