I pull into the lot grab the waist pack and head towards the front gate buying a €3 parking token on the way, as in Europe when parks charge for parking how they do it is you go in, park then either at the ticket booth or parking hut you buy a token and keep that with you for the day and at the end of the day when you leave the lot there is a gate and a place next to the car to insert your token which will get the gate to go up, neat and efficient system, also profitable for the park for those who loose their large bulky parking token
Well parking token goes into waist pack where it's safe and I pay my admittance fee and head to the first ride I see being Devils Mine, a coaster made by Vekoma and relocated by FAB, was basically a custom roller skater which was decent but nothing to write home about. From there I ride the ferris wheel and realize just how enormus the park is. The park is in a valley between 2 mountains so it's narrow but very very long, and also there is another part of the park on top of one of the mountains. Real nice setting.
So yeah, from there I ride random rides pretty much garden variety flat rides along with a Vekoma Whirlwind which is one of their corkscrew versions like what Knoebels had, runs smooth and provides a good ride believe it or not, and another Zierer Ladybug coaster also called Marienkäferbahn, also there was a Mondial Shake at the park which I rode and it gave a substandard ride (Michael Wood's Magnum here in the US is 10x better), so I wander around and ride all the nifty flats then I track down the real reason I was there... Trapper Slider, which amounts to a 1,000 foot tall coaster, it's an Alpine coaster, which is just like an alpine slide but with tubular steel track and brakes you control. There is POV online somewhere, I will find it and post at a later date. But you get on the car in the station (holds 2 people, tandem seating), then after a few seconds the operator lets you let go of the brake and coast to the lifthill, which takes about 2-3 mins to climb, and from there you get to control it all you want, of course the 3 times I was able to ride it I was behind slow people, though my final ride I stopped at the top of the ride and waited to be rearended by the sled coming up off the lift, so then I let go of the brake, so I'm tearing down the track at perverted speed, getting ejector airtime and nasty laterals that were making the entire structure sway and made my upstop wheels make unsettling noises, I was having a kickass time til I caught up with the car in front of me and they were taking their sweet time so I slam on the brakes, they start smoking and I slam into the back of their car and I ride their ass the rest of the way down, fun was had by all.
I ended up leaving the park around 3pm, after about 5 hours in the park which seemed like enough time for me to do everything I wanted. I would have liked to stay longer but when I planned my trip I was unaware that convieneintly located just 70 miles off the highway was the town of Veghel in the Netherlands (hotel tonight was in Belgium) and at this carnival (called Kirmes in German) there was a little ride called XXL, which is KMG's newest creation an afterburner that swings to 45 meters (about 10 feet taller than the Huss Giant Frisbee), Veghel was like 4 hours from where I was at so I needed to get going so I could get there with some daylight and not get lost in darkness.
So I get to the highway leave Germany and cross into the Netherlands, I get off the highway and it's a fairly main road going to Veghel, that is until I hit the first of many detours and get horribly lost but keep heading in the right general direction, anyways I finally get there by following the super massive pendulum that I spotted about 10 mins before I got there, so I get there and find parking in a store parking lot where I park (parking rules are different in Europe, and what I did was legal), and I walked the 4 or so blocks to the Kirmes where I take in the sight of a 147 foot Afterburner doing it's thing. Wont go into extreme detail but XXL is one of the best rides i've ridden to date, puts all other frisbees to shame (more on that in other TR's), it's the fastest most intense carnival ride I have ever laid eyes on (80mph at full speed), so after 2 rides on that (€2.50/ride), I check out other novelties at the fair, where I find a clone of the Mondial Shake made by Fabbri (€2.00/ride) rode once and was mildly impressed as the ride it gave was comperable to a Mondial Shake despite being italian, also came across a Reverchon Explorer called Hyper (€1.50/ride) took one ride, saw a KMG Speed called Cyber One and I was shocked to see it at €3.50 a ride (it's a SkyScraper ride), so I cram into the restraint that I barely fit in and enjoy my ride on that, nice long ride also, then I walk about 3 blocks down a city street where i found another block of rides, a Superstar (€2.00/ride) rode once, it was the most intense ride I think I've ridden, pointlessly intense it's like a spin out here in the US exept way bigger and the main ride doesnt spin, just the claw, and it spins damn fast to the point where it's hard to breathe, while the arm the claw is on flips upsidedown and keeps you there for way to long. Then there was a Gravitron called and themed to Star Wars which I didnt ride along with a funhouse and some other stuff. Went back up to the main part of the fair and rode a Polyp called Blue Power(€1.50/ride) and rode once, then I went back over to XXL and rode twice more, also there that I didnt ride was a large Ferris Wheel, maybe a dozen kiddie rides and a few other random things. So after my 2 XXL rides I decided I had spent enough $$ took a few more pics and headed back to the car to drive to Hasselt, Belgium.
The drive despite being mostly B roads was straightforwards and well marked out to Hasselt where I get to the city and promptly get lost, but I know my hotel is near a giant fair which I could plainly see so I snake my way towards the rides I see where I park and call the hotel (I have a tri-band cell phone, which came in handy) and they give me some better directions which I follow to a Gorgeous Holiday Inn in downtown Hasselt (there will be time for that carnival tomorrow) where I am shown to the exectuive king suite and I get my bathrobes and whatnot, I open up the complimentry mini bar and empty it, then turn on the TV to see the building of Kingda Ka on TV in English (Dutch subtitles), seeing loads of Irony in that I settled in and eventually feel asleep.
How can I afford all this you ask? Well when I make travel plans I tend to check prices on a daily basis for a month or so and one day I notice that the holiday inn price on Orbitz doesnt look quite right, so I go to the Holiday Inn website and see the same prices, €9 for a room and €12 for a Executive Suite (both are 60 day advance prices and both are missing 0's), so when I check in you all should have seen the look on the clerks face after seeing on his computer what I was paying for a €250 room at walkup rate, turns out they had switched their system over and I caught it with an incorrect price before the system caught it, score one for me!
However I will say they did honor my price with no complaint at all and I got no less service than anyone else in the hotel and got the full executive treatment which I really wasnt expecting and did appreciate, was a first class hotel with great staff, would be worth every penny of the normal advance rate of €120. Also being downtown parking was €10, but seeing what I paid for the room I could afford that.
Next: Bobbejaanland and Hasselt Septemberfoor
