Photo TR: Cookiex versus Europa Park - A mega PTR

This was the big trip of the year for me. Europa Park was a park I've wanted to go to since the day I first got interested in coasters, and as each years pass my excitement only grew larger (but the financials didn't). Last year I started college and the loans granted gave me the financing needed to buy a plane ticket down to Frankfurt (I would have preferred Strasbourg since it was closer but there were no direct flights from Copenhagen) and experience this word-class theme park for the first time.

Did it live up to the hype? We shall find out.

But let's first detail the journey before we get to the destination.

I'll start by thanking Scandinavian Airlines (SAS). Without their youth fare this trip would not have been possible.

The gate and flight number

Clear blue skies. A good day for flying.

My home town Malmö seen from the air.

By the time we got to Frankfurt things got a lot more cloudy.

VERY cloudy.

Frankfurt Airport is a kinda crappy airport (as I can attest by spending a whooping six hours there on the way home), but it's excellent for plane-spotting.

Terminal 1 is basically Lufthansa territory with occasional partners sprinkled about.

How many airports can you spot three A380s (the worlds fattest commercial airliner) parked in a row?

The train that will take me to Offenburg

From Frankfurt it's a fairly long ride to Rust, but as I said before the closer airports just weren't available.

Approaching Karlsruhe I spotted this fairground. They had a Wild Mouse coaster which was to the right of this picture.

Arriving to Offenburg it was time to take the regional train to Ringsheim

Ringsheim basically serves as an entry gate to Rust. It's a fairly standard German village otherwise.

This late in the day (9 P.M) the bus to Rust only departs once every hour. In fact this was the last bus of the day.

Tried to get a picture of this fountain but the bus was driving so fast that only this blurry image came out.

Good evening, Silver Star!

Here's the hotel I stayed in over the weekend. The thing about Rust is that most of the hotels outside the park resorts are limited in availability. I booked this hotel all the way back in March before I ever decided to make my other two trips so far this year (Heide-Park and Liseberg).

Coming up: First day of Europa Park!

Are you at the park now, or did you just feel like posting the useful travel arrangements first, followed by the rest?

Are you at the park now, or did you just feel like posting the useful travel arrangements first, followed by the rest?

Travel arrangements followed by the rest. Part of it is because all the images I took take forever to upload to Onedrive and I didn't want to wait.

The view of the park from the hotel.

Good morning, Silver Star!

First order of business was to buy a 2-day ticket. I still have it in my wallet.

Since I arrived at 8.15 A.M I thought I would have to stand and wait for the park to open at 9...

But they actually let us in 40 minutes early!

A piece of history stands near the entrance gates. A piece of the Berlin wall to be exact.

I don't know why the park decided to bring a symbol of the cold war into what's otherwise a cheery and happy place, but it's an interesting piece of memorabilia.

Italy is the first "country" you enter after the German area and it looks pretty nice.

Then your tour is suddenly halted by this. It's the same as when Heide-Park lets guests in an hour early but only lets them enter the entry port, but at least with HP the entry port is walled off from the rest of the park. Here they just stop you at a random street corner with a sign basically saying "oh, you want to see the rest of the park? Too bad, you have to wait."

Euromaus comes out and tries to put the moves on this random chick

Meanwhile the DJ elephant up on the roof is clearly high on something

"You can tell that American corporate bastard I'm coming for him next!"

The rest of the park opened up and it was time to take the E.P Express. But first a view of the ticket booths from the main station.

Rolling into the club

Approaching our target...

You get some pretty good views of the as of yet under construction Ireland area from the E.P Express.

Looks like it'll be a pretty nice area once it opens.

Coming up next: 12 coasters (and one log flume)

You thought the first ride of the day was going to be Wodan? Nope, it's Blue Fire.

Having been on Helix just a month prior I went in with very high expectations. Safe to say Blue Fire met all of them. Is it as good as Helix? Well, it doesn't have the two sweet airtime hills that put Helix over the edge, but it's a close second among my favorite steel coasters. The launch is great, the soundtrack and themening are all great, and the inversions give some surprising hangtime. It's a fantastic coaster.

Same couldn't be said about Wodan though.

I was a bit disappointed with Wodan. It ended up being a bit too violent and shaky for my tastes and the loud awful noise it makes didn't really help matters (I could tolerate that with Balder as the coaster itself was still excellent). It's not a bad coaster, in fact once you adapt to its joltiness it's pretty fun, but it's not the top 10 material I hoped it would be.

Some Portuguese pirate

I actually really liked Atlantica Supersplash

I don't even really know why, I just thought it was a lot of fun.

Time to do VR on Alpenexpress

Europa Park charges two euros for the VR googles. The VR was okay, but I prefer the regular ride.

Some mushroom-themed chairswinger I didn't ride

I really enjoy log flumes, and Tyrol was no different. Not the best one out there, but it was very well themed.

I didn't know what to expect from Arthur...

I haven't seen the film it was based on, but I ended up really enjoying the ride.

It's very impressive as a dark ride, and the coaster sections while short aren't half bad either. I wouldn't mind seeing more parks make use of this technology.

Coming up next: Greeks and Russians

Euro-Mir was the second disappointment of the trip.

I tried to have fun with it, but it was just too violent and nauseating for my tastes. After all the hype for this and Wodan, I really wanted to like both more than I did. The disco lifthill was pretty cool, though.

Poseidon has seen better days (it's pretty jolty and the track is a bit rusty in places) but it's a fun water coaster nonetheless.

Kinda makes you wonder why they built Atlantica SuperSplash though when it's basically Poseidon's second half with larger boats. Oh well.

I will say finding the entrance to Poseidon was harder than it first appeared. My first instinct was to approach the main building, but that only takes you to the exit. You're actually supposed to enter from the opposite end, which meant walk around the entire bay.

And even when you finally find the entrance the queue itself is a long walk.

Through the net!

One thing I haven't touched upon yet is that Europa Park is seriously dedicated to keeping the operations as fast as possible, which is great since it keeps the lines moving and the wait times short. Sometimes it's even a bit too fast, especially when you need to place stuff in the storage cabinet (see Blue Fire, Wodan and Silver Star). With Poseidon they solve the capacity problem by loading two boats at once.

I was gonna make a joke here, but the photobombing employee ruined the frame.

This was the line for Pegasus without VR. No really.

Meanwhile the VR line was 45 MINUTES! Of course it is when you only dedicate the last four rows to VR while the rest of the train departs half-empty.

Coming up next: Swiss and Stars