robinschroder

Welcome back Big Mike! Glad you had a great time away in Cancūn! And congratulations to Brian, Shawn and Jeff - it's great to have qualified!!

Big Mike - you really live life to the full! It's so great that you've achieved so many of your dreams! As for what you're up to this week... I think you'll join the mile high club as you fly over to LA, where you will hike up to the Hollywood sign. On the way down you will bump into the Fonz.

Please lock me in for 6 duckies! Incidentally the above report explains the 'Little Bighorn' title of a piece of music by Berlin dub-techno artist Thomas Fehlmann.

5??? Too bad my guess was for just 1! Ha ha!

Another great update Big Mike, bringing a smile to my face on my train ride to work!

^ I'm worried too! I also only saw 1 Ducky...!

I really enjoyed our visit to Gardaland on the TPR trip - glad you had fun on Raptor!

Big Mike, after much consideration, I'm going with 4 duckies. There should be a TPR ducky emoticon!

Well no wonder the aliens chose to land in Roswell! They would've felt right at home!

Big Mike - wishing you Happy Birthday! Looking forward to searching for those duckies later on!

Big Mike - congratulations on 1000!! And here's to the next 1000! The timing of your daily updates has been perfect for reading on my early morning train journey here in the UK every day - thanks for all the updates so far!

Great report Big Mike - I'm going with 4 duckies!!

A brilliant set of photos, Hanno - have a great rest of your weekend at the park!

Thanks Bill, yes it was a suspended ghost train. And a Happy New Year to you too! Winter Wonderland closes today for another year, and the rides will make their way back to the Netherlands / Germany ready for the first Spring fairs!

This was one of the best days ever! Thanks for the flashback, Big Mike - I counted 3 duckies!

Wow - this is so amazing! I can't believe that you can pretty much turn up and do a Skeleton run without weeks of training (even though obviously they do run longer intensive courses)! The ski-jump next for you, Larry - surely you can't just turn up and do that by the end of the day!

Robotland was recently featured on the BBC World Fast:track programme. Hopefully this link works internationally, being from BBC World. Due to open in 2014 according to the programme (and as mentioned in the previous news too), it will be a cross between an educational environment and a traditional theme park. They used the word "Edutainment". Interestingly some of their concept art shown in the programme features what appears to be an Intamin Mega-Lite (???) being held by a robot.

^ It's not a signed copy is it? There was recently one on eBay.

19 out of 26 for me too. Lots of guesswork, though!

There's always something vaguely haunting about abandoned / semi-demolished parks...

Great pictures, Mike - Winter Wonderland always looks great when it's all lit up!

^ ^ Exactly, EB - you may have thought that Buwalda put their rides into storage in the Netherlands for the winter, but in actual fact they've been "storing" them at Hyde Park instead! Plus they give them new Christmas names - so Euro Coaster becomes 'Christmas Coaster'! And Spinning Coaster (which was new to Winter Wonderland this year) becomes 'Christmas Spinning Coaster'! We really liked Spinning Coaster a lot - although two laps was enough to fulfil my spinning quota for the month! Euro Coaster is a bit more of a relaxing ride. Groetjes en tot de volgende keer!

Whilst I know that Mike and Rosie have already documented their visit to Winter Wonderland (at London's Hyde Park) this year, I thought I'd post a short video from a visit I made with some friends last night to Winter Wonderland. Whilst certainly not on the scale of the Düsseldorf Rheinkirmes (although it was nice to see Power Tower II in both locations!) or with the larger coasters you'd find at some of the other, smaller German fairs (such as Bonn's Pützchens Markt) we had a lot of fun, and it was really nice to see Winter Wonderland so busy and popular. We were really lucky with unseasonably mild weather too last night! Anyway, here's the video (in HD!) : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y3e50i5fBsI Robin

2012 certainly seems like a good year for a first visit to PortAventura! Great to see another hypercoaster coming to Europe!

It's funny - the first year I "tried" to ride this I was very nervous about the super-strong launch. Then the second and third years I "tried" to ride it, I was more worried about the history of incidents if I did ever get on it. Either way I was always slightly nervous of the launch!