Joe & Liz's TPR Europe Mainland Europe Trip PTR

[ginzo]

OK, I've decided to get off my lazy ass and at least TRY to finish this TR.

 

We're still in Paris!

Random Paris street scene.

Liz doing her favorite thing: Nothing!

This is a view from one of the upper balconies in the Pompidou Centre. Notice the freaky weird street performers to the left. Oh, and that group of kids was randomly singing "Wonderwall" by Oasis.

Zombie statues. Awesome.

"We've come for your daughter, Chuck."

This awesome terrace is on one of the upper floors of the Pompidou Centre.

Here's the view from inside of one of the escalators, which, again, are outside the building. It gives the place a very distinctive feel.

The Pompidou Centre building has a really funky design with a lot of things like air vents and escalators prominently displayed on the outside of the building.

Here's Liz sitting in front of the fountain at the Pompidou Centre, which is an insanely large modern art gallery. Also featured is a bottle of European Orange Fanta that is probably worth about $800. Although it was an acquired taste, I really came to enjoy the Fanta over there.

One thing about Paris is a lot of the restaurants have little food windows that sell food that you can just take with you on your way to the various attractions. This is a LOT more affordable than doing a full sit down meal. And the food quality is generally quite excellent. That little food shop there on the corner sold "trois fromage panini" that was out of this world. Some of the best food I've ever had.

More of the awesome Paris city scene.

The view again from the apartment we stayed in. The relatively narrow streets combined with the decent sized buildings creates a distinct feel. Also, notice the graffiti. Certain parts of Paris have a lot of it, but not really in this district. You'll notice a ton of it on the RER (commuter train) run from Charles de Gaulle Airport into Gare du Nord (big train station in Paris).

[BeemerBoy]

"We've come for your daughter, Chuck."

 

Well played.

[ginzo]

Sunday, June 22nd was "day 0" of the trip where a bunch of us took the bus into Jardin d'Acclimatation, which is a kiddie park in the middle of Paris. It's a beautiful park, but we just got the credits and hopped onto the subway to go see some more Paris attractions.

Gracias!

See caption above.

It was a beautiful day in this very pretty park. Wish we had more time to check it out, but we had a schedule to keep.

Scary train!

Up and away they go.

I know you always wanted to see the backs of Will and Ryan's heads.

Some of the Europe Trip group. Notice how everyone is nice and relaxed and not pointing at watches or harassing the trip organizers.

Yay, first park of the trip.

[ginzo]

OK, so this is the last update in which I'll bore everyone with Paris.

A view from the outside. BTW, it's super fun to bike around in circles in that area back by the glass pyramid.

Another massive hallway. It's amazing how up close and personal they let you get with all these priceless works of art.

Octavian: My favorite Roman emperor and probably the best politician in history.

For Liz's money, she prefers the "dogs playing pool" painting. Very cultured.

I'm a total tourist for taking this picture. When you actually go and see this, it's nothing but you and 700 idiot tourists taking crappy pictures of it. And I was one of them! Seriously, you can't understand how amazing this thing is until you go and see it. It has a subtle charm all its own. From anywhere you stand in the room, that damn woman still stares at you knowingly.

"And marble busts of the greatest ghost writers the literary world has ever known."

Finish your brussel sprouts, Timmy, or you'll make Baby Jesus cry.

This place is immense.

Pretty sweet-looking spiral staircase at the Louvre.

Liz at the Louvre.

"Les enfants desire hamburger et frites." < You're a dork if you get that reference.

Haha. Le Car.

I like symmetry.

More of those awesome Paris buildings.

[ParkTrips]

Pompidou Center + Euro Fanta Orange is enough to make me happy, screw art

[ginzo]

TPR Mainland Europe Trip 2008 Day 1: Parc Astérix

 

On day 1, we visited Parc Astérix in Plailly, France, which is just on the outskirts of Paris.

 

I honestly wasn't all that excited about Parc Astérix at first. Sure, I was thrilled to be on the overall Europe trip, but I was actually expecting very little from Parc Astérix itself. How amazingly WRONG I was.

 

You see I made the mistake of judging a European park in the same way I'd judge an American park, by the apparent quality of the coasters. One thing I learned is that in Europe they have several awesome parks that don't necessarily feature the best coasters. They just have an awesome overall atmosphere, excellent theming, and a wide variety of things to do. Parc Astérix definitely falls into this category. The theming is top rate and very clever. I know jack squat about the Astérix characters and stories, but still had a great time at the park. It's the kind of park that is just fun to explore and discover all the cool nooks and crannies.

 

I definitely want to go back to Parc Astérix some day.

Some day, this will all be yours.

Fun thing to look at in the queue.

Notice the outline in the wall.

The entrance to Parc Astérix's new heavily themed Vekoma madhouse. The theming and the preshow were *amazing*, but once you get into the ride part it's pretty much the same thing you've seen many times over.

Still on that awesome boat ride. Endless things to see.

Beware of hitchhiking ghosts!

Obélix, the ACE lifetime member, and his dog Idéfix, aka "le petite chien".

I wonder if these gypsies would sell a gypsy cart to Mr. Toad.

Boat ride cave.

Another boat ride scene. I only rode it once. So, I'm sure I missed a ton of details.

This is from Parc Astérix's funky little boat ride. Their indoor dark ride is a haunted one and fairly scary. So, this is what they offer up for the kids. Excellent work, I might add.

More excellent theming that greatly adds to the park experience.

Another shot of it. As good as it was, I'm not sure it was my favorite bobsled coaster of the trip. I remember some of the other ones being a bit more forceful, like the vicious one at Efteling that cracked my camera's LCD.

Huge and awesome.

Our first ERT session for the trip on the hugest bobsled coaster you've ever seen. Note that this was also the first coaster that we broke. If I remember correctly, some happy trippers had to be evacuated from the midcourse. Or maybe my memory is distorted from the lingering jet lag.

The station for the log flume. Note the excellent theming. And it's just for the flume!

Decent looking log flume that I did not ride. It had a pretty large looking line that I was too lazy to wait in. In retrospect, I probably should have toughed it out. One thing about European parks is that the log flumes are generally amazing with multiple drops, turntables that turn your log backwards, double down drops, etc.

And there he is.

False advertising: No credit here.

Very non-phallic. The park is loaded with cool stuff like this.

The group with both buses, including the crappy short bus that I was originally on. Fortunately, the short bus was replaced by the awesome VIP coach when we got to Efteling Hotel two days later. That VIP bus was amazing. I'd pay an upcharge to get a bus like that again.

The entrance.

[Moose]

This park (parc?) was great.

 

The log flume line moved much quicker than you'd expect. It didn't have any turntables that I can remember but it was a lot of fun.

 

As for the evac, we weren't evaced from the midcourse, it was the long end break run.

[ginzo]

Here is the second set of pictures from Parc Astérix.

Tee hee.

Talking trash can.

Probably the only real weak spot in the entire joint. The anus of Parc Astérix. While it didn't live up to its reputation as being the worst steel coaster in the world, it wasn't good or worth doing ever again. I really hope they replace this with a nice Swiss coaster some day.

Again, great theming.

I think this is the exit from Transdemonium, Parc Astérix's excellent haunted dark ride. I remember it being a bit creepy at points and there are definitely a few fun surprises in there.

Yep, the theming here is right up there with the best of them.

Piggie!

OMG! Splash down.

Another shot of that crazy giant bobsled coaster.

A little known fact is that Parc Astérix has an El Toro.

Another character actor.

One of the character actors in the kiddie area.

More of the endless theming. Love this place.

Just looking at this building makes me hungry. Unfortunately, this restaurant was closed all day. However, we got very generous meal vouchers from the park that we were able to use to buy steak, fries, and wine.

Tranny garden?

WTF??? I'm glad there's no racism in this park.

[ginzo]

TPR Mainland Europe Trip 2008 Day 2: Walibi Belgium

 

So, here we were at the infamous "Vekomaland" park. They feature 4 Vekoma coasters, but only 3 of them ran on this day because the SLC was down. Reliable sources tell us that the current management of the Walibi parks is extremely stingy on maintenance.

 

My thoughts on the park as follows. It's a decent park, but nowhere near as good as several other parks in Europe. Vekomaland seemed clean enough and was pretty decent on the eyes. There was no visible neglect, other than a down SLC and a 2nd gen Intamin drop tower with a few cars not operating. The concessions were not good, but this is pretty much the usual for amusement parks.

 

Vekomaland gets major points in my book for featuring the ONLY Schwarzkopf on the trip. Turbine was really good! The music and enclosed loop really added to the experience for me. Also, the Vekoma mine train and woodie were both really fun coasters. Oh, and Vekomaland featured a really kick ass shooting dark ride.

 

It's a solid park. It just has the misfortune of being surrounded by so many A+ level parks.

 

The highlight of the Vekomaland day, however, was the second half of the day when we were at the Aventure Parc ropes course. That giant zip line was more fun than everything at Vekomaland combined. I think Liz liked Aventure Parc more than anything else on the trip and she's still lamenting the lack of ropes course in the US. Special thanks to Elissa for finding Aventure Parc and arranging for us to go there!

Another shot of the Fail Coaster. I hear that they totally screwed up the drop angle on this thing and it grinds where it's supposed to coast. Some people have compared this to the Flying Turns at Knoebels, but I can't agree with that. The Flying Turns will actually be open and running some day. Vertigo is irreversibly headed for the scrap yard.

Although I love second gen Intamin freefalls, I did not ride this one.

All aboard the Fail Coaster! Not even the great Jean-Claude van Damme can save this piece of crap from the junk yard. This is Belgium's version of The Bat: It won't be here in a few years.

Note to self: Chef Boyardee is into pegging. This was also an Elissa bingo square. Liz racked them up that day.

I passed on the chocolate salty balls.

Alright, this gets my nomination for dumbest park rule ever. The supposed reason for this is to keep pubes out of the water, but you're still going to get every other kind of hair in there. Are they saying that somehow pubes are more likely to contain pathogens than, say, axillary (armpit) hair? Yeah, uhm, no. And, there's also this thing called "chlorine" that can "disinfect" the water.

What's this?

The mascot again. Such a happy little guy.

If you sit on the left side as the train goes by the waterfall, you can reach out and splash water onto the person next to you. I, of course, would never do such a thing.

Vekomacurve.

This ride was really good actually. Not quite up to the high standard of Michael Jackson or Big Thunder Mountain, but still really good. Definitely puts the Arrow mine trains to shame.

The lift hills for the Vekoma mine train. If I remember correctly, this is a single circuit with two lifts.

Boarding the shooter. It has three endings depending on how well you do.

Jeff Johnson's younger brother.

This shot of the shooting dark ride entrance is also sad and pathetic.

Russ & Stacey are also sad and pathetic.

Ryan and Stacey are both sad and pathetic.

Cute park Mascot.

The easiest Elissa bingo square to get of all time.

Yes, we are all sad and pathetic.

Here is Robb talking the operator into letting us on the kiddie coaster. Good work, Robb!

My very first Vekoma woodie credit.

My only gripe is the back seat seemed to have that problem that the Millennium Flyer trains have: The lap bar keeps falling further and further into your gut, especially when you hit the bottom of the drops. The other seats didn't seem to have this problem as much.

Really decent woodie. Nice drops and airtime. Back seat was extremely smooth.

Elissa bingo square.

Hanno taking a picture? Strange, huh?