Solid Gold Posted July 14, 2010 Author Share Posted July 14, 2010 So, some people had said that Europa was one of the best parks in the entire world. I mean, I guess they could be telling the truth... In Freiburg station, I notice that Subway deals aren't quite as good in Europe...shouldn't this be the 4.65 footlong or something? Good thing cheap bakeries are EVERYWHERE. Who decided that in America we need our bakeries and Eis shops to be upscale and cost too much? This suits me wonderfully. Little do you know this is actually a food/bemoaning about food prices report. You should just turn back now. Just kidding, it's actually a trip report about closed train platforms that cause me to miss my trip to Europa Park. JUST KIDDING, it's actually about getting to Europa Park at ridiculously early times on the first bus of the day from Ringsheim train station (very easy to get to the park or hotels, and free with the Eurail pass). See? I am the first person here at 7:30 AM, before most of the employees. I decided to use the next hour to walk around the entire perimeter of Europa...yeah I had some time on my hands. This is Rust, Germany. A lovely place. The Spanish hotel has these WTF giant puppets just hangin' around outside. Here's the least credit-y credit ever from outside the park. Blue Fire Loop....Through lots of things! Silverstar is super duper easy to Photograph from outside the park. Here's the back half. Here is the BIG first drop, still the largest on any B&M Ever! Wait, why am I excited about this? Someone buy a 300 footer! Artsy Fartsy! Only by Bravo... Yay, I can finally use my ClubTPR card! Keep in mind members, you must go to Information to use the discount, or you will get lots of awkward looks. Actually, you may still get awkward looks and calls to the manager. But it looks like it worked! Ropes aren't dropped, let's see what's in the shop. OMG. I've been in the park for two minutes and I already want to buy their stylish merchandise. Do other parks sell jackets this spiffy? I mean, put me on a crotch rocket with this baby on and we have liftoff. I love this shirt enough that I've screen printed it at home... OMG WE THINK THIS MERCHANDISE IS REALLY GOOD! OMG NOW IT'S FINALLY TIME FOR BLUE FIRE! Funky one of a kind element=Bizzaro sideways hangtime. Houston, we have a timing failure! Umm, so my review of Blue Fire...Well, all I can say is that it's reeeeally overrated. My top ten steel is not amazing, so this ride slipped into my #10 spot, but that's just ahead of Vortex at KI. Maverick, the most comparable ride I can think of, is much much better. Blue Fire is just too...smooth. No intensity to it at all. And the heartbeat monitor? On both my rides, for both me and the person next to me, it just fluctuated randomly the whole time. Good elements, and fun, but I feel if you added 10 MPH to the whole course it would add a lot to it. Already nearby I grabbed the credit on Atlantica Supersplash. Here's where the park theming really struck me for the first time. That statue in the station is about 6-8 feet tall, and there's a bunch of animatronics that move about in the queue. Moving back towards the middle of the park I found Robot Unicorn Attack-The Ride! I stole this picture from TowersTimes to show you something: See the big turn up there after the first drop? Well the banking on that thing is seriously like, 80 degrees. On a kiddie coaster! Why do you have to enter under a horse's ass to get to Poseidon? Because it's more fun! Great theming, great operations-Sums up Europa Park. Had to wait about 40 minutes for the mouse, which would have been okay except... AAARGH this ride has Rosanne! Next I tried to find Euro-Sat, but I ended up in..umm...some sort of Lager based mixed drink bar? WTF this isn't Eurosat! But it was okay, because after the awesome Dino-ghost train ride I found Mr. Roboto and thanked him very much for helping me find EuroSat. Eurosat has an escalator! Why does Disaster Transport have a big set of stairs and this ride gets an escalator? Next up was the Beemer sponsored by Mercedes. Silver Star has a large area devoted to it, with a lot of stuff to do both inside and outside the building. In the upper left corner you can see a racing simulator, demoing Gran Turismo 5. There are all sorts of things like this at Europa. I think I honestly think I could spend a whole day at this park without riding anything! (Oh, and Silver Star-fun, but meh). Finally something in my brain told me it was time to ride Euro-Mir! -------------------------------------------------------------------------- Hold up. There's something we have to do before you can experience Euro-Mir. Alright. Now we're good. Here's a look at the awesome effed-up transitions! Look at that sexy curve! OMG is that a REAL Space Station?!?!?? Euro Mir has spacepeople, glass, tunnels, tunnels through space and glass, crazy russian dance music, possibly the longest lift hill in the entire world, and spinning! What's not to love? If I had a camera attached to my head, I would give it two thumbs up. In a serious sense, Blue Fire is better. But as for just plain fun, this may be one of the greatest coasters ever designed! The last credit was Alpenexpress. It is one of three rides that travels through some sort of elf-gold mining mountain, which is sort of 80s and lol. I'm beginning to think the reason people don't count these is not because they rely on electric power, it's because they're boring. All powered coasters. Boring. Here's one of the other rides that goes through the mountain, another WildWasserbahn (apparently Germany's term for the log flume). However, I'm using the log flume to point out something I didn't like at all about Europa park-It's totally confusing! Look at this pic and the two previous. These are all entrances to the line for Wildwasserbahn. MANY rides at Europa go on this weird system of multiple entrances, meaning that some real entrances are unnecessarily hard to find, and some places called entrances are just paths that take you to the real entrance that people otherwise walk on just to get around the park. It's dumb, and there should just be one place with a clearly marked sign for a ride entrance. There are also several signs throughout the park that tell you to go down a certain path to get to a ride, when that path is definitely not the best way to get there. Dumb. The Spanish area of the park was super nice. And it doesn't really even have any good rides! Scandinavia is even nicer! And it does have really good rides! The area around this pirate ship is great. And the ship doesn't look too bad itself! Rapids ride-Tremendous. The channels are so wide, I actually saw one boat pass another during the course of our ride! Another "I didn't know that could happen!" moment. The park's new Shower: The Ride. Whilst on the monorail I caught some pics of something new the park is adding. This is next to the splash battle, looks like a possible sprayground? Caves, 2nd stories, water pipes? Who knows? And now: A report from some of the park's dark rides! Apparently Batavians like to hold pigs and SCREAM! And there are also Trannies holding their German-Chinese lovers? But seriously, Pirates in Batavia is seriously good. The opening scene is a WOW moment for me. I've yet to visit any Disney park, but I doubt POTC could be much better! Yay! My first Bench: The Ride! This "Magic Bench" took me to Russia. Kind of generic, I didn't really know if there was a story to it. My favorite dark ride in this park was the ghost train Geisterschloss. Nothing but classic theme park FUN here, and it was about the perfect length too. Oogey Boogey man says go to Europa-Park and ride its SIX fun pure dark rides (not pictured is Atlantis Adventure, my second favorite Shooter ever after Men in Black)! Now Back to the REAL trip report, the FOOD! Here are fish and chips. Raspberry ice cream bar! The real winner: Crepes! And tasty meat from Greece. I bought some unpictured stuff, easily the most I've ever spent on food in a theme park! And yes, Europa has the giant German slides o' doom too. I wish I had time! This guy says: Now that the park is closed, you can take pictures of MEEEEEEE! Here in the front of the park is nice "standard" garden, just here to be beautiful. Fountains that are sooooooo nice, I explored them after the park was closed because you just can't do the whole park in one day. How many days are necessary for a full visit of Europa? Two MINIMUM. Just a great, great place. I will certainly be back someday. I mean really though, see how long this trip report is? Double it and then you might cover the basis of what the park has to offer. I didn't even get a picture of Schweizer Bobbahn or Cassandra's Curse and I didn't get mostly any of all the buildings and theming and the shows. Just a huge, huge and nice park. GO HERE! Thankfully, IC trains run through Ringsheim station, so my trip up to Cologne for Phantasialand the next day was an easy 3 hour trip via IC and ICE. Mezzo mix made it even easier! Thanks for Reading! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Thuur Posted July 14, 2010 Share Posted July 14, 2010 Quite an adventure! Cool that you have made this trip, the public transport is oke in Holland. But sometimes a point (Like Toverland) is just not interesting enough to have a permanent busline to it.I am glad you have found some Dutch hospitality (Or were just lucky ). Have you visited Efteling as well or are these the parks you have visited? Thanks for sharing! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Kooky Posted July 14, 2010 Share Posted July 14, 2010 Really nice TR. Nice to see that you liked EuropaPark and my hometown "Freiburg"... but i can tell why they have so many entrances on some rides in EuropaPark. I am going there since 25 years when i was a kid and at this time the park was just a little family park, but every year the park gets bigger the crowds get bigger. So they had to expand the lines of the rides. In between time they build mostly lines were they can controll the way were you walk but in the past the were often not variable. So the decided to build more entrees on the older rides, which they can close if the lines will get longer. So you see, its a feature, that you don`t have to walk miles to the rides itself, if no one is queuing. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
gisco Posted July 17, 2010 Share Posted July 17, 2010 Europa Park is awesome. So much to see. I was there on the TPR Europe trip and I can't wait to go back and explorer the park some more. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
kumba830 Posted July 17, 2010 Share Posted July 17, 2010 When I was in Germany I bought a Summerbreak ticket for Deutsche Bahn that let you travel unlimited amounts on pretty much all trains except the ICE. We freaking used the train to get everywhere, and they really do have a much better transportation system than here in the USA. I went to Heide Park during my stay, and like you I was underwhelmed by Colossus. But then I absolutely loved Desert Race, with all it's fast turns and awesome twisty airtime! Heide has some great water rides to and Grottenblitz is really fun for a powered coaster. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
darkon Posted July 17, 2010 Share Posted July 17, 2010 Bench! - The Ride has a storyline. As far as i remember it goes something like this: A russian couple really wants to have a kid, but she never got pregnant. Someday they´re so inspired by watching the children play that they build a snowman and an old man comes along and the snowman turns into a little girl they call "Snowflake". She loves her new parents and playing with other kids in the snow, but somehow she got lost (i´m not sure at the moment how that happens...) and wanders through the cold russland. At the end she returns to her parents, but then the spring is comming and she is melting from the sun. It´s an old russian fairy tale. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
robinschroder Posted July 17, 2010 Share Posted July 17, 2010 You are very adventurous! Or maybe just crazy. I'm not quite sure yet. I couldn't agree more with Morgan! I think you deserve a medal for surviving your haphazard European adventure! This has been a unique TR so far, can't wait to hear how it all ends! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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