TR: Brean Liesure Park, UK

[89James89]

Right just as a head's up this is my first trip report and I'm not the world's best photographer. As such it may not be brilliant and some of the photos may be lacking but its all I got so is the best I can do.

 

Well having lived in Devon (south coast) UK all the 22 years of my life and being into rollercoaster’s and theme parks for the last 4 years, I recently discovered that I don't actually have to take a three hour train or car journey and book a weekend away (ok so I don't have to do the weekend but it's London so there's always stuff to do to make up a weekend) to get a coaster fix. You see as some of you already probably know, it turns out that there's 4 less than a hour and a half away (ok 5 if you include Maximus at Crealy but I've whored the hell out of that when I was younger so I'm not going to count it) in the sunny place called Brean Leisure Park. This little park which had up until a few weeks ago had escaped my notice has apparently been there for a while. Show's how observant I am.

 

Anyway to cut a longer than need's be story short me and my girlfriend (coaster convert) decided to check this place out yesterday as it looked pretty good value and would be a good way to spend our day off together. So with everything planned we set off (late as usual) to Brean and around 50 minutes later were driving through housing estates sure that the GPS has decided to play funny buggars until we spot and overshot the park.

 

Overshot corrected we buy our unlimited wristbands, priced at £19.99 which turned out to be very good value as opposed to buying tokens and dived into a day of rides.

 

First up was this Terror Castle which, having never been on a haunted house ride before was a rather shocking experience. This ride is seriously messed up and although it didn't scare me as such I'm pretty sure it disturbed me. Not wanting to spoil it, but once ridden you never need to watch another scary film again as I'm sure they've managed to somehow, cram most of the plots horror bits into scenes in the ride and in my opinions scarier than Saw Alive. The fact that it also seemed to traumatize my girlfriend, with the bit's she actually had her eye's open to see, was also pretty funny.

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After that was the Waltzers which taught me the stupidity of turning your head on a ride that's spinning pretty quickly and also showed why queues (which were non existent, except for the bumper cars, all day) aren't such bad things as my stomach wasn't feeling too good.

 

Now I've kind of forgotten the order in which we rode the other rides but hers photo's from the rest of the day.

 

Now this ride, Wipeout I didn't ride (don't actually know why to be honest I'm just not fond of them) but I thought I’d get a photo of it anyway.

 

Hellraiser was pretty tame really for what I thought it'd be like but was still a fun ride.

 

X Factory was another fun ride though I've been on one before that I would say was more intense and a faster ride.

 

Despite being really small, Sky Diver was one of the rides I was least looking forward to as I have a fear of drops and despite loving rollercoaster’s not a great like of height’s The ride itself however was more intense than it looked from off ride but still not that bad.

 

Wild Water, the park's log flume didn't get graced by our presence as my girlfriend doesn't particularly like getting wet and having been on log flumes before I agreed to give it a miss.

 

Now as for the rest of the flat rides I for some reason didn't take anymore pictures of them. We did ride Sizzler which was just like every other ride of it's type, Disco Fever which was some random bounce ride which hurt because of how the seats are angled but was fun all the same and the Dodgems which are always fun.

 

We didn't ride the rest because thought that the rollercoaster’s and other rides were much better use of our time and Extreme scared us both to death watching it.

 

Now onto the rollercoaster's themselves.

 

First one was the new one (relocated from Blackpool I think) which I don't have any photos of because I forgot and it was in the dark. All in all it reminded me of a smaller and better version of X no way out in which you actually go forward and are marginally less smashed about all over the place. We still rode it several times though.

 

Next was Magic Mouse which scared the hell out of both of us. Now it wasn't intense or anything like that but seriously we thought it'd derail every time it went around one of the corners it was so jerky and sudden. Still we rode it 3 times to make sure we weren't just lucky we didn't die.

 

Finally we had Shockwave. Now, I've read about Pinfari loopers like this, and was pretty much dreading this ride but decided to give it the go ahead anyways. Now the drops were pretty sharp and in my opinion more intense than a lot of higher coasters that I've been on. The trains weren’t that uncomfortable either but coming into the final helix and brakes was like a trip to the chiropractor. We rode this twice and the second time I didn't hold on or brace myself at all and the ride seemed smoother but still that last helix and break run hurt.

 

 

 

Now as for the park and day as a whole it was pretty good. There were little to no lines for anything and a lot to do there to fill in the five hours we spent at the park. The ride bands are more than worth it if you plan on spending more than a few hours or plan on going on more than about 8 rides and we've already decided we'll have to go again at some point. The staff were also pretty friendly when you were waiting for trains to fill. So to sum it all up it’s a nice way to spend a day if you have the time but don't expect any real atmosphere you'd get at Thorpe Park or other parks around.

 

Hope you enjoyed the brief trip report.

 

Cheers

 

89James89

Edited August 14, 2011 by 89James89

[Gutterflower]

Ahhh Brean used to be my local park but I haven't been in years. They used to have a couple of kiddie rides and a standard pinfari where shockwave now is. Good to see it's still going strong.