Photo TR: Bas goes to Italty 2011

hyyyper · November 4, 2011

In the summer, I travelled to Italy together with three other fellow roller coaster enthusiasts. The idea was hatched during the Troy marathon in September of 2010.

At first, my only goal was to go to Mirabilandia and ride Katun. Katun was a rollercoaster that was high on my to-ride list for quite some time. However, Italy has more to offer than just Katun, or Mirabilandia. I knew of Gardaland, and from some trips reports on ThemeParkReview I saw that the neighbouring parks of Caneva World weren't bad at all as well.

When it became more and more believable that the park Rainbow MagicLand would open on the date it had promised, it became also more interesting to visit it too. However, driving all the way to the south for a single park was a little too much, even for us. So, we researched some more to find more parks we could visit.

Eventually, we found three other parks that featured more than just a minetrain and a wack worm. Close to Rome (and thus Rainbow Magicland) was Zoomarine, while Fasanolandia and Miragica were located near Bari. We also included Fiabilandia, simply because it was on our route and it fitted into the schedule.

So, all the plans were made, reservations made and finally it was the 18th of July, time to start our Italia Coastertrip 2011.

After we kick-started our trip with a visit to Toverland we left in the night of 17 to 18 July for Cologne. We flew via Munchen to Bari, where we could pick up our rental car and go straight to the first park on our trip: Miragica.

Miragica is a small charming park. While it only has two rollercoasters and a handful of other rides, the rides are very varied and the park is well themed. The top ride in the park is the Intamin Accelerator, Senzafiato.

The launch of the coasters is al right, but not very powerful. The tophat is short and small, which makes the changes of directions they way they should be: intense and fast. By a mistake from one of the developers, the tophat gives you a nice view of the parking lot instead of the park itself. The rest of the ride is OK, however I did get the feeling Intamin did not put a lot of effort into making the rest of the layout interesting. Overall, the track is really nice, but since Intamin installed train with OTSRs, the comfort is not very high.

The biggest FAIL in the park was the wild mouse coaster. 'Spaccatempo' is officially a 'spinning wild mouse' from Zamperla. However, in total, we got 1.5 half spin, of which 1 spin happened on the brake run. Thus during the ride, we only made half a spin. It was a bit of disappointing, especially when compared to the other mouses we would do on this trip.

The water rides in the park are unique. The river-rapids is more like a large spiralling slide were you go down on in the standard round boats. And the log flume has screens placed next to drops, which bounces all the water you usually splash away, right back into your boat. The explanation of the operator was spot on: "It's a total shower".

The tower ride in the park is very good. It might not be the highest, but it is one of the few towers that has a drop and launch in one program. The rest of the park was very well maintained and themed, but there was not much shadow, which was unfortunate because of the heat that day.

Eventually we got to a very ghetto-ish 3D cinema, but thankfully the air-conditioning was set to 'South Pole' and movie itself was quite enjoyable. After to movie we went to the (also quite ghetto) stunt show and then left the park to find our first hotel.

Onto the pictures: