Thorpe Park - WooHoo!!!

Yesterday the brave few from Concert Band that were still around and able travelled up to Thorpe Park for a day of fun and adrenaline. I think the best way to go through this is my opinions of my favourite rides.

Nemisis Inferno
Feels very weird when you don't have anything under your feet for this ride, especially when a corner throws you out to the side or you're doing a loop and you don't see anything but sky for what seems to be an eternity. Apart from keeping a firm eye on the seat in front of me I did enjoy the ride though it'd be worth going on it again to try and gain more of the experience.

Stealth
This is the parks new ride for the year, and looks very scary as you look at it from various points of the park. The track appears very simple, you go up and come down but the up is vertical and the down goes beyond vertical before catching you again. This was the first ride we had to properly queue for and this actually helped quell my anxiety, though having the ride breakdown while we were waiting wasn't the best announcement I heard all day.

The ride itself really is something else, being accellerated to 80mph in 2.5secs is just breathtakingly fast (literally) while the down part with the beyond vertical has you hanging against the harness while the cart twists down beneath you. This ride alone gave me the biggest adrenaline rush of the whole day, though I'm not entirely convinced I'd do it again.

Tidal Wave
Before you even join the queue for this ride it warns you that you'll get very wet, and they aren't exaggerating. In reality it's just a very big log flume ride, but the amount of splash that you generate just gets you from every angle. Of course we weren't expecting the group after us to get us as well as we were waiting to disembark but given the heat of the day it wasn't long before everything was dry again (well mostly) while we queued for the next rides.

Zodiac
This would probably be considered a tame ride in comparison to all the others, but given that you start in a ferris wheel on it's side which then spins you up enough that your pod is already horizontal and then lifts so you start doing loop the loops as if in a plane (or nemisis). I can't explain what is was about this ride, but it definitely brought a smile to my face or maybe that's just the adrenaline from the day.

Collousus
10 loops in total and two corkscrews, so at least we knew what to expect, or at least that's what I expected. What I didn't expect was that you could move in the seat, so that meant on some bumps you were jolted out of the seat (much like going over a hump back bridge) and on the corkscrews you were totally out of your seat resting on the harness. We managed to do this one twice, and even the second time it was exciting and worthwhile.

Overall I had a really enjoyable day and managed to keep the old fear of heights at bay to take on some of the more challenging rides :)