Richard Bannister

Anyone planning their coaster trips with RCDB.com could be forgiven for thinking that Waarbeek is not worth visiting. It is a particularly small park, with only a handful of rides, all of which are targeted at a young audience. It is in fact oddly similar to what I imagine Nokkakivi Park could become in the next few years, if Lauri manages to keep things together. Lauri, however, is unlikely to ever operate a roller coaster dating from the 1930s, though if he's reading this and wants to prove me wrong I'd be delighted.

Rodelbaan (#1017) operates with single car trains seating four people in a similar fashion to a wild mouse coaster, albeit with one major difference; the cars have no restraints whatsoever. The layout is fairly simple. A small lift hill, probably fifteen feet, takes passengers to the sole "big" drop, no more than ten feet, followed by a turn and some small bunny hops. One more turn brings the car back to the station at a relatively slow speed. On paper this doesn't sound particularly impressive, but amazingly the ride has a significant amount of floating airtime. It is wonderful to see classic coasters such as this one which haven't been vandalised with retrofitted restraint systems; long may this ride stay as it is.

On my last visit to Movie Park Germany it is fair to say that the park didn't do much for me. Unfortunately for the intrepid enthusiast, even crap parks can add interesting new rides that simply have to be ridden. My plan for this weekend jaunt included just enough time to ride Jimmy Neutron's Atomic Flyer (#1018) and then leave. As with Kvasten, this family coaster is truly excellent thanks to Vekoma's wonderful new train design. Now if they could only reengineer the standard SLC trains... well, I'm entitled to my little dreams, right?

It should be noted that the new management at the park appears to be doing great things. Though we didn't have a lot of spare time it was nevertheless evident on a cursory inspection that the place is slowly being turned around; it is a great deal cleaner than I remembered, and new theming is evident on some of the rides that didn't have it before. Crucially, one of the dreadful coasters has been removed in favour of an excellent replacement. Though the park isn't somewhere I wanted more time in today, it does look like it might be worthy of a proper visit in a few years from now.

Toverland is a park that would ordinarily be worth about half a day for even the seasoned enthusiast. However, we'd done the place pretty thoroughly on our last visit, and as such the only real draw for us was the new wooden coaster, Troy (#1019). We took two circuits in total, one at the front and one towards the back. The front was certainly a good ride but not outstanding, and the back was to be frank nothing special. On our Scandinavia trip a fortnight ago some participants were describing this ride in glowing terms, making me wonder if we caught it on a bad day. It will be very interesting to see how this ride breaks in over the next while, as it's not entirely fair to judge a wooden coaster in its first month.

The whole purpose of travelling to the Netherlands (and other countries) this weekend was to visit the Tilburgse Kermis, one of the largest travelling fairs outside of Germany. Rather than use a dedicated ground the various rides are set up on the streets of the city, including just about all of those leading towards our overnight hotel (oops). We had to park the car about a quarter of a mile away and fight our way through the crowds with our luggage. Fortunately a one night trip meant that this fit in a backpack, but it would have been somewhat less fun if we'd been dragging suitcases. The window from our hotel room gave a birds eye view of one of the three booster-style rides present.

Coaster enthusiasts were adequately catered for with Big Roller Coaster (#1020), Big Apple (#1021), Bugs & Bees (#1022), Black Hole, and Super Mouse. The latter seems to have lost a piece of track somewhere along the way, as the turnaround between the medium drop and the large drop is shorter than usual on Reverchon mice, only reaching about three quarters of the way along the support strut below it. It didn't affect the overall quality though; our car spun at an insane speed, possibly the fastest I've ever experienced.

Though we walked around the fair for nearly three hours the necessity to pay for each ride kept us at bay; things might have gotten very expensive otherwise. We tried the Roller Ghoster dark ride, purely based on the name, only to find that it was a haunted house that could best be described as fairground-level. Finally, I tried the attraction I've wanted to ride since its last minute cancellation from Funderland last year; XXL. Giant frisbees are nothing new to me, but KMG's version feels much more forceful. It was in fact the first ride I've ever been on where I felt my glasses strap might not be adequate; I ended up tightening it every three or four swings. One ride was enough for me to realise that this ride needs to come to Irish audiences in the future.