Richard Bannister

France's mediterranean coast is home to a number of funfairs that operate during the summer months. While not actually parks by the traditional definition, they all operate annually, drawing from the same broad selection of rides. They also share very late opening hours; nothing tends to happen before 8:00pm at any location, with most places running well past midnight. Our plan for this trip was to have another shot at tracking down the elusive R2000, and given that we'd planned a total of seven possible locations where it might be. Unfortunately for us we guessed wrong across the board, but we did at least manage to find a good selection of new credits.

Three of our potential locations (Carnon, Gruissan, and Marseillan-Plage) were closed when we passed them, and thus I've not written trip reports from them. All had visible coasters, meaning we'll have to get back there at some stage!

Lunapark Palavas-les-Flots was the only stop this evening where we had plenty of time to look around, largely because we arrived there ninety minutes before anything actually opened. The ride selection was a fairly generic affair, with the only slight oddity being a rather large log flume that looked like it might have been customised for the site. We didn't actually try this, not relishing the thought of getting wet, but it certainly appeared to be interesting enough.

Tim had told us that we'd probably find the coaster we were looking for here, but he was mistaken. Instead, pride of place was held by Infernal Toboggan, probably the least interesting of the adult travelling coasters that appear at the Foire du Trône each year. We did a single circuit (it'd have been rude not to) but this was mostly to pass the time until the Magic Pomme (#1197) opened, giving us our first new credit of the evening.

After a mediocre start to the evening it was a wonderful surprise to discover a vintage Schwarzkopf coaster that we'd not known about in advance. The ride operator on Jumbo Jet (#1198) was watching television as we approached, leaning against the track as he watched a screen resting flat on one of the coaster supports and presumably using the ride superstructure as an aerial. We figured (correctly) that he would wait for an ad break to run the coaster, and besides we had to wait that length of time for enough people to fill the train.

The ride itself proved to be a little on the frightening side; the state of the foam padding on the cars didn't inspire a huge amount of confidence in the operators maintenance technique. Be that as it may the train covered the layout with the legendary Schwarzkopf smoothness, apart from one nasty jolt at the bottom of the first drop. A few moments later we'd cleared La Pomme (#1199) and were back on the road.

This park was known as Europark at the time this trip report was written.

Our first visit to Europark two years ago happened by accident, but today's trip was entirely deliberate. We had but one item on our agenda, namely ticking off the Wilde Maus (#1200) that appeared here a year after our last trip. This model was without question the most thrilling Maurer mouse I've ever been on, thanks to a complete absence of any trim braking until after the big drop. Unfortunately, this was a double edged sword; taking unbanked corners at speed hurts a lot, especially with keys in ones pocket!

The last park of the night was the only one to charge us for car parking. It wasn't hard to see why, however; there were barely any spaces available, quite a surprise on a Thursday night. Roller Coaster (#1201) was an entirely standard Galaxi, albeit graced by one of the brightest lighting packages I've ever seen on a coaster (short of Höllenblitz, anyway). Speedy (#1202) was a heavily customised kiddie coaster, swapping the usual Big Apple for a large inflatable slice of cheese.