Richard Bannister

The sixth day of our trip was planned mainly around a visit to the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum. I'm not intending to write about that experience, except to note that it reinforced the horrors of what the Nazi regime did during the second world war in a very real way.

Before we could get there, however, we had a five hour drive from Austria to Poland, crossing through the Czech Republic en route. Though there was a substantial charge for dropping off our rental car in a different country the hit was quite a bit less than the cost of one-way flights for two people, with the added benefit that we could travel on our own schedule. I identified three possible alpine coasters that were (mostly) on the way, but was only able to positively confirm one of them as being open, and the requirement to be at Auschwitz for mid-afternoon made it impractical to go to the others on spec.

HEIpark Tošovice is probably best described as an Adventure Centre. It features a restaurant, a ropes course, a playground, trampolines, and Bobová Dráha, a Wiegand installation that was one of the first rides of its type in the country. The layout looked fairly nondescript from the roadway, but turned out to be exceptionally good thanks to a sizeable number of airtime hills and tight turns along its 965 metre track. The whole journey was negotiated at considerable speed, too, thanks to a steep helix at the start of the course that got things going nicely.