I last posted about Alton Towers on here nearly four years ago, when I wrote about what I described as “the annual Beyond Alton Towers trip”. Since then it hasn’t really lived up to the “annual” bit; we’ve only just finally made it back there. Everyone’s schedule and finances seem to have got increasingly complicated over the past few years and it’s been hard to get the whole group together for things like this. But Alex’s pending 30th birthday finally gave us the hearty kick-up-the-arse we so badly needed, and we managed to not only reunite the core Alton Towers crew (me, Alex, Gavin and Heather) but also drag along Laura, Lori, Stuart and Sam for the ride(s) as well.
(The thought of my quite-a-bit younger brother being 30 years old is something I’m still not entirely comfortable with. I’d only just started to get used to the idea of being in my 30s myself, for god’s sake, then Laura went and turned 30 a few months ago, and now Alex is doing it too. Will this ever end??).
Of course, Alton Towers has been in the news quite a lot this year, following the now-infamous Smiler roller coaster crash back in June that seriously injured four people. Probably mostly because of this, the park was by far the quietest I’ve ever seen it. Most of the time there was virtually no queue for the majority of the rides (Spinball, Rita and Th13teen still had queues but much shorter than normal). It was weird being able to just walk into the Nemesis loading station and get straight on the next train without having to wait at all. Consequently, we managed to do fourteen rides on the first day, most of them big ones, something that would have been impossible on any of my previous visits. No wonder we were all exhausted by the evening after all those adrenaline rushes.
Front row on Nemesis
The Smiler itself is still closed, and I wouldn’t be surprised if it never re-opens after all that bad publicity. We saw them sending test trains around it, with weights in them to simulate riders. Unfortunately the only other new ride to be added since our last visit (Nemesis Sub Terra) was also closed the whole time, though I’m not sure why. So the only thing that was actually new to me was Enterprise, a big spinny wheel thing near Oblivion. It’s one of the oldest rides in the park, but I’ve never been on it before as Alex always said it wasn’t that good and I’d decided I’d rather spend my precious Alton Towers time queueing for things that were good rather than something that wasn’t. But this time, with hardly any queues to contend with, I gave it a try. It wasn’t bad. It didn’t make me feel as sick as I’d expected it to. Once it got going it felt a bit like going round the same roller coaster loop again and again, only less safe because inside your little cage there’s no lap bar or anything to make you feel secure.
Anyway. I may not have done much new stuff this time, but I thoroughly enjoyed revisiting all the old rides again, especially after such a long break. I was a bit worried I’d have lapsed back into being too scared to go on any of the big ones, but after a quick Saturday morning spin on Nemesis, I felt ready to face the rest of the park. Stuart, however, was quite nervous about it all as he hadn’t been to Alton Towers before, though his girlfriend Sam was already a bit of an adrenaline junkie (“Naw, just a junkie”, Stuart said affectionately). But once he got going, he enjoyed the rides a lot and wanted to do all of them (although he was still entertainingly sweary during the scary bits). It was Laura and Lori that really surprised me, though… they hadn’t even been going to come into the theme park at all until we discovered we could get them quite cheap tickets for the second day, as they weren’t sure it would be their thing. But they ended up going on quite a lot of the rides. They both did Th13teen and Rita, and Lori did Nemesis, Air and Sonic Spinball too.
Opinion was divided on what was the scariest. As I mentioned last time, Gavin, Alex, Heather and I are all terrified of Rita now, whereas the others just casually went on it and couldn’t understand what we were making such a fuss about. Laura said it didn’t bother her much, because she’d been in the car with her dad in his younger days. I did feel slightly vindicated when I read all the ride statistics online afterwards, though – at least in terms of raw G-force, Rita is the most intense, clocking up 4.7G compared to Oblivion’s 4.5 and Nemesis’s 4.0. Though I can fully understand why most people find Oblivion scarier – the fact that you’re experiencing 0.2G less than you would be on Rita isn’t really much comfort when you’re plunging face down into a huge dark hole from sixty feet up in the air.
I know it’s blurred, but that gives you a better impression of what it actually looks like.
It was a nice enough day on the Saturday for us to risk doing the water rides. I’m not sure if they were there last time, but there are now pay-per-use water guns lined up next to the Congo River Rapids, so you can pay a pound to soak ten innocent passing riders. We discovered this when a huge jet of cold water hit Stuart right in the face as we descended the rapids, but he made himself feel better later on by doing the same thing to some other unsuspecting people. And so the cycle continues. Alex and I managed to emerge from the rapids mostly dry, but both got absolutely drenched on the Flume. Note to self: don’t sit in the front next time. Or do what Gavin did and bring full waterproofs, including a plastic bag to keep his feet dry, though that seems a bit like cheating to me.
Meeting one of my childhood heroes.
As always, there was plenty else to do at the Towers as well as the white knuckle rides. Gavin and Stuart both became obsessed with those machines where you have to move the grabby claw so that it picks up a prize for you. There were lots of those all over the park, especially around the Arrr-cade in the pirate themed bit. (It’s not really called the Arrr-cade, but it definitely should be. Missed opportunity there, guys!). Gavin eventually did manage to win a Gremlin toy from one of them, though I dread to think how much it must have cost him altogether. I’m not sure if Stuart won anything from those, though he did win some soft toys for Sam from one of the “Win a prize every time” stalls. Heather, meanwhile, thought she was making friends with a duck near the Flume, but it turned out it just wanted to steal her doughnut.
The doughnut thief eyes up his next victim.
It was a great weekend… mustn’t leave it so long before going back next time 🙂 .
(Photos mostly by Laura this time… I didn’t take my camera and hardly took any on my phone).