The thing about Europa Park that you need to remember is that their mascot looks like a 4K version of Charles Entertainment Cheese. That is very important for the rest of this conversation.
Ed Euromaus
Now that we're all on the trolley, let's get to today's nonsense. It was an early start for my companions today, we were expecting to leave the hotel-motel-apartment inn at 8:45AM. And we did. Which allowed us to walk up to Europa Park at the bight and early time of about 9:00AM.
This is the part where I need to swear you to secrecy about our hot tips on how to best experience Europa Park. Have you sworn? To secrecy? Good.
First stop was to jump on the EP Express. The EP doesn't stand for ExPress or EuropaPark. It stands for Eepy. It's for eepy travelers to get a tiny nap while they're whisked away to Spain. Great invention. This allowed us to skip around most of the crowds and get to our first destination in the Iceland area, Wodan. It's a big'ol wooden coaster. Here's a picture of it.
A thing I very much liked about the rides is that they all had detailed info about What Was Going On About Those Things Happening On The Ride. It looks like this.
I don't know what Clermont County Ohio has to do with pirates, but here we are. (Click to embiggen.)
[This is the space where Angie is gonna talk about all the rides she liked.]
[Oh! Hello there! I'm not asleep yet today. I'm also back to pretty much 100% health too! The world is a burrito.
So Europa Park is amazing and big and adorable and a maze of so much to see and do and eat I wish I had even MORE time to explore it, but I'm glad we are doing 2 days. It's better than King's Island with the big coasters but the theming of Disney World, but not as commercial. It has its own charm. Like a maze the stores and streets zig zag and wind around. There could be a huge coaster full of screaming people, or a giant geodesic dome, but you wouldn't know it or hear it until you turn a corner and BOOM it's there! Each little part of Europe is contained in it's own, charming way, keeping you immersed.
Also right now is the fall and Halloween decorations, so there is like a fuck ton of pumpkins here (internet says over 180,00 pumpkins)!! It is all very cute and the weather is nice and cool, so I am in fall heaven here!
So the rides! We started with Wodan, which is Viking themed, and a wooden coaster. It was like Mystic Timbers but I didn't feel like it was as fast and was a lot smoother. Great ride. Then we did Blue Fire (but I keep calling it Blue Steel) which is a mega coaster and TIL a mega coaster has a drop between 200-299 feet high and a hyper coaster has a drop 300-399 feet. Orion at King's Island is a hyper coaster. Blue Steel is a mega coaster. I think it was a lot more fun than Orion! Lots of great air time, it was more like Diamondback with with a loop and a launched start. The animatronic/mannequin people at the beginning of the ride all had the same face and looked like George W Bush to me! LOL!
We went on the Europa version of Pirates of the Caribbean, Pirates of Batavia, which was...very similar. But still fun. We ate some fries and crepes and soon it was time for our Virtual Queue for Voltron Nevera, the newest coaster here in the Park. I think it might be my favorite ride from the entire day!! We will definitely be riding it again tomorrow. It has two launches and so many rolls and loops and twists and turns, it is a DELIGHT! Plus, it's Nikola Tesla themed!
We calmed down with a few indoor rides including the adorable Madame Freudenreich which is an old lady who lives with dinosaurs that all help make a cake for the T-Rex since it's his birthday. Dark ride with old, adorable dinosaur animatronics? Yes please!
We made it to France and that was when I finally got to ride the ride that was the whole reason for this trip! The seed that grew into this amazing vacation: Eurostat Coastiality VR's Phantom of the Opera! When I heard there was a Phantom of the Opera roller coaster I was so intrigued. I had been meaning to travel to Germany, so what better chance than now and with my besties??
The roller coaster is actually just the coaster inside the geodesic dome: the CanCan Coaster! You just enter in the back of the coaster and queue in a special line that is decorated with PotO memorabilia and costumes. A painting of Carlotta tells you the rules (thank God for subtitles) and you walk into a waiting room where they give you your VR headset. It includes the whole face/eye visor and headphones cranked to 100 decibels. You are seeing and hearing NOTHING until they load the VR. Then you are instantly transported into a beautifully rendered Box 5 at the Opera Populaire in what looks like PS2 graphics. LOL!! Okay, maybe not that bad, but really not that good either. It's fine. The hard part is you're supposed to walk to the coaster with this VR headset on, so it renders the waiting room space around you as Box 5, all the others on the coaster with you are PS2 avatars on Parisians going to the opera circa 1880. We were "warned to leave box 5 empty" (all this is in English for us, BTW) and then B5 becomes an elevator that goes down into the Phantom's lair?? Sure! You, meanwhile, are carefully following your PS2 avatar host when in reality you're mincing to the coaster train, safely stepping in (you see the gondola boat) and then you feel them safety attach the headset to the coaster seat. You wait a little bit while your coaster train waits its turn to run the usual CanCan coaster track, and it drives around a bit in the lake under the opera house, oh look there's the creepy mannequin in the wedding dress, and roses keep falling from the ceiling like it's a CLAMP anime (not far from the truth). Then you feel the coaster start to climb in a slow spiral up and up, while the Phantom explains that Christine has been paying too much attention to Raoul and not enough attention to him and their music. "And if I can't have Christine, I'll make sure no one else can have her!" (actual quote). We have by now reached what I assume is the top of the geodesic dome, but we have been climbing the top of the Opera while Christine sings below and the Phantom is on the chandelier we've been circling. Now he does his "you will curse the day you did not do..." spiel and then he crashes the chandelier, and our coaster plunges with it and....let's just say that one fallen chandelier does a lot more damage in this coaster than in the play. Large marble busts fall on the crowd! The floors crack open to lava below! Beams crack and topple! Explosions! I started laughing because the level of destruction was so over the top! Every once in a while we'd catch a glimpse of, or follow, Christine and Raoul running from the destruction or reaching out for each other. Meanwhile you'll see the Phantom swinging around like Tarzan here and there. When we finally break free from the collapsing opera house into the burning states of Paris outdoors (yes, somehow half of Paris is now on fire, too), we see that Christine and Raoul are safe, and we zoom into them as they happily kiss in front of the blaze that was the Opera Populaire. Then we dip down into the Phantom's underground lair where he's sitting glumly with his music box monkey and I just burst out laughing! It was so over the top. But I really did love it and had a lot of fun. They played music from the play throughout and I had a great time. Unfortunately, it was very motion sickness-inducing for Ryan and Linny, especially Ryan, who said the VR video had frozen during the ride! BLARG! That would definitely throw me for a loop! I was lucky the graphics in mine lined up perfectly with the ride! I think I might be the only one who rides that again tomorrow...
Jeff and I went to watch a short show called Spook Me which felt very Disney-ish, while Ryan and Linny went to walk off the motion sickness.
We met back up at the Haunted Mansion-I mean Castello dei Medici. And it was very Phantom Theater with the theme of maybe Dante's Inferno?
And lastly, we rode on Arthur, based off the book and movie franchise by Luc Besson. We loved that ride so much we rode it twice! It's half animatronic and half inverted coaster (dangling feet) and was so fun and sweet! Now we really have to try and watch the movie!
And that's my long contribution to the rides of Europa Park: Day 1!]
We came back to the apartment-hotel-inn-and-tavern for a dinner from local pizza place, Mamma Mia's. It was pretty decent. The desserts were the most popular. It was as we were retiring to our rooms that I noticed this.
The Gigler.
That brings us up to now. When will it be then? Soon. Goodnight!
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