Archive Page 3
The Saturday of the ECC Knights and Legends trip saw us meet up with a load of folk at Camelot and beginning the day with an ERS on Knightmare, their new coaster for 2007.
The ride was originally in Japan but, when the park closed, was bought together with the rest of the rides by a business consortium. Various rides were bought and can now be seen all around the world, but no buyer could be found for BRMX and it was left in an expensive storage facility at a dockyard in the UK. Camelot’s owners were able to do a deal to allow the ride to be “stored” at the park instead.
It rides very smoothly apart from a few kinks in the track. The highlight is definitely the “psycho drop” which pulls 5G as it twists downwards.
Continue reading ‘Camelot - It’s Only a Model’
Today saw a visit to the home of the precursor to the end of the world, haunter of my dreams, the tower of doom: Apocalypse. Yes, today Tom, John and myself visited Drayton Manor.
The inevitable lowlight of the day was a ride (or should that be a stand) on their big nasty drop tower. As you may know, me and drop towers don’t get along. Me and slightly broken drop towers get along less well. Today Apocalypse lost its tilt, meaning the standup side didn’t lean out to let us face the ground.
But that was only the beginning of a rather tiltless day. Drunken Barrels, tipsy as it may have been, certainly wasn’t tiltsy either. Instead, it has turned into a flat bog standard teacup ride without so much as a wimper of a raised platform.
Other parts of the day were better though, aside from the equally inevitable crushing blow on G Force and bangin ride on Shockwave. We rode the cable cars which are never open and visited the old penny arcade.
Things we learnt today:
- ostriches voluntarily gave up the ability to fly
- waltzers in the dark aren’t very good if they don’t spin
- you can’t have enough piratical adventures
It’s not been a spectacular summer weatherwise, has it? Then again, at least it hasn’t snowed. Well, not outside anyway.
In Tamworth, however, it snows every day at the Snowdome.
I’ve just got back from there after a spectacular tobogganing session this evening.
Courtesy of some rather nifty controls, the toboggans were steerable and brakeable (but where’s the fun in that?) down the length of the real proper cold snowified slope … hopefully slowing to a graceful stop at the bottom.
A bargain at just £8 for the half hour session - especially since we only shared it with 10 others instead of the usual 120 session capacity!
I went to see Knocked Up last night, without many expectations above it being a bit of a girly flick (I wanted to see Rush Hour 3, but that’ll have to be another time now). How wrong was I?!
Knocked Up revolves around a girl and a bloke who meet in a club one night and end up sleeping together. Eight weeks later, the bloke gets a phone call from the girl … she’s pregnant. Not wanting to be a total arse, the guy decides they should try and make a go of it. Cue all the getting-to-know-you absurdities, misunderstandings and associated goings on and you pretty much have the rest of the movie.
It may be a little coarse for some tastes, but the balance between chick-flick romance and gross-out movie fart jokes is about right to make it bearable for both sexes. As with most of these kinds of film, a lot of the story is predictable but nevertheless entertaining. The rest of the audience last night certainly enjoyed it too.
Not content with controlling a large portion of Staffordshire’s tourist dollars, Alton Towers are now looking to control the weather too. Apparently they’re looking at a technique originally developed in Communist Russia that aims to prevent it raining.
Rain-seeding involves firing silver iodide into clouds in a bid to make them empty over an unimportant area (Stafford? ;-)).
In addition to Russia, China is a big fan of the process and are due to use it to ensure a dry and pollution free Olympic Games in Beijing next summer.
However, I doubt residents of Stoke-on-Trent will be so excited when their town gets turned into Soak-on-Trent.
Last night’s slot on Mainstage at Greenbelt was headlined by Delirious?, following on from the slightly wacky Duke Special who turned out to be quite good too.
It’s got to be at least a decade since I first saw Delirious? in concert and they can still hold a crowd. Quite a wide ranging crowd too age-wise - all the way from 14 year olds, through those who used to be 14 year olds when they first started, to those who you wouldn’t really think were still capable of jumping quite as high as they did!
Their set was largely stuff from World Service and The Mission Bell, but there was time for the classic History Maker - does it make me old that I remember that when it was new? Martin Smith proclaimed it as the song that has never died (or maybe the song they’ve failed to kill off). Hopefully that’s how it will remain for a while yet.
Even though they began with Rain Down, the clouds luckily didn’t play ball and the evening remained dry. Highlights for me included Now Is the Time and Majesty. There were also a couple of new songs and some of the trademark taking-it-wherever-it-goes moments.
It’s been a few years since I last saw them play live, but yesterday reminded me of how good they are … and how far they’ve come since the Cutting Edge days and Littlehampton beach. It may not quite have beaten Wembley Stadium (what could?) but it was a spectacular way to end our couple of evenings at Greenbelt.
