James Salter

Apostrophe Rage

Wow, look - James has written a post!

That’s not all I’ve been writing. Take look at the trip reports from last weekend’s ECC AGM and a Sunday morning trip to Chessington.

Fish and Dips and the Mystery of the Missing Wheel

I�ve been to Adventure Island a few times in the past, notably both in the warmth of summer and in the bitter cold of late January. The park is one of those places that seems to guarantee a nice day out regardless of temperature, but even so I set off on Saturday around the M25 (after what happened last time I thought it a safer bet than attempting the more usual �three trains and the underground South West Trains would like to apologise for the delay to this service and any inconvenience this may cause but don�t blame us because we�re really a bus company and we never wanted to run a train service anyway� approach) with trepidation after seeing the BBC forecasting rain, possible thunderstorms and cold winds.

It was a nice surprise then to arrive on the seafront in blazing sunshine. I do like surprises.

It was not a nice surprise to leave my car and find a ticket machine that demanded more than the contents of my wallet coinage in exchange for a ticket. I do not like surprises.

After considerable rummaging around the doors, the back seat and all those little drawers dotted around my car to find the correct volume of fiscal objects, I was able to buy off the money munching monster without having to walk along the beach selling Kiss-Me-Quick hats hastily made out of pages torn from the AA�s 1987 Road Atlas.

Various club members had already arrived at one of the multitude of Adventure Island entrances and were discussing the various amounts they had paid to park in various locations around Southend. It seems the best deal was �5 for the day. Pah! My parking space had a beautiful sea view for just �2 extra.

Continue reading ‘Fish and Dips and the Mystery of the Missing Wheel’

An Island Adventure

Trains, dear friends, have both good points and bad points. Train tracks on the other hand only have points. But look, I�m barely a sentence in and I�ve already got sidetracked. Look � tracks � I�ve done it again. Where is this leading you may ask? Aside from the obvious answer of absolutely nowhere just like the majority of my trip report blog posts, I�m vaguely attempting to set the scene. Let�s start again. 3, 2, 1, focus:

With the majority of theme parks in the UK closed for the winter, there isn�t a great deal of choice of places to visit at the moment. Thus, when you get the offer of a trip to Adventure Island, you don�t say no, even if it does mean being in close proximity to 14 year old Mr and Ms Undesirable of Essex and their two kids.

As when I�ve visited Southend before, on Saturday I once again elected to take the train. In theory it works out very slightly quicker, cheaper, and far less stressful than battling half way around the M25 on a Saturday morning. That, though, doesn�t account for South West Trains and their inability to understand that they are supposed to run a train service.

I arrived at the station and purchased my ticket ready to board the 08:34 to Waterloo. The flashy new matrix displays showed the train was expected at 08:36. Hardly remarkable, even when this was revised to 08:38. Even when this changed to �delayed� it wasn�t all that unusual, but a fellow comrade, nee passenger, felt it necessary to press the big green information button. This caused a sound remarkably similar to the beep a lorry makes when it�s reversing to radiate from the information point for the next few minutes. I took a step back, just in case it decided to detach itself from the wall and reverse into the waiting room.

Eventually someone answered, sounding as though they�d just been woken up and really didn�t have any idea where they were, their voice broadcast loud enough for the old deaf lady who lives in the woods to hear. As they struggled to grasp the abstract details of their surrounding reality, Comrade Button Pusher asked what time the next train was due. Answer: �8:34 sir.� Fine, apart from it was already 8:40. �Oh, but it�s delayed.� (Thank goodness � I thought I�d forgotten how the concept of time worked for a moment). �There�s a train before it broken down at Effingham, but it�ll be there in a couple of minutes.�

That was that. Wisely at that point he hung up (or went back to sleep). If he hadn�t, he�d have got a barrage of abuse from the passengers gathering around Comrade BP. I wonder how many more hours he spent getting woken up and telling passengers their train would be along in a couple of minutes, hoping it would magically jump the tracks over the broken down train and continue on its merry way. I�m sure the Fat Controller would never allow this to happen on the Island of Sodor.

The rest of the journey was, relatively speaking, uneventful following a trip-saving lift from Dad�s taxi service to a station that one could actually catch a train from. Along with the rest of the carriage, I was thoroughly entertained for most of the distance from London to Southend by a man talking loudly to �Julie� on his mobile. His call started at Fenchurch Street with him telling Julie that he had to go and he�d speak to her later. He and Julie then proceeded to break up, make up, sort out their love life, holiday and who was going to Tesco, up until he got off the train 45 minutes later.

As it turned out I arrived in Southend only a few minutes after I�d originally planned, foiling South West Trains� plans of forcing everybody to become hermits. After the adventurous journey I was half expecting to find the park had detached itself from the mainland but, indifferently, Adventure Island was still under the pier where it always is.

Adventure Island, SouthendI met up with John, Paul, Ringo … no, sorry. I met up with John, Paul and Lewis for the inaugural trip of the LCC (Lewis� Coaster Club) and we went in to buy our Winter Wonder Wristbands for the bargain price of �11, even though the posters outside were hinting they were available for the less reasonable �77. After poking our arms into her kiosk, Paul and I eventually managed to persuade the lady in the window that we really would rather buy a wristband than spend the rest of the morning helping her with her crossword.
How much?If Carlsberg made rollercoasters, they�d do a deal with Guinness and probably have the rollercoasters with the longest trains in the world. Since they don�t, that honour goes to Green Scream. When I�ve visited in the past I�ve always been forced to sit in the front of the train, presumably to ensure the big green friendly (screaming?) monster would make it around the track. Adventure Island were taking no chances on Saturday though, having filled the front few cars with sand bags. That didn�t guarantee anything though, meaning the train got stuck on the brake run as we waited to board.A quick recap: it was still only late morning and I�d already encountered Comrade BP, sleepy information guy, Julie�s boyfriend and crossword lady, so what happened next really shouldn�t have been that surprising.

The ride op � obviously having inhaled a bit too much smoke the last time the local pagans celebrated their bi-annual pier burning festival � started near-simultaneous whistling and calling to the train: �Come on, get a move on!� I wonder if the train was called Julie? It wouldn�t surprise me. On this occasion though, she wasn�t budging. At the risk of taking a metaphor too far, an engineer had to come to disengage her and ride her back into the station before we could take our turn.

As ever, the ride is hindered at every drop and turn by the length of the train, meaning the bits which you�d expect to be fast are slow and the bits you�d expect to be slow are just odd. Nevertheless, I think JP was overawed. Maybe.

John and LewisWe trailed through Beelzee Bob�s and swung on Archelon before making our way to the other side of the pier. Wait, can you smell smoke?Welcome to the other side. Here we rode the park�s other two coasters, Barnstormer and my favourite, Mini Mighty Mega. Or is that Mighty Mega Mini? Or Mighty Mini Mega? Or Mega Mighty Mini? Whatever.

As I mentioned at the beginning (blimey, that was a long time ago), we don�t have many year-round theme parks in the UK. Elsewhere in the world, places like Disneyland are open every day. Rides cannot be operated constantly without the need for mechanical attention and refurbishment. For Disney, this means shutting down the ride for a few weeks while their engineers swarm all over it with their oil cans and imagineers swarm all over it with their paint cans.

Obviously fearful of the chavs who might swarm all them with their coke cans, Adventure Island take a different approach to ride rehabs. Rather than shutting the ride down completely, they just remove bits to work on. This led to Mega Mini Mighty (anag, 3 words) missing its back few rows of seats and, more interestingly, the park owning the world�s only Move It 16 (a Move It 24 less 2 arms).

Mini Mighty Mega, sans seatsLunch beckoned at the McDonalds with special walls, so we headed up the highstreet via the new cliff-side lifts. To me, one important component of a lift is the cable. Apparently, Southend town planners do not feel the same way. They believe powering the lift up and down by way of three groaning motors is much safer and more effective.
Checking for firesFollowing the eternal wait in Europe�s slowest moving fast food queue, we were back in the park. Somehow I found myself on my first shot/drop/generally-very-scary tower on the year. With minimal persuasion. I think the crazy people on the journey must have got to me. Bloody stupid horrible scary drop towers.
We found ducks!Next, because it was such a cold day John and Lewis thought it would be a thoroughly good idea for us all to ride the log flume. It wasn�t.Adventure Golf proved a much better suggestion and it gave me the chance to find something else I�m not good at. Mind you, I don�t think any of us will be making it to the Rider Cup anytime soon. Making it anywhere near the green would be an achievement, with the possible exception of Lewis who managed to hit the teeing-off-mat rather than the ball and still managed a hole in one. Strange powers at work I tell you. What were the final scores? Out of the four of us, Lewis came first, Paul and John were joint second. For the life of me I can�t remember where I came.

Tiger Woods Mk IIAnd so, as the setting sun of time sunk beneath the horizon of destiny, and the lift of fate whirred its way up the cliff of eternity, it was time to leave. It was undoubtedly a chilly day, but proved a good and very welcome out-of-season trip nonetheless. Thanks go to Paul and Lewis for allowing John and myself to gatecrash their traditional Adventure Island adventure.
In case you’re not having a good time - don’t worry, you can go home soonThings we learnt in Southend:

• How to make a �Y� with two arms
• Lewis is not a doughnut, but he is the only member of the club
• Paul can summon owls on command
• John can make golf balls go backwards
• It�s not a bad thing to have your chair taken away in McDonalds: eventually you�ll be rewarded with two
• I can get myself stuck in a whip
• A skateboard is properly called a disco, thus a skateboarder must be a discoer
• Northerners are defined as anybody who lives further up than Southerners

For the official, more comprehensible description of interesting events, together with associated Eastbourneist prose, take a look at trip report-master Lewis� trip report.