Oktoberfest, Skyline, Europa and Steinwasen parks plus..

Nimmykins · Oktoberfest, Skyline, Europa and Steinwasen parks plus..

Many months ago Alan Chilvers started planning a trip to Oktoberfest, to experience the delights of leiderhosen, serving wenches and the numerous rides in the centre of Munich.

In the end 17 RCCGB members joined him on a merry whirl around Germany from Thursday, September 27 until Sunday, September 30, taking in the festival, three theme parks and an unexpected extra.

We flew into Zurich and set off on a lengthy drive across Switzerland, through Austria, and up to Munich. Eager to experience the delights of Oktoberfest, we all dumped our bags at our respective hotels and headed into the city.

What a feast of delights. I didn't expect to see quite so many men wearing leiderhosen, but it was definitely the masuline costume of choice - matched with a cardigan and shirt. For the girls it was the wenches outfit with pinny. Some more wench like, while others just stuck a pinny on their normal clothes.

The first thing you could see when heading to the plaza where the festival takes place, was the Star Flyer. The huge chairplanes which pull riders up as high as a drop tower.
The quality of the rides was phenominal, with two topspins, amazing ghost trains with actors working inside, Flying Circus, an amusing helter skelter where you're dragged up a conveyor belt and four rollercoasters.
Our first coaster was an indoor spinner with an huge Valhalla style water feature on the front. I can't remember its name, but it began with 'H'. It was a thrilling ride with wonderful light effects inside. Quite amazing considering this was a travelling piece of kit.
Then on to Olympic Looper, a fantastic Schwartzkopf ride with terrific airtime and a brilliant ride experience. Eurostar, the inverted travelling coaster required a defensive riding position, but it was alright. There was also a pair of dualling Wild Mouse coasters, temping the counters to ride both sides.

Friday was Skyline Park, just outside Munich, where we were joined by the Coaster Police.
Skyline has a Maurer Sohen x-car ball coaster, as well as a 'wildcat' style ride, two butterfly coasters, an unusual inverted coaster with a gondola underneath and a space themed powered coaster.
What made this park particularly enjoyable were the self-operating rides and vast numbers of human powered pieces of play equipment. Having expected to spend a few hours only at this park, we enjoyed a full day (sharing the park with a couple and two other families).
I would certainly recommend it to everyone and recommend the unusual drop tower ride.

We had a long drive to get to Europa Park, as there's a whole range of mountains and the Black Forest between it and Skyline. Just ask Alan about cycle paths. It was exciting to see the lights of Europa Park in the distance, and a pleasant evening of beer and schnapps was enjoyed once we reached our hotel. Some brains were a bit fragile in the morning, but most of us made it to the park by 10.30am.

Dressed for Hallowe'en, Europa Park looked impressive. There must have been at least 500,000 pumpkins and squashes piled around the park. When we arrived the queues were heavy on Silver Star and Euro Sat, however, once people had spread themselves around the park the lines soon went down.
New rides: Atlantis Splash was a fun water coaster, and pretty much a walk on and Pegasus was also great.
I would recommend taking a ride on the observation tower as it gives a great view of the park and the surrounding landscape.
The pirate themed water ride was phenominal. It's obviously very well maintained.
As well as taking in the coasters, my boyfriend Paul and I do enjoy a kiddie ride or two. We were joined by Beaker and Helen P on Ciao Bambini. I'm really hoping my footage of their hand dance through the ride will come out. It's very similar to Magic Mountain at Blackpool.
The jungle boat ride was another well-maintained attraction with some fun features.
Europa Park is definitely somewhere I'd want to visit again and would recommend it to everyone. (Same goes for Phantasialand).

The following day we headed through the Black Forest to Steinwasen Park. It was pretty thrilling getting there through the mountains, as there were quite a few hairpin bends. Once there we were once again delighted with the park.
Set in stunning forest with a host of wildlife, Steinwasen Park also has some great rides.
For those who like something gentle there's a Black Forest themed scene ride. There was a terrifically fast motorised bobsled, and a fun little powered coaster.
The most amazing rides were the spinning 'rapids' with a great lift-hill. We also had a fair number of repeat rides on the toboggan, which was about three times longer than Oakwood's.
We finished off our morning with a walk through the wildlife area and across the suspension bridge. I'm not a fan, but managed quite well until people started shaking it.

At the park entrance was a leaflet for the Hasenhorn Coaster and we could see video of this huge ride which was only a few miles down the road, so one scenic drive through the Black Forest later, and we were there.
The cablecar journey up the mountainside was pretty long, and as the lads had gone ahead, we had the delight of seeing them merge into a big lump of riders about half way down.
When we got to the top the queue didn't seem too big, but turned out to be an hour long as the cars were sent off in batches of six (to stop too much clogging up.)
Once strapped in and on it was an amazingly fast ride, but still took a fair while to get down the mountainside as it's almost three kilometres long.

We then had to hot-foot it to Zurich, but we all made our flights.

It was a fantastic weekend.

Check out:
http://www.skylinepark.de
http://www.europapark.de
http://www.steinwasenpark.de
http://www.hasenhorn-rodelbahn.de

Kirk

Nice report Smile

any photos to follow?

Nimmykins

nemesis scribe

Excellent report Nimmy!! Very Happy

Grrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr so jealous you have done Olympia Looping!! Maybe i will plan to do it next year????

Skyline sounds a nice park though.

Europa is a lovely park and they certainly do like their pumpkins around halloween time haha. Was Eurosat covered in a big pumpkin sheet type thing??? It was last year and very impressive.

Someone should ban pappa smurf from being allowed to drive, especially at his age haha.

Drei bier bitte!!!!!!!!

Herr ADski Cool

Magic

Olympia Looping is now one of my favourite coasters. It is way better than just about every coaster in UK parks, and it's a travelling coaster. How they move that thing I don't know. Shame we won't see any more of these built.

Hollenblitz was the indoor travelling coaster. It use to be called Star World but had a retheme and a new outside drop set up last winter. It is a great ride with some brilliant effects.

Flying Circus was a mental spin n spew. I'd heard so many reports of coaster fans being sick on it that I was worried but had to ride it cos it's so legendary. I'm so glad I did because it rocked. There were some amazing g's on it. Think of the kind of forces you get on a Maelstrom when you spin in the direction of travel and then imagine that sensation lasting 3 times longer and that's Flying Circus.

Skyline really was a gem of a park with hilarity from start to finish. There must have been more staff in the park than public. One of my highlights was the go kart dodgems. It was literally a go kart style track with electric dodgem cars, where it had been raining, despite having a roof, sections of the track were wet, mainly on the bends, and when you tried to turn you just went straight into the barrier, closely followed by the rest of the cars. We were spinning each other out with the slightest taps. As there was no one else around the ride op just left us going and didn't stop the ride till we'd all got bored and got off, we even did pit stops with driver swaps.

Something Nimmy neglected to say about the Steinwassen toboggans was how fast they were or that at least 3 of us fell off. My knee is scuffed to bits and I know John Friend has a lovely black scuff mark all along his jeans. I'd hate to do these in the rain.

Nimmykins

Nimmykins

http://www.facebook.com/video/video.php?v=6629161539 - I've put my video up

Coaster Chick

I agree with all the above - thanks Alan for a great weekend. I was an Oktoberfest Virgin and like Nimmie I was really amazed at the amount of lederhosen!!!!! And the size of the beer tents!!! Surprised

Europa was awesome - some UK theme parks could learn a lot from this park. The Halloween theme was amazing especially the big pumpkin cover over Eurosat. There can't be any real pumpkins left in Europe let alone Germany.

Skyline was great fun indeed and we all got very silly!! I loved the water coasters that bounced into the water. Very Happy

I also did my first butterfly coaster and first alpine coaster on this trip. Very Happy

A good trip was had by all!

smiler

Flying circus is that the one that came to the Dome back for the winter wounderland. great report there and love to try out some of those coasters to. I know that southport are to get a traverling ride thats never been in the UK before so be interesting what they bring over hope its something special like those kind of rides.