witchfinder
Giga Poster
This August I was really hoping to have rearranged my trip to the USA from last year and be taking in such delights as Cedar Point and Dollywood. Sadly Joe Biden is being a stubborn old coot so new cred desperation means I have to resort to s**t like this instead… 
Browsing Coast2Coaster and a bit of Googling, I came up with this two-and-a-half-hour road trip that took in 6 parks and a potential 10 new creds (all of them awful). With some of the Welsh fun fairs opening until 9pm, there was the potential to do all this in one crazy day!
I suggested the idea to some other CF members, and to my surprise I found 9 other desperate fools that also wanted to do this trip, and even more surprisingly we agreed a date that we could all do it on – that date was Saturday 14th August!
And so it was that I found myself in @Howie’s Jag along with @DelPiero, travelling to Southport Pleasureland on an overcast British summer day for an 11am start. Could we hit all six parks in one day? Would we get spited? Read on to find out!
Bit early for the Halloween branding isn’t it?
Kicking off at Pleasureland, we met the rest of the group (bar one) and headed for our first cred of the day. At the moment it costs 24 quid to get into the park and have unlimited rides, which is great if you want to spend a few hours making the most of it, but not so good if you really just want the creds. As a result we spent almost 2 hours here as we all agreed we needed at least 6 or 7 rides to get our money’s worth (ish).
Good or bad memories?
Anyway, first cred was the new for 2021 (at this park) Rocket, which I took exactly one photo of. This Pinfari family cred relocated from Gulliver’s Warrington had been given a nice new paint job and a fancy sign, and definitely shows that the park is looking to move away from temporary travelling rides. The ride itself was smooth and mildly thrilling, easily the best quality ride at the park and roughly equivalent to a small Vekoma family coaster, so perfectly adequate for a more long-term acquisition. The seat belts in addition to lap bars were a bit unnecessary though!
Next door to Rocket was the Ghost Train, whose impressive façade hides a really crap dark ride with virtually no animatronics or sound and static scenes made from the finest Halloween stock from Home Bargains. Apparently they often have a scare actor in here, but not this day, so it was just awful.
No you won’t!
Next up it was time to ride the most extreme coaster of the trip, being the only one with an inversion – the inventively named Roller Coaster.
This Pinfari death machine was deemed so uninspiring that the park had decided to erect a large wooden screen to stop visitors seeing exactly what they were about to endure. What we endured was rattling cars, jerky transitions and uncomfortable OTSRs. I used to like these things when I was a kid!
In the first of a couple of landmarks on this trip, Roller Coaster was DelPiero’s 500th cred. Lots of people took a photo of him with his sign in front of the cred to mark the grand occasion, but I did not. Congrats anyway!
Keeping the cred train rolling (literally) our next ride was the Grand Canyon powered coaster. This was the only remaining coaster since my last visit to Southport so no new cred for me, but I still rode. The tacky theming is somewhat engaging.
Most of the group rode the horrible spinny thing next to the coaster, which I know better than to do so I took some photos. We then went into the Fun House (which was fun – obviously) and most of us rode the Frisbee. I wasn’t sure about doing this as these kind of things often make me sick, but it didn’t look too intense so I gave it a try. In the end I didn’t really enjoy it but I didn’t regret it either.
Cool. As. F**k.
Another spinny thing was ridden by some of the group so I wandered around taking some photos of the park, which has certainly improved a lot since my last visit. Some areas are quite nicely presented but the theming is very inconsistent and quite bizarre!
Time for our last cred then, and we saved the best until last - the first of several wacky worms we’d be riding that day, which is bizarrely called Apple Coaster even though there is no apple!
With all the creds done and time pressing on, a few of the group rode the Waltzers before we headed out of the park. I nipped to the loo which had a rather amusing sign.
Thoughts on Southport – as I said, it’s improved a lot in recent years but it is still pretty rough around the edges. They are obviously trying their best to transition back to a park with permanent rides and I think you can just about get your money’s worth from the £24 ticket price as long as you like flat rides. I do really hope that’s just a COVID-related measure to monitor capacity though, because if they open this new Zamperla Thunderbolt then I really don’t want to have to pay to ride everything else in a couple of years’ time!
Speaking of COVID, the park’s preventative measures were pretty much non-existent. No hand sanitiser on any of the rides, not even the Fun House which has about 1000 touch points that will have been soiled by dirty children. No social distancing. No anything really apart from the odd sign here and there. Personally I wasn’t too concerned but if that kind of thing still worries you then you might want to give the park a miss.
That’s the only ‘major’ park of the trip covered then. Everything else should be a much shorter read than the above!
After lunch we drove south for an hour, through the Mersey tunnel to New Brighton and their tiny children’s fun fair which had two new creds for 2021. We also met up with @Mysterious Sue to complete our cred hunting group of ten.
We bought a bundle of tokens between us which required some maths to work out how much everyone owed, then took our ride on the Runaway Train, a tiny oval kiddie cred which did have a bit of whip around the corners and the seats were reasonably comfortable for adult riders.
You’ll be seeing this scandalous IP theft again later in this trip report!
It was now raining fairly heavily as we boarded the park’s second cred, the unimaginatively named Family Coaster. This is a standard wacky worm layout but the vibrant blue paint job and the jolly shark train made it stand out. It also had a secret up its sleeve, as the ride is operated with the trim brakes on the drop and station disabled, which combined with the wet track made for the most thrilling wacky worm ride you can hope for, being whipped around the corner after the drop and getting the slightest pop of ejector as you barrel through the station. We all agreed it was probably the best worm ride we’d ever had!
New Brighton done, we got back on the road for the leg that would make this an international cred run, as we drove for another hour into Wales and the delightful seaside resort of Rhyl! To be fair, Rhyl seems to be undergoing some renewal with many of the decrepit old buildings being demolished and some shiny new ones going up in their place. We parked in the weird underground car park on the seafront and walked up the stairs to the underwhelming Rhyl fun fair.
Just one cred here, Nessi, which cost a very reasonable £2 to ride. Nothing special, but I’d say these Super Nessi coasters offer a slightly more exciting ride than your average wacky worm thanks to the series of helixes.
Within 30 minutes we were done in Rhyl and headed just 10 minutes down the coast to our next stop – Towyn. What can I say about Towyn? It’s best summed up by looking at this satelline view on Google maps:
https://www.google.com/maps/place/T...d22562589fa96dea!8m2!3d53.302171!4d-3.5395369
What a bizarre place, almost entirely made up of static caravans, none of which are situated in nice holiday parks but are just plonked next to each other with just enough room for a car between each one. This place doesn’t even have a nice beach, and the beach has to be accessed via a bridge over a railway line, so I have no idea why this place became a holiday destination!
We parked up at Tir Prince Fun Park, the first of two fairs we’d be visiting in this godforsaken town.
Towyn’s No. 1 fun fair (of two!)
To be fair, that was accurate, as this was a pretty substantial fair with a good selection of rides, some of which were nicely presented. Most of which I didn’t get photos of! They also had reasonably good COVID prevention, measures in place with hand sanitiser available at most rides. Southport take note!
Once again we grabbed a bulk buy of tokens, all added to a single “Fun Card” which had to be laboriously scanned ten times over to get us all on each ride. First up was Batman, the dubiously-licensed Fabbri spinner, which had the distinction of being Howie’s 400th cred! (Again, no photo from me)
This was without doubt the spinniest spinning coaster I’ve ever been on. It was already spinning before it reached the top of its split level lift hill, and by the end of the ride we must have been spun around a good 50 times, if not more. If I’d been riding alone it would have been horrible, but with a group of enthusiasts it was hilarious and a lot more fun.
The second cred here was the Crazy Caterpillar, the third and final wacky worm of the day. It was better than the Southport one but nowhere near as good as New Brighton’s shark.
At least it had an apple though!
A short walk down the road was Knightly’s fun fair, which is accessed via a footbridge over the aforementioned railway line. Just one cred here, the Twin Spiral Dragon, which didn’t look very operational as we approached the park.
We wandered over to check it out and it was running, so we went and charged up yet another Fun Card with the required number of tokens and returned to the cred to find it had broken down just before reaching the station.
Bollocks
We hung around for 15 minutes, with some of the gang riding the KMG Freak Out, during which we kept an eye on the cred, but after seeing the ops try and send it round and it set off a load of sparks and roll back, it was clear that this was our first spite of the weekend.
Annoyingly we had a fun card filled with credits we didn’t need now, so we used them up riding the Dodgems before leaving this disappointing park and making our way back to our cars. All that faffing about had meant it was now approaching 7:30 and with Llandudno Pier’s rides closing at 8pm we had no chance of finishing the six-park run in one day, so we headed to our extortionately priced Premier Inn near Bangor (another consequence of COVID) where we had a meal, booze and a lot of laughs.
We reconvened on Sunday morning and after breakfast we made the short trip to Greenwood Forest Park, where @SilverArrow had arranged for us to ride the Green Dragon coaster free of charge.
We were met by a slightly bemused member of staff at the entrance and escorted to the cred, given an overview of how this unique ‘people powered’ coaster worked and then got our ride. Without doubt this was the most interesting and unique cred of the trip and not a bad ride either, as it negotiated the hilly terrain with a couple of helixes (helices?)
Since we’d got in for free, some of us bought the on-ride photo for a reasonable £2 to give something back to the park, and after thanking our hosts we jumped back in our cars to make the 35 minute journey to the final park on our trip and the one we missed from the previous day – Llandudno Pier.
Llandudno really is rather lovely compared to the scabby towns just 30 minutes up the coast like Rhyl and Towyn, and with some sunny weather for the first time all weekend this was the perfect place to end our trip. The cred was another Runaway Train, identical in layout and dodgy IP theft to the New Brighton one but with a more vibrant blue and red paint job on the track. Being built on the pier and elevated slightly made it a far more enjoyable experience though.
With the cred run complete, we spent a bit of time wandering up and down the pier and then a lot of time trying to find somewhere that could accommodate a group of ten people for lunch, eventually settling for an Irish Bar with a fiery landlady, slow food service and several meals of questionable quality.
We finally said our goodbyes and hit the road home around 4pm after a really fun weekend. The creds were almost universally crap, but the company was great and there’s no better way to do these rides than with a group of like-minded enthusiasts that you can share the apathy with! With just one spite I ended up with +10 creds, putting me at 295 overall, which means that whatever trip I do next will almost certainly get me up to 300!
Thanks to everyone that came on the trip and made it so much fun, but special thanks to @Howie for doing all the driving, @DelPiero for helping navigate and some hilarious conversations, @MouseAT for sharing his hotel room and @Libby_Liz for saving me from certain spider death...
Browsing Coast2Coaster and a bit of Googling, I came up with this two-and-a-half-hour road trip that took in 6 parks and a potential 10 new creds (all of them awful). With some of the Welsh fun fairs opening until 9pm, there was the potential to do all this in one crazy day!
I suggested the idea to some other CF members, and to my surprise I found 9 other desperate fools that also wanted to do this trip, and even more surprisingly we agreed a date that we could all do it on – that date was Saturday 14th August!
And so it was that I found myself in @Howie’s Jag along with @DelPiero, travelling to Southport Pleasureland on an overcast British summer day for an 11am start. Could we hit all six parks in one day? Would we get spited? Read on to find out!
Bit early for the Halloween branding isn’t it?
Kicking off at Pleasureland, we met the rest of the group (bar one) and headed for our first cred of the day. At the moment it costs 24 quid to get into the park and have unlimited rides, which is great if you want to spend a few hours making the most of it, but not so good if you really just want the creds. As a result we spent almost 2 hours here as we all agreed we needed at least 6 or 7 rides to get our money’s worth (ish).
Good or bad memories?
Anyway, first cred was the new for 2021 (at this park) Rocket, which I took exactly one photo of. This Pinfari family cred relocated from Gulliver’s Warrington had been given a nice new paint job and a fancy sign, and definitely shows that the park is looking to move away from temporary travelling rides. The ride itself was smooth and mildly thrilling, easily the best quality ride at the park and roughly equivalent to a small Vekoma family coaster, so perfectly adequate for a more long-term acquisition. The seat belts in addition to lap bars were a bit unnecessary though!
Next door to Rocket was the Ghost Train, whose impressive façade hides a really crap dark ride with virtually no animatronics or sound and static scenes made from the finest Halloween stock from Home Bargains. Apparently they often have a scare actor in here, but not this day, so it was just awful.
No you won’t!
Next up it was time to ride the most extreme coaster of the trip, being the only one with an inversion – the inventively named Roller Coaster.
This Pinfari death machine was deemed so uninspiring that the park had decided to erect a large wooden screen to stop visitors seeing exactly what they were about to endure. What we endured was rattling cars, jerky transitions and uncomfortable OTSRs. I used to like these things when I was a kid!
In the first of a couple of landmarks on this trip, Roller Coaster was DelPiero’s 500th cred. Lots of people took a photo of him with his sign in front of the cred to mark the grand occasion, but I did not. Congrats anyway!
Keeping the cred train rolling (literally) our next ride was the Grand Canyon powered coaster. This was the only remaining coaster since my last visit to Southport so no new cred for me, but I still rode. The tacky theming is somewhat engaging.
Most of the group rode the horrible spinny thing next to the coaster, which I know better than to do so I took some photos. We then went into the Fun House (which was fun – obviously) and most of us rode the Frisbee. I wasn’t sure about doing this as these kind of things often make me sick, but it didn’t look too intense so I gave it a try. In the end I didn’t really enjoy it but I didn’t regret it either.
Cool. As. F**k.
Another spinny thing was ridden by some of the group so I wandered around taking some photos of the park, which has certainly improved a lot since my last visit. Some areas are quite nicely presented but the theming is very inconsistent and quite bizarre!
Time for our last cred then, and we saved the best until last - the first of several wacky worms we’d be riding that day, which is bizarrely called Apple Coaster even though there is no apple!
With all the creds done and time pressing on, a few of the group rode the Waltzers before we headed out of the park. I nipped to the loo which had a rather amusing sign.
Thoughts on Southport – as I said, it’s improved a lot in recent years but it is still pretty rough around the edges. They are obviously trying their best to transition back to a park with permanent rides and I think you can just about get your money’s worth from the £24 ticket price as long as you like flat rides. I do really hope that’s just a COVID-related measure to monitor capacity though, because if they open this new Zamperla Thunderbolt then I really don’t want to have to pay to ride everything else in a couple of years’ time!
Speaking of COVID, the park’s preventative measures were pretty much non-existent. No hand sanitiser on any of the rides, not even the Fun House which has about 1000 touch points that will have been soiled by dirty children. No social distancing. No anything really apart from the odd sign here and there. Personally I wasn’t too concerned but if that kind of thing still worries you then you might want to give the park a miss.
That’s the only ‘major’ park of the trip covered then. Everything else should be a much shorter read than the above!
After lunch we drove south for an hour, through the Mersey tunnel to New Brighton and their tiny children’s fun fair which had two new creds for 2021. We also met up with @Mysterious Sue to complete our cred hunting group of ten.
We bought a bundle of tokens between us which required some maths to work out how much everyone owed, then took our ride on the Runaway Train, a tiny oval kiddie cred which did have a bit of whip around the corners and the seats were reasonably comfortable for adult riders.
You’ll be seeing this scandalous IP theft again later in this trip report!
It was now raining fairly heavily as we boarded the park’s second cred, the unimaginatively named Family Coaster. This is a standard wacky worm layout but the vibrant blue paint job and the jolly shark train made it stand out. It also had a secret up its sleeve, as the ride is operated with the trim brakes on the drop and station disabled, which combined with the wet track made for the most thrilling wacky worm ride you can hope for, being whipped around the corner after the drop and getting the slightest pop of ejector as you barrel through the station. We all agreed it was probably the best worm ride we’d ever had!
New Brighton done, we got back on the road for the leg that would make this an international cred run, as we drove for another hour into Wales and the delightful seaside resort of Rhyl! To be fair, Rhyl seems to be undergoing some renewal with many of the decrepit old buildings being demolished and some shiny new ones going up in their place. We parked in the weird underground car park on the seafront and walked up the stairs to the underwhelming Rhyl fun fair.
Just one cred here, Nessi, which cost a very reasonable £2 to ride. Nothing special, but I’d say these Super Nessi coasters offer a slightly more exciting ride than your average wacky worm thanks to the series of helixes.
Within 30 minutes we were done in Rhyl and headed just 10 minutes down the coast to our next stop – Towyn. What can I say about Towyn? It’s best summed up by looking at this satelline view on Google maps:
https://www.google.com/maps/place/T...d22562589fa96dea!8m2!3d53.302171!4d-3.5395369
What a bizarre place, almost entirely made up of static caravans, none of which are situated in nice holiday parks but are just plonked next to each other with just enough room for a car between each one. This place doesn’t even have a nice beach, and the beach has to be accessed via a bridge over a railway line, so I have no idea why this place became a holiday destination!
We parked up at Tir Prince Fun Park, the first of two fairs we’d be visiting in this godforsaken town.
Towyn’s No. 1 fun fair (of two!)
To be fair, that was accurate, as this was a pretty substantial fair with a good selection of rides, some of which were nicely presented. Most of which I didn’t get photos of! They also had reasonably good COVID prevention, measures in place with hand sanitiser available at most rides. Southport take note!
Once again we grabbed a bulk buy of tokens, all added to a single “Fun Card” which had to be laboriously scanned ten times over to get us all on each ride. First up was Batman, the dubiously-licensed Fabbri spinner, which had the distinction of being Howie’s 400th cred! (Again, no photo from me)
This was without doubt the spinniest spinning coaster I’ve ever been on. It was already spinning before it reached the top of its split level lift hill, and by the end of the ride we must have been spun around a good 50 times, if not more. If I’d been riding alone it would have been horrible, but with a group of enthusiasts it was hilarious and a lot more fun.
The second cred here was the Crazy Caterpillar, the third and final wacky worm of the day. It was better than the Southport one but nowhere near as good as New Brighton’s shark.
At least it had an apple though!
A short walk down the road was Knightly’s fun fair, which is accessed via a footbridge over the aforementioned railway line. Just one cred here, the Twin Spiral Dragon, which didn’t look very operational as we approached the park.
We wandered over to check it out and it was running, so we went and charged up yet another Fun Card with the required number of tokens and returned to the cred to find it had broken down just before reaching the station.
Bollocks
We hung around for 15 minutes, with some of the gang riding the KMG Freak Out, during which we kept an eye on the cred, but after seeing the ops try and send it round and it set off a load of sparks and roll back, it was clear that this was our first spite of the weekend.
Annoyingly we had a fun card filled with credits we didn’t need now, so we used them up riding the Dodgems before leaving this disappointing park and making our way back to our cars. All that faffing about had meant it was now approaching 7:30 and with Llandudno Pier’s rides closing at 8pm we had no chance of finishing the six-park run in one day, so we headed to our extortionately priced Premier Inn near Bangor (another consequence of COVID) where we had a meal, booze and a lot of laughs.
We reconvened on Sunday morning and after breakfast we made the short trip to Greenwood Forest Park, where @SilverArrow had arranged for us to ride the Green Dragon coaster free of charge.
We were met by a slightly bemused member of staff at the entrance and escorted to the cred, given an overview of how this unique ‘people powered’ coaster worked and then got our ride. Without doubt this was the most interesting and unique cred of the trip and not a bad ride either, as it negotiated the hilly terrain with a couple of helixes (helices?)
Since we’d got in for free, some of us bought the on-ride photo for a reasonable £2 to give something back to the park, and after thanking our hosts we jumped back in our cars to make the 35 minute journey to the final park on our trip and the one we missed from the previous day – Llandudno Pier.
Llandudno really is rather lovely compared to the scabby towns just 30 minutes up the coast like Rhyl and Towyn, and with some sunny weather for the first time all weekend this was the perfect place to end our trip. The cred was another Runaway Train, identical in layout and dodgy IP theft to the New Brighton one but with a more vibrant blue and red paint job on the track. Being built on the pier and elevated slightly made it a far more enjoyable experience though.
With the cred run complete, we spent a bit of time wandering up and down the pier and then a lot of time trying to find somewhere that could accommodate a group of ten people for lunch, eventually settling for an Irish Bar with a fiery landlady, slow food service and several meals of questionable quality.
We finally said our goodbyes and hit the road home around 4pm after a really fun weekend. The creds were almost universally crap, but the company was great and there’s no better way to do these rides than with a group of like-minded enthusiasts that you can share the apathy with! With just one spite I ended up with +10 creds, putting me at 295 overall, which means that whatever trip I do next will almost certainly get me up to 300!
Thanks to everyone that came on the trip and made it so much fun, but special thanks to @Howie for doing all the driving, @DelPiero for helping navigate and some hilarious conversations, @MouseAT for sharing his hotel room and @Libby_Liz for saving me from certain spider death...
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