CoasterCrazy
Giga Poster
Just when we all though we’d broken the back of another off-season, you-know-what hit, closing parks worldwide and grinding updates to an unexpected halt. So, to keep us all going, I've decided to dust off some memories and finally write up a trip report from last summer. I know I haven’t been active on here for a while, but hopefully I can provide some of the wholesome coaster content we’ve all been missing over the last few months. Hope you’re all keeping well during these challenging times.
We set off last August, a time when the UK was still in the EU, everyone had enough toilet roll and the only eyesight tests being conducted in Barnard Castle were by Specsavers. Oh, and for more context, West Coast Racers was still 4 months from opening. But more importantly, me and some mates from home decided to go on a 5-park cred run across Denmark and Sweden. Staying in hostels along the way, this was our itinerary (spoilers, obviously):
6th August: Fly over to Aarhus
7th August: Exploring Aarhus
8th August: Tivoli Friheden
9th August: Djurs Sommerland
10th August: Travel and night out in Copenhagen
11th August: Bakken
12th August: Tivoli Gardens
13th August: Exploring Copenhagen, train to Gothenburg
14th August: Liseberg Day 1
15th August: Liseberg Day 1 1/2 and flight home
By some absolute miracle, the weather (mostly) held every day we visited a park and tipped it down every day we didn't. Even better, every cred was open and we ended the trip with an impressive +26! What a time to be alive.
I’ll try and update this thread regularly, so if it helps, you can pretend it’s happening live? I’m not doing this completely from memory, I wrote notes just after the trip, but I may a bit hazy on some details as a result of my ridiculous tardiness. I’m not sure why it took me quite so long to write this all up – but here I am anyway, and I hope you can all enjoy reading this.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Part 1: Tivoli Friheden (8th August 2019)
It's important to clarify at this point that although my friends love coasters, they weren't (yet) goons. So before we flew out, I duly did my duty to the enthusiast world and introduced them to the terms "creds", "+1" and even "credit whore", which they were about to become. I ended up shamelessly showing them "that Coasterforce video":
Thankfully none of them ever chose tea, so it’s safe to say they all passed the test.
After landing, we checked into our hostel and spent the rest of the day exploring central Aarhus (particularly the bars). It's nothing spectacular, but it's a very pleasant city!
It's full of little cobbled streets like this!
Because every city needs one of these:
There was this fab little rooftop bar which offered some beautiful views of the city:
The modern art museum was (obviously) funky:
Then there was this absolute monstrosity:
"Boy" (see real human in the background for scale!)
Absolutely terrifying, definitely has gollum/smeagol vibes?
From our hostel downtown, we were able to walk half an hour or so down to the first park of the trip - Tivoli Friheden. I hadn't heard particularly great things about this place, but decided to do it for the creds and as a warm up for the rest of the parks. With the park bring fairly empty , we ended up having a great time and easily managed to spend the whole day there. Was it a world-class theme park? No. But did we have a great time? Yep!
Something tells me we wouldn’t have enjoyed this park nearly as much had we done it right at the end of the trip, but it was a good day nonetheless.
I'm also going to shamelessly plug my YouTube videos here, but I've got loads of embarrassing photos and video screen grabs to share too. Here's a music video for the park:
For our first ride of the trip, we decided to start in the deep end with one of the most intense coasters known to man:
Dragen (Tiny Pinfari thing): +1
Surprisingly not even the worst coaster of the trip. The only standout feature was this surprisingly violent airtime hill hidden at the end of the layout, which was hilarious given the hideous lack of legroom.
The first of 26 corny cred selfies of the trip then:
Decided to give their flagship coaster, Cobra, a try next:
Offride video:
Nerdy selfie:
Given the history of this coaster (it derailed shortly after opening and no more models were ever sold), I braced myself for the worst. Thankfully, it was relatively painless and genuinely enjoyable! Although slower, it was much smoother than the customary SLC – less hang and bang, more hang and rattle gently? This was largely due to the design of the trains, which featured some of the comfiest seats I’ve ever seen on a coaster and unoffensive OSTRs. The seats were basically gaming chairs.
Despite the obvious initial engineering flaw, I actually think this is a very well-designed coaster. For a ride with such a small footprint, particularly as an invert, this pint-sized coaster punches well above its weight. I mean, how on Earth did they manage to fit a cobra roll into a ride that’s not even 70ft tall? There are some great positive forces on the immelman and the entrance to the helix. The short trains give it that nice, snappy feel. My only major gripes with the ride are the shuffling in the cobra roll and the way the pacing completely dies after the first half of the helix. It’s actually reasonably intense and If it wasn’t for the negative press from the derailment, I’d imagine we’d have seen quite a few of these pop up at smaller parks.
Due to the small size of the trains, it's actually got quite a kick to it! And there's still a bit of a whip in the back.
The world's smallest cobra roll?
By this point it's absolutely CRAWLING!
These sound barriers are incredibly annoying for photography - but I guess they do the trick? They give the rides a little bit of extra character too. They seem a bit excessive - perhaps they exist solely to appease planning boards?
Next up, Tyfonen:
The proof(ish):
It's a middle-of-the-road reverchon spinner. Pretty smooth and a good amount of spinning. Enough said!
All things considered, they're decent fun.
Not to be outdone by the "mouse in a box" Dark Knight coasters, Tivoli Friheden presents a "mouse in half a transparent plexiglass box"?
Did I mention the cute boating lake?
When it's your turn to come in, your number lights up, but I imagine you could easily stay out for longer if you wanted to!
We then headed over to Bisværmen (“The Bees”):
Whatever that Bee's on, I want it!
Somehow my first SBF Visa spinner (maybe that’s a good thing?). Think we all know what they’re like by now. Some nice theming on this installation though.
+1 Obtained
I hadn’t realised just how tiny the park was! But it was dense. There’s also this weird section of the park to the East with just a scattering of family flats which are very easy to miss. It’s probably big enough for a medium-sized thrill coaster (a GG Woodie like Wood Express would definitely fit, but what do I know?)
There are several fab flat rides at the park too:
Hjertekig is an RES drop tower which is apparently over 200ft tall! This is almost certainly the most impressive ride at the park and ended up being the best drop tower on the trip! The drop is properly stomach-lurching and the minimalistic lap bar restraints make it even better. The ride provides some nice views over the city and runs in two distinct modes – observation tower and drop tower, both of which feature a good amount of rotation at the top. It doesn’t quite it offer the same sensation of speed as other larger towers (coughcough AtmosFear), but is undoubtedly the most forceful tower I’ve done!
So much exposure with these restraints!
Yeah, 200ft is about right...
There was also this infernal contraption, Pegasus:
Whoever designed this ride and its crazily long extended cycle is sick in the head, but if I’m honest I quite enjoyed it! It’s comically nauseating fun. It’s closed now, and whilst I’m glad I managed to ride it, I wouldn’t really want to give it another go. The new ride looks like a worthy replacement though:
It's like they looked at Pegasus and said, how can we make an even better torture machine?
Rest in peace, pieces, or perhaps a Scandinavian fair circuit?
Sommerluglen is the park’s Gerstlauer Sky Racer, like a Sky roller just without the elevation change. I utterly failed to spin this one though! Fortunately, I got my revenge later in the trip…
There were several rain spells during the day, but because the weather changes so rapidly, rain generally passes very quickly without spoiling your day! We decided to whore their Triotech shooters during the downpours, particularly their funky haunted house. It's a classic old school shooter with quirky dark ride section punctuated with the sudden appearance of 5D screens. Obviously, it was Zombies. Some of the props felt pretty low budget, but they certainly made the best of the resources available to them.
We managed to get ourselves onto the daily leaderboard, but couldn't get anywhere near the bloody kid with virtually all of the all-time top scores! Although apparently, he's at the park every week to maintain his status, so hats off to him?
Until next time kiddo...
And no, we didn’t do it (sorry). Kinda wished we had now, but Scandinavia is so expensive! Looked ****ing terrifying though.
Hilariously, the junior pirate ship was somehow better than the adult one. And of course, we were sad enough to embarrass ourselves on all the kiddie rides! Happy to report that we resoundingly beat the kids at all the interactive ones (phew).
So overall thoughts about the park then? Not world-beating by any means, but there are a couple of absolute gems in this tiny park, particularly their Sky Tower and drop tower. Cobra was surprisingly good too and the property has its quirks. If you judge it as a park for locals rather than tourists, then it's actually rather good. Massively helped that the park was dead though!
Score sheet:
Dragen X 2
Cobra X 5
Tyfonen X 2
The bees X 2
Haunted House X >10
Thanks for reading, and REMAIN INDOORS
Next stop: Djurs Sommerland
We set off last August, a time when the UK was still in the EU, everyone had enough toilet roll and the only eyesight tests being conducted in Barnard Castle were by Specsavers. Oh, and for more context, West Coast Racers was still 4 months from opening. But more importantly, me and some mates from home decided to go on a 5-park cred run across Denmark and Sweden. Staying in hostels along the way, this was our itinerary (spoilers, obviously):
6th August: Fly over to Aarhus
7th August: Exploring Aarhus
8th August: Tivoli Friheden
9th August: Djurs Sommerland
10th August: Travel and night out in Copenhagen
11th August: Bakken
12th August: Tivoli Gardens
13th August: Exploring Copenhagen, train to Gothenburg
14th August: Liseberg Day 1
15th August: Liseberg Day 1 1/2 and flight home
By some absolute miracle, the weather (mostly) held every day we visited a park and tipped it down every day we didn't. Even better, every cred was open and we ended the trip with an impressive +26! What a time to be alive.
I’ll try and update this thread regularly, so if it helps, you can pretend it’s happening live? I’m not doing this completely from memory, I wrote notes just after the trip, but I may a bit hazy on some details as a result of my ridiculous tardiness. I’m not sure why it took me quite so long to write this all up – but here I am anyway, and I hope you can all enjoy reading this.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Part 1: Tivoli Friheden (8th August 2019)
It's important to clarify at this point that although my friends love coasters, they weren't (yet) goons. So before we flew out, I duly did my duty to the enthusiast world and introduced them to the terms "creds", "+1" and even "credit whore", which they were about to become. I ended up shamelessly showing them "that Coasterforce video":
Thankfully none of them ever chose tea, so it’s safe to say they all passed the test.
After landing, we checked into our hostel and spent the rest of the day exploring central Aarhus (particularly the bars). It's nothing spectacular, but it's a very pleasant city!
It's full of little cobbled streets like this!
Because every city needs one of these:
There was this fab little rooftop bar which offered some beautiful views of the city:
The modern art museum was (obviously) funky:
Then there was this absolute monstrosity:
"Boy" (see real human in the background for scale!)
Absolutely terrifying, definitely has gollum/smeagol vibes?
From our hostel downtown, we were able to walk half an hour or so down to the first park of the trip - Tivoli Friheden. I hadn't heard particularly great things about this place, but decided to do it for the creds and as a warm up for the rest of the parks. With the park bring fairly empty , we ended up having a great time and easily managed to spend the whole day there. Was it a world-class theme park? No. But did we have a great time? Yep!
Something tells me we wouldn’t have enjoyed this park nearly as much had we done it right at the end of the trip, but it was a good day nonetheless.
I'm also going to shamelessly plug my YouTube videos here, but I've got loads of embarrassing photos and video screen grabs to share too. Here's a music video for the park:
For our first ride of the trip, we decided to start in the deep end with one of the most intense coasters known to man:
Dragen (Tiny Pinfari thing): +1
Surprisingly not even the worst coaster of the trip. The only standout feature was this surprisingly violent airtime hill hidden at the end of the layout, which was hilarious given the hideous lack of legroom.
The first of 26 corny cred selfies of the trip then:
Decided to give their flagship coaster, Cobra, a try next:
Offride video:
Nerdy selfie:
Given the history of this coaster (it derailed shortly after opening and no more models were ever sold), I braced myself for the worst. Thankfully, it was relatively painless and genuinely enjoyable! Although slower, it was much smoother than the customary SLC – less hang and bang, more hang and rattle gently? This was largely due to the design of the trains, which featured some of the comfiest seats I’ve ever seen on a coaster and unoffensive OSTRs. The seats were basically gaming chairs.
Despite the obvious initial engineering flaw, I actually think this is a very well-designed coaster. For a ride with such a small footprint, particularly as an invert, this pint-sized coaster punches well above its weight. I mean, how on Earth did they manage to fit a cobra roll into a ride that’s not even 70ft tall? There are some great positive forces on the immelman and the entrance to the helix. The short trains give it that nice, snappy feel. My only major gripes with the ride are the shuffling in the cobra roll and the way the pacing completely dies after the first half of the helix. It’s actually reasonably intense and If it wasn’t for the negative press from the derailment, I’d imagine we’d have seen quite a few of these pop up at smaller parks.
Due to the small size of the trains, it's actually got quite a kick to it! And there's still a bit of a whip in the back.
The world's smallest cobra roll?
By this point it's absolutely CRAWLING!
These sound barriers are incredibly annoying for photography - but I guess they do the trick? They give the rides a little bit of extra character too. They seem a bit excessive - perhaps they exist solely to appease planning boards?
Next up, Tyfonen:
The proof(ish):
It's a middle-of-the-road reverchon spinner. Pretty smooth and a good amount of spinning. Enough said!
All things considered, they're decent fun.
Not to be outdone by the "mouse in a box" Dark Knight coasters, Tivoli Friheden presents a "mouse in half a transparent plexiglass box"?
Did I mention the cute boating lake?
When it's your turn to come in, your number lights up, but I imagine you could easily stay out for longer if you wanted to!
We then headed over to Bisværmen (“The Bees”):
Whatever that Bee's on, I want it!
Somehow my first SBF Visa spinner (maybe that’s a good thing?). Think we all know what they’re like by now. Some nice theming on this installation though.
+1 Obtained
I hadn’t realised just how tiny the park was! But it was dense. There’s also this weird section of the park to the East with just a scattering of family flats which are very easy to miss. It’s probably big enough for a medium-sized thrill coaster (a GG Woodie like Wood Express would definitely fit, but what do I know?)
There are several fab flat rides at the park too:
Hjertekig is an RES drop tower which is apparently over 200ft tall! This is almost certainly the most impressive ride at the park and ended up being the best drop tower on the trip! The drop is properly stomach-lurching and the minimalistic lap bar restraints make it even better. The ride provides some nice views over the city and runs in two distinct modes – observation tower and drop tower, both of which feature a good amount of rotation at the top. It doesn’t quite it offer the same sensation of speed as other larger towers (coughcough AtmosFear), but is undoubtedly the most forceful tower I’ve done!
So much exposure with these restraints!
Yeah, 200ft is about right...
There was also this infernal contraption, Pegasus:
Whoever designed this ride and its crazily long extended cycle is sick in the head, but if I’m honest I quite enjoyed it! It’s comically nauseating fun. It’s closed now, and whilst I’m glad I managed to ride it, I wouldn’t really want to give it another go. The new ride looks like a worthy replacement though:
It's like they looked at Pegasus and said, how can we make an even better torture machine?
Rest in peace, pieces, or perhaps a Scandinavian fair circuit?
Sommerluglen is the park’s Gerstlauer Sky Racer, like a Sky roller just without the elevation change. I utterly failed to spin this one though! Fortunately, I got my revenge later in the trip…
There were several rain spells during the day, but because the weather changes so rapidly, rain generally passes very quickly without spoiling your day! We decided to whore their Triotech shooters during the downpours, particularly their funky haunted house. It's a classic old school shooter with quirky dark ride section punctuated with the sudden appearance of 5D screens. Obviously, it was Zombies. Some of the props felt pretty low budget, but they certainly made the best of the resources available to them.
We managed to get ourselves onto the daily leaderboard, but couldn't get anywhere near the bloody kid with virtually all of the all-time top scores! Although apparently, he's at the park every week to maintain his status, so hats off to him?
Until next time kiddo...
And no, we didn’t do it (sorry). Kinda wished we had now, but Scandinavia is so expensive! Looked ****ing terrifying though.
Hilariously, the junior pirate ship was somehow better than the adult one. And of course, we were sad enough to embarrass ourselves on all the kiddie rides! Happy to report that we resoundingly beat the kids at all the interactive ones (phew).
So overall thoughts about the park then? Not world-beating by any means, but there are a couple of absolute gems in this tiny park, particularly their Sky Tower and drop tower. Cobra was surprisingly good too and the property has its quirks. If you judge it as a park for locals rather than tourists, then it's actually rather good. Massively helped that the park was dead though!
Score sheet:
Dragen X 2
Cobra X 5
Tyfonen X 2
The bees X 2
Haunted House X >10
Thanks for reading, and REMAIN INDOORS
Next stop: Djurs Sommerland
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