United Kingdom Appendix

London, England, UK – Wednesday, June 30th, 2010

I woke up, and it was the morning of June 30th. I held a plane ticket from London Heathrow to Chicago O’Hare departing at 9:55am on July 1st, 2010. This was what it had all been leading down towards: The Last Day. One final adventure remained within the bounds of possibility for this twenty-four hour cycle. But it wasn’t going to happen. No sprinting down hills to catch nearly missed trains, no dangling over 700 foot cliffsides, no talking my way into a free ride at a closed park, no spontaneous overnight roadtrips across an entire country, or anything else I wouldn’t have had the creativity to imagine an hour before it actually happened. My last day was set to be a period of calm reflection, silent goodbyes, and tying up a few loose ends.

I had to go to King’s Cross station to pick up a bag of checked luggage I left behind when I first set off backpacking to Adventure Island. I needed to write my dad to tell him when and where to pick me up at the airport tomorrow and what I wanted my first meal back on American soil to be. And then I needed to figure out what to do with the rest of the afternoon and evening. Not wanting to spend more money I decided to get as much remaining value from my Merlin Annual Pass as possible and would visit Madame Tussaud’s Wax Museum and The London Dungeons, neither of which I had heretofore sampled despite being a five minutes’ walk of the wax museum from classes.

It seemed a bit odd that I should indulge in such blatantly touristy sights given that I hardly considered myself the starry eyed, Hawaiian shirt wearing, fresh off the plane vacationer anymore. But it was something to do. Madame Tussaud’s main exhibits were a bit smaller than I was expecting (unlike an actual museum you’re channeled along a set pathway loop from entrance to exit, so if you skip past something near the beginning you won’t have a chance to see it later) but then at the end there were multiple extra exhibits and attractions only tangentially related to the wax museum theme that helped pad out the Tussaud’s experience into a complete one. These included a short haunted walkthrough, a large omnimover dark ride through British history (and reasonably decent, reminding me of something you’d find at Epcot), and finally the temporary add-on exhibit which for me was a Marvel comics 4D movie using a surround screen (so much expensive theater hardware wasted on such a poorly animated, corny short film). Some of the wax museum halls could get pretty crowded, however, so if you want your picture with every celebrity and historical figure (or, even moreso, want a picture of every celebrity and historical figure without anyone else in it) you might be waiting awhile. The price for a non-passholder is very steep (wouldn’t like to imagine what the crowding in the VIP Lounge would be like if it were any cheaper) so unless you’ve got lots of cash to blow and think you’d be really into the whole wax museum idea I’d recommend spending time at any number of the completely free public museums around London.

Just across on the south side of the river nearby London Bridge (not Tower Bridge, the bridge every tourist mistakes for London Bridge, which is about half a mile downriver) is the London Dungeon, where as you enter you are warmly told to have a horrible time. These aren’t actual dungeons, from the looks of it from outside it was an old warehouse converted into an elaborate group-led horror walk-through attraction with stops along at various mini-theatrical showrooms. You’re in there for the better part of an hour and the experience is varied enough that it doesn’t become too repetitive. In most cases a story (the black plague, Jack the Ripper, Sweeney Todd, etc.) is introduced by a live actor or some overheard audio, which eventually culminates in a special effect gag or ‘gotcha’ moment, and then you move on. There are some exceptions: a mirror maze which they keep you walking around in circles until the tour guide gets bored and decides to open up the exit, a long comedic skit with an 18^th century judge trying audience members for various silly crimes, a short water flume dark ride section, and a small drop tower ride as the grand finale, supposedly designed to simulate the gallows but that doesn’t play too well for anyone very familiar with this from carnival parks. The objective is to meld history with entertainment, but while it’s always clear that the Dungeon was built by entertainers and not historians most of the subject matter has little historical importance beyond its lasting legacy in pop culture urban legend anyway. It’s better priced and more likely to please the theme park fans than Madame Tussaud’s.

After the Dungeons I took for the last time one of my favorite European activities: an hours-long, rambling, city-spanning walk. I started from London Bridge crossing up to “The Monument”, over to St. Paul’s Cathedral, down Fleet Street, passing by King’s College and the Royal Courts of Justice (as well as getting a meal; I should have thought about getting a haircut there as well), continuing along The Strand up to Nelson’s Column and the National Gallery (which I’ve still yet to visit, I always got out there after opening hours), turning off through The Mall up to Buckingham Palace, doubling back along Victoria Street past some of London’s modern architecture, returning to Westminster Abbey and the Houses of Parliament, and finally crossing the Thames once more for an evening flight on the London Eye.

The return flight home felt much shorter than the way there, probably owing to flying with the time zone changes rather than against them so I would arrive the same afternoon rather than the morning of the next day… along with the fact that the flight time simply was shorter. My dad was there waiting to pick me up at O’Hare Terminal 5, where we stopped to get a deep-dish pizza at Pizzeria Due (of course that had to be my choice for my first American food, especially as I was landing in Chicago!) before starting a long drive back to northern Michigan, where I was able to share some of my favorite stories (I think the whole Monte Igueldo saga took more than an hour to relay) before falling asleep for the rest of it. We arrived around two in the morning, twenty hours since I got up in London to catch my flight. My mom woke up long enough to welcome me home and show me what had changed around the house in my absence before going back to sleep with the promise that we’d talk more tomorrow. I was still on London time so I stayed up a while later reflecting on what I had accomplished.

I never would have believed it when I first left for Rome last January, but I really did get to do nearly everything I had originally planned to see. Some of it was at great expense and much difficulty, but I didn’t miss out on a single thing that was important to me. The holes worn through my shoes (see right!) were a testament to that.

I completed two separate foreign study programs in Rome and London over a nearly five and a half month period (170 days to be exact). In total I visited eleven countries: Italy, France, Austria, Hungary, Germany, Switzerland, Spain, England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales; twelve if you count Vatican City with my daily walk across St. Peter’s Square. These provided plenty of photographic opportunities: there are currently a total of 9014 photos from Europe uploaded to my Flickr page.

Among those nations, within nine I rode a roller coaster. I visited a total of thirty-five different parks, and added 144 unique roller coasters to my list; fifteen were wooden, the remaining 129 all steel.

The tallest roller coaster I rode was Europa Park’s Silver Star at 219 feet (67 meters); the fastest was PortAventura’s Furius Baco at 84 mph (135 km/h), and the longest was Lightwater Valley’s The Ultimate at 7442 feet (2268 meters). I also did my first 8-inversion and 10-inversion roller coasters (Dragon Khan and Colossus), my first scenic railway (Hochschaubahn, Hullámvasút, Montaña Suiza, and the Great Yarmouth Roller Coaster), my first wooden wild mouse (Blackpool Pleasure Beach’s), my first Disneyland park, and, perhaps most importantly, my first Mack powered roller coaster.

On the normative side of things, my favorite roller coaster was Alton Tower’s Nemesis, followed very closely by Lightwater Valley’s The Ultimate. On the continent my top pick ended up being (probably as much to my surprise as anyone else’s) Disneyland Paris’ Space Mountain: Mission 2; runners up were Blue Fire and iSpeed (apparently I found Europe does launched coasters very well), with Oakwood’s Megafobia being my top pick for wooden coasters, followed closely by Blackpool’s Wild Mouse.

I have a harder time comparing parks because the criteria for judging one against the other varies from place to place. I enjoyed Disneyland Paris more than I would care to admit, and would call it my favorite overall theme park in Europe, followed by the smaller, more peculiar local flavors of Erlebnispark Tripsdrill and Terra Mítica (with apologies to the Europa Park and Alton Towers fans bases). Also on the continent, the Wiener Prater, Tibidabo and Monte Igueldo are the best places I visited to experience ‘European culture’ (whatever that is), although my experiences with each of these were strained by one or more factors so I’d like to return to each to get a better impression.

Judging all the parks in the UK against each other (I know a number of local readers will be looking forward to this), I again have a hard time picking one clear favorite. I might have used the criteria “which would I most want to return to in the future”, but that would fail in this case because my answer would have to be Fantasy Island, just because it was the one park where I didn’t get to ride the major roller coasters. It’s an incomplete judgment system anyway because it favors larger, more dynamic parks over smaller places that exist frozen in time. Alton Towers was, and will remain the most important park in the UK for any enthusiast to visit, but I’m not certain I would ever call it one of my personal favorites. Similar can be said about Blackpool Pleasure Beach, which I might like just a little bit more if only because there’s a wider array of attractions that you don’t need to queue for, though my opinion about the two may flip in a couple years. The London area parks were the epitome of average; still must visits especially as Thorpe begins to build a coaster collection that may eventually be recognized on an international scale, but again they’re not favorites. Ultimately (ooh, foreshadowing) my picks for my three most meaningful UK park experiences will countdown like this:

Third: Great Yarmouth Pleasure Beach (+ Joyland)

Second: Oakwood Leisure Park

First: Lightwater Valley

Take that for what you will; I would expect very few people who do a similar tour to arrive at the same conclusions.

Lastly, shortly after I returned home I compiled a chronological list of my 25 best European memories. This was much more for my own sake than anyone else’s (though in a way the same can be said for this entire website), but as long as I had it I figured I should share it.

1. First weekend in Rome: walking 6 hours around the city with Sasha, Chelsea and Jason
2. Travel to / first night in Firenze
3. An evening out at Campo dei Fiori with Kate & friends
4. Sacre Couer in the morning over Paris
5. Disneyland Paris at night with no lines
6. Sacher Torte in Vienna
7. Getting locked out of Vidampark in Budapest and talking my way in for free
8. Riding Expedition GeForce 36 times in one day
9. Guesthouse with non-English speakers; braving German, Swiss and Italian rail
10. Birthday dinner with the Fontanas / evening out with Giulia & friends
11. Walking along Bari coast and through the Old Town listening to PFM and Locanda Della Fate
12. 5 hour night walk through Rome by myself without a map
13. Superman rerides at night in the rain
14. Riding a bicycle through Barcelona after drinking a little too much Sangria, Montjuic by myself at night
15. Deciding to miss my bus to the airport so I could get a ride on the Montaña Suiza, and then having to carpool with other stranded American students from Bordeaux to Paris
16. Philosophy in the Underground, at Buckingham Palace, in St. James’ Park, and at Big Ben
17. Seeing Eric Clapton in concert, and being the only person there not really knowing who he was
18. Looking over the edge of the Cliffs of Mohar
19. Day out with Chris and Ralf, and purchasing copy of In the Court of the Crimson King on vinyl
20. Getting banned from photography at Adventure Island over suspicion of pedophilia
21. First ride on the Ultimate
22. Seeing the Illusionist at the opening night of the Edinburgh Film Festival
23. Nemesis marathoning and meeting up with Sam at Alton Towers
24. Queuing five hours for Wimbledon and watching the Soderling-Ferrer match
25. Oakwood w/ Mathew

More impressive than any individual event on this list is the sheer quantity of them. So overwhelming was it all I nearly feel as if half of the life I’ve lived so far was concentrated in that relatively short 5½ month window of time. Yet as huge of an odyssey as it was, just writing about all of it was an odyssey in its own right. It took me over a year to finish the entire European series (although there were many periods of inactivity during that time frame when I was preoccupied with other activities), which has a total of 54 separate pages, resulting in a total word count around 203,500… which is a mere 8000 words short of Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment!

Despite many pressures from school, travel and plain laziness, I’m proud to say that I don’t think I ever shorted a review’s content. Occasionally my editorial skills may have been strained from the constant pressure to churn out more pages of words every weekend resulting in some pieces that may have seemed tired or formulaic, going through the motions of explaining what I did and if I liked it without any deeper analysis, but even towards the very end I think I was always continuing to push myself as a writer to create more original ideas in my own editorial voice. (That’s not to make any boastful claims of my post-editorial skills, which as you may have noticed through my many grammatical errors, missing words, redundant vocabulary and sometimes off-the-wall sentence structures are pretty lax; a byproduct of having too much to pen in too little time.)

So that’s it. It’s over. I am done writing about Europe. (FINALLY!!!) I’m very thankful for the many people who have read my reports, even if you never commented, I appreciate that sense of validation I get with every dot on my WordPress statistics page. Hopefully I’ve shared at least one thought that has allowed you to reflect on roller coaster, theme parks, or even the world at large in a slightly new and different way. None of the reviews or opinions are to be taken as absolutes, everything I’ve learned about the world during my time in and writing about Europe is impermanent and cannot be substituted for anyone else’s lived experiences. After 200,000 words it may seem odd that I can only offer one piece of advice for my readers. Nevertheless, here it is:

With everything about the world you encounter, do so authentically.

It terrifies me to think how much farther I must go before I can do that, but even if I only took a baby step when I jumped across the Atlantic, that’s at least one more step forward. Now I wonder if I’ll be able to take another across the Pacific…

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