Dec. 30 – Wrapped up my thoughts on Chessington World of Adventures, which is fairly straightforward as far as reviews go but hopefully still worth a glance. Thorpe Park should be published on the first of the new year… all that’s left to do is to write it.
Dec. 28 – Got my computer back and am now ready to start rolling out new reviews at least every other day, if not even faster. I’ll start with one of the final non-coaster reports detailing a weekend spent in Ireland, where I voluntarily stared death in the face, an incredibly stupid thing to do.
Dec. 23 – Wishing you all a Merry Christmas and a Happy Holidays (and thank God I’m an atheist). Legoland Windsor is now published, go read it. I’d like to keep the updates from the United Kingdom really fast and steady through the rest of the winter break period (until Jan. 13th for me), although as I write this my laptop’s screen is currently hanging off at an angle not intended by the manufacturer so I’ll be bringing it into the shop tomorrow and who knows how soon I’ll be able to get it back.
Dec. 19 – I’ve decided to use this break between European chapters to get caught up on two other essays I’ve been working on that will finally give that Philosophy header on the upper right some content of its own. The first is my attempts to explain where I see a fundamental lack in today’s theme parks, one that cannot be fixed with even the largest of Imagineering budgets, as well as explaining how this problem can be overcome. It should at least give some perspective on why defenses that a theme park has “really great attention to detail” are of little importance to me. The second is a reflection on my travels in Europe I had originally written for a my school’s study abroad essay contest with a $1000 prize. I didn’t win… apparently it wasn’t the suger-coated, “smiles and triumph”, “let’s utilize 3rd world poverty to treat our 1st world liberal neuroses”-type story they were cherry-picking winners for internal promotional purposes. That, or employing themes from writers like Albert Camus and 20th century existentialism just aren’t good enough for the selection committee’s lofty standards. (You can tell I’m not bitter, right?) Anyway, I know large quantities of barren text are not the most fun thing to read, but if you can get around to them sometime over the next month, I think these entries might be some of the most rewarding on this site so far. Or maybe I’m just getting really self-indulgent.
Dec. 10 – No surprise I’m once again late (blame it on finals approaching next week) but I have the final updates from Spain ready along with some other new stuff. Besides the Monte Igueldo story below, there’s also a Spain Appendix detailing a post-park travel saga. Additionally a new chapter index for the United Kingdom has been created giving a good idea of what stories are to come next (next week: Legoland Windsor). But perhaps most exciting is that I am finally ready to announce where my 2011 travels will take me… take a look on the brand new 2011 Reviews page to find out. Needless to say I’m excited! But for now, please read one of my most memorable and personal reflections from my European travels by clicking below. Thank you.
Nov. 28 – Two parts for the price of one, which, as always, are free anyway! Click below for tales of mystery and enchantment from the city of Barcelona. Only one last update and then I’ll be moving on to Great Britain. The final story from Spain will probably become my most memorable from my entire European travels.
Nov. 21 – Part two of two of PortAventura is now served up. Still on track to finish Spain by the end of November, upon which I will share an announcement concerning what future 2011 updates shall bring.
Nov. 15 – Finally reached a bit of clear patch; I cannot wait for Thanksgiving break. PortAventura (Part 1) is live. Readers familiar with Nietzschean interpretations of Greek myths should find extra delight in today’s update.
Nov. 6 – I should apologize right now because my musings on Valencia, Spain got pretty weird even by the existing standards set by this site. Well, now you just have to read it to see what I’m talking about, don’t you?
Nov. 2 – School is really starting to suck right now. Hard. I finally got Terra Mítica written and published, no idea when the next ones will be. I’m still clinging to the hope that I can finish Spain by the end of November.
Oct. 18 – Finished Parque Warner Madrid, and now all three parts from my time in Madrid are finished. Hope to have Terra Mítica and Valencia done after next weekend but I might be too busy to commit to that.
Edit 2: School is really starting to suck right now. Hard. I have Terra Mítica written, it will be published in the next day or two as soon as I find a bit more free time. Sorry about the delays.
Oct. 14 – Parque de Atracciones de Madrid is now up. Go read it to get all the juicy details about my forays into the underground world of coaster prostitution. Parque Warner Madrid this weekend.
Oct. 11 – I didn’t want to fall behind on my existentialism readings so writing updates took second priority last weekend. Still I had time to get the first part of Madrid finished (banner below), as well as make a new links page for 2010 Spain (most of the links go to the Flickr photo page at the moment). Plus I’ve penned about 90% of Parque de Atracciones de Madrid, so that will hopefully be up in the next day or two… or three.
Oct. 02 – The last report from Italy is now complete! Zoosafari Fasanolandia awaits your review via the banner below. POV footage of all four roller coasters is included. Next weekend will see the publication of tales from Madrid, España, as well as her Parque de Atracciones del Same Town.
Sept. 29 – Reports from Miragica and the seaside town of Bari (which includes a great photo slideshow of the old city at night) are online. I’m getting close to wrapping up the Italian reviews, only one park left and then I’ll start publishing the ten-part story from Spain. Check back for the next update this weekend!
Sept. 19 – It took a week longer than I wanted but it also turned out better (or at least longer) than I originally hoped; Mirabilandia is now posted for reading. The last three parts of Italy are much simpler and should be posted on a faster schedule over the next week or two. Some other housekeeping notes, the 2010 page has been cleaned up into subsections, and I have a small batch of Michigan’s Adventure photos from last weekend on Flickr. Thanks for reading and (maybe) commenting!
Sept. 08 – Now I have both coasters and culture to share. Gardaland and my visit to Venice and the surrounding Veneto region are both posted below. The ‘culture one’ I think is just as if not more entertaining, partly because I got to visit my Italian relatives while there which provided some fun stories and anecdotes. Hopefully I can squeeze in a Mirabilandia update this weekend, but I’ve also got to get a trip to Michigan’s Adventure in on their last day of operation this Sunday otherwise this will be my first year since 1994 that I haven’t gone.
Aug. 27 – No coasters, just culture. (Actually there is one coaster if you read closely). While I watch my page views counter skyrocket as everyone rushes to click on the links below, I’m going to try to roll out a new review every weekend from now on as the fall semester is starting in a couple days. Who knows if I’ll be able to keep up with that schedule as I’m taking 17 credits and trying to find a job as well, but by my calculations I should have everything I wanted to write about Europe finished by next January at that rate.
Aug. 19 – The final chapter (and appendix) of the saga of spring break 2010 is complete. Next will be more tales from Italia, although it might be a few extra days before the first is posted as I need to get some, erm, applications submitted to my university. More news later, for now, peace.
Aug. 15 – Still cranking the stories and reviews out, Europa Park (Part One) has been posted online.
Aug. 13 – Holiday Park is now posted. I just have two parts to Europa Park then I’ll be done with the whole spring break story from last March. Maybe that can be completed before a full week has gone by?
Aug. 08 – Keeping a fast pace to make up for lost time, I got another review written on Erlebnispark Tripsdrill which should be worth a read (and maybe a comment, too). Next will be Holiday Park, which I think has a certain roller coaster worth extra special attention. You know which one I’m talking about. Keep checking back over the next few days so you don’t miss it!
Aug. 06 – Okay, I know what you’re thinking, “why would I ever want to read that long of a report on some random Eastern European park I couldn’t care less about?” Good question, and the reason you should want to is because there’s a pretty interesting story in there which so far makes today’s update stand alone from all the others posted on this site so far. You’ll just have to read it to find out for yourself. Oh, there’s also quite a bit of cultural information on Budapest and Hungary which you may or may not want to skip to get to the fun part.
Aug. 02 – Good news, today is my birthday! So yeah, I kind of got stuck writing a final take-home paper from my summer study program and then got caught up in our local film festival so I didn’t have time to work on new updates. Budapest and Vidámpark have still yet to be penned, but I did get around to posting both some movie reviews from my four days at the Edinburgh International Film Fest last June (Day 1; Day 2; Day 3; Day 4) and also uploaded my journal from the month or so I spent in London, found via the link below. Not really coaster related, but whatever, I dedicated myself to get it all written… eventually.
July 15 – Back with two updates from Austria, the first about the city of Vienna (sorry, no coaster content), the next about that infamous Viennese institution, the Wiener Prater. Notice the banner promises the inclusion of an economic analysis… sounds like fun, right!? Hope to be back again with another review from Budapest before too much more additional time slips us by. For now, enjoy.
July 08 – 5 1/2 months. 11 countries. 35 parks. 144 roller coasters. And it’s all finally over. Now that I have some moments where I’m not running down narrow cobbled streets to catch a train I’m about to miss I think it’s about time to start updating this site again, don’t you agree? Good; the link to the long-delayed part two of my Disneyland Paris report is below. It will probably be awhile before I’m all caught up on every park and ride I visited (believe me, they’re all coming, and I don’t intend to leave out any details despite the enormous quantity of material I have to go through) so I might take this moment to share a couple post-trip thoughts. I got to do quite nearly everything I planned to do, which is ridiculous considering how over ambitious these plans were to begin with. Even when things didn’t go according to plan (which happened a lot) there is nothing I would change about my time in Europe… well, maybe except for the fact that I ran some 2k over budget, but that’s just being nitpicky. Really, my only regret is that it’s all over, but I’m definitely glad to be back home in Michigan. Anyway, with any luck I can have one or two updates to share per week so you can start checking this space on a semi-frequent basis again. Enjoy the review below, Vienna and the Wiener Prater will be next.
May 25 – Now this update is coming to you from London, England. Again, no time to be writing new reviews, but I’ve already got a start to my collection of UK parks with Legoland Windsor this past weekend and semi-planned stops by Thorpe, Chessington and Oakwood over the upcoming weekends. I managed to do everything I wanted to in Spain save for a perpetually shuttered Stunt Fall, and that entire photo set is now uploaded online for your viewing pleasure: 2010 Spain on Flickr. While that collection is now static, another collection for the UK may prove much more dynamic in the near future: 2010 United Kingdom / Ireland on Flickr. That’s all for now; again, it will probably be another month before I can have time to write any new content, but the photos on Flickr should with any luck tell some stories on their own that will be elaborated in full on a later date.
May 14 – This update is coming to you from Barcelona, Spain. I’ve had a run-in with bad weather today and stuck indoors, but I’ve already had a chance to visit Parque de Atracciones de Madrid, Parque Warner Madrid, Terra Mítica and Port Aventura over the course of the last week. Coming next should hopefully be Tibidabo and Parque de Atracciones Monte Igueldo, although I’ve had a slight setback with the discovery that Tibidabo isn’t open on Fridays as I had originally been planning on, so hopefully a change of plans to accommodate a couple hours at Tibidabo on Saturday will work, although this also forces me to move Monte Igueldo to only an hour on Sunday morning before I have to leave to catch my plane to London. Once I’m in the UK, I again won’t have much time to be writing reviews, although there should be lots of photo updates to check out on Flickr, if I can ever find a decent internet connection.
Apr. 22 – Well, I missed that deadline, and I still don’t have anything to show, and I can’t say I will in the near future either since things are going to be pretty fast-paced for me starting from now all the way to the end of June. I’ll try to get Disney wrapped up sometime soon but after that I might have to put new updates on hold for a little while and just focus on doing the actual traveling part of the process. However, I do at least have plenty of photos to share from Gardaland and Mirabilandia from this past weekend, and Zoosafari Fasanolandia and Miragica are coming next weekend. I also finally put some content under the essentials page because that blank ‘coming soon’ message was driving me crazy. Lastly, an iSpeed banner at the top has been added to the mix, as have lots of cool story banners for coming 2010 reviews on that page.
Apr. 11 – Two days! Only two days since the last update and I’m back with another, the Walt Disney Studios Park. My hope is I can find the time to finish the last part of Disneyland before the end of the week, after which point I’m leaving for a four day weekend trip to Venice and northern Italy, with stops at Gardaland and Mirabilandia.
Apr. 09 – Not even a week has gone by since the last update and I already have another one to roll out, this one on Disneyland Paris (the first part, anyway). I wonder if I can speed the pace up even further? We shall see.
Apr. 04 – So much has happened since the last update it’s hard to know where to begin. Most importantly, the first part of what will become a long-ongoing series of reports on parks across Europe has been posted, click the link below. I’ve also got over 2000+ photos uploaded from Paris, Vienna, Budapest and Germany that are worth checking out here. I even had time to toss in two new headers for the randomized mix at the top. Okay, maybe that’s not a huge amount of stuff to see just on the website, but through living it, it’s been an expedition. Or maybe that’s just my excuse for not finishing the photos on the Voyage (see below!) Until next time…
Mar. 19 – Raising the levels of self-indulgence to ever greater heights, the Voyage is now done… all 10,000-plus words of it. Well, not quite. I ran out of time to format the photos in the second half of the article so that side’s a bit bare at the moment, but since it’ll be over two weeks before I have time to work on this site again I didn’t want to keep everyone waiting that long just for more photos when I’ve already been promising Voyage would be soon for the last two or three months. So click on the icon to the right to give it a look. This also marks the last of the 2009 reviews, and looking forward to 2010 I can say there’s a lot of exciting stuff ahead (see two updates beneath this one to get an idea of what I’ll be starting about 12 hours from now). Good times.
Mar. 09 – Top Thrill Dragster is now posted, click the banner below. I rather think this is one of the better reviews on this site so far, more concise and also deserving of the title “roller coaster philosophy”… Kant’s Critique of Judgment is directly discussed as part of the analysis. Meanwhile, the very latest the Voyage will be uploaded is early morning on Friday the 19th. That evening I leave from Rome for Paris for the first part of my twelve day spring break I detailed in the update below including nine days at seven different parks, and I need to have all of my planned 2009 reviews finished as I will be swamped with new material afterward. Also be sure to check out the photo collections I’ve gathered so far from Italy on Flickr (non-coaster related).
Feb. 22 – Wow, that was a long time between updates! Thankfully I haven’t disappeared completely and have been working hard on new content; you may have noticed a text-only version of the Raptor analysis has been posted for a couple weeks. I sat down this weekend and finally sorted out the whole problem with articles displaying photos incorrectly depending on the browser you’re using by simply going through each individual page and reformatting all of the photos so every page should display properly in both Firefox and Internet Explorer now. I also wrapped up a review on two more of the Point’s attractions, Wicked Twister and Mantis. As for Voyage… I really shouldn’t be surprised that a ride like that is going to take me longer to adequately analyze. I’ve got about eight pages done on it so far and need another five at least before it’s publishable. I’m still mostly on schedule, as I only needed to finish both Voyage and Top Thrill Dragster before I’ll tour (and subsequently start reviewing) my first European parks once spring break rolls around in late March. The plans are ambitious enough: five days in Paris, three of which will be at Disney with a stop at Jardin d’Acclimatation, then flying over to Vienna for three days including time spent at the Wiener Prater, and then wrapping up with a rail tour in Germany that will involve a day at Tripsdrill, a day at Holiday Park, and then finishing with two at Europa Park. I’m excited, although I’m not sure if my bank account will be after it’s all over.
Jan. 19 – Quick update, I am moved in comfortably in Rome and am having a great time exploring the city; too bad my proficiency in the language is still mostly limited only to ‘ciao’, ‘buon giorno’ and ‘grazie’. I have a lot of walking to do daily to get to and from my apartment to classes, but it’s a great walk (it literally is a short cut to walk through St. Peter’s Square every day!) For anyone interested I have a growing collection of photographs you can view on Flickr. I also wanted to mention I noticed some big formatting problems with most of the pages that suddenly developed; turns out it had something to do with the most recent update of Firefox. I downgraded to v.3.0.17 and that seemed to fix everything, but it still doesn’t solve the problems for other Firefox users (I don’t expect anyone out there would want to do the same just for the sake of getting all the pictures to line up correctly and the top menu bar to have the proper text). However both time and internet connectivity are limited here so I’ll just have to wait and see if Firefox releases any more updates to fix these problems since I really can’t deal with reformatting all my pages (besides the fact I have pretty poor tech skills and wouldn’t know what to do anyway). In the meantime, if it’s a problem for other people I guess I can advise to use IE (haven’t tested Chrome and don’t know what Safari looks like for Mac users either).
P.S. I really really really want to finish Voyage soon but unfortunately I have had zero energy left after my days to get it done.
Jan. 10 – Well that took about a week longer than I wanted. Not much of a surprise given how many movies I gave myself to review. The next update you see here will be for Voyage, which hopefully won’t take too long but it will be hard to say with any certainty when I’ll have time to devote to the site any more in light of the fact that I’ll be living in Europe with limited internet access for the next six months starting on Tuesday. Holy crap.
Jan. 01 – Big update today. Seeing as we are now exactly one decade since the turn of the millennium, a Millennium Force analysis seemed particularly fitting to me. Not only that, Raven and Legend
have been uploaded. They actually have been up for several days, but are now complete with photographs. Plus I am very close to getting a long article about the 21 best movies of the last decade published as well, check back before the weekend for an update. That’s not all, a short film based on a screenplay I made a few years ago is also online, Criminals Anonymous.
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