Toms View of the World

This weekend (eventually) saw a small group of friends meet up in the Irish capital for some fairground fun, thanks to the great people at Funderland.

Due to unforseeable circumstances, the expected showpiece ride was unable to attend, however it’s place was taken at short notice with with Goetzke’s FreeFall (actually a Huss Shot-n-Drop) tower, which was giving excellent rides, as was the case with all the rides I tried throughout the event. The core list of rides was much the same as last year, including the superbly presented “Power Wave” Schwarzkopf Polyp (shown here), and the regular 2 large-ish coasters, Wild Mouse (Reverchon) and Speed Loop (Pinfari ZL42), and for the spinner fans, Extreme and TakeOff.

Speed Loop was it’s usual self - far smoother than most examples of this type of ride, but the most fun was to be had on the mouse. A huge “thank you” has to go to John and Brian at Funderland for allowing us to experience the Mouse with the “spin pin” reset in the station, to allow spinning over the entire length of the ride, rather than just on the lower half of the coaster, as it is normally operated.

Now, having had this special ride, it’s very clear to me that, in general terms, this type of generic spinning-mouse coaster could be improved if the cars unlocked on the first straight at the top after the lift, rather than on the level below - taking the bigger drops spinning was a lot of fun, and is probably the biggest single improvement that could be made to this design of ride. However I don’t know what impact (if any) it would have on the wear-and-tear on the ride, but the forces the riders are subjected to are certainly not uncomfortable, although the end result is a little more like a tracked waltzer than a coaster!

Maybe Reverchon/Zamperla should offer options on the design as to exactly where the spinning gets unlocked…

Just to say, if you seen one of these Mouse coasters at your local fair, please do not annoy the operators by requesting such a ride.

As has been the case in previous years, the hospitality shown to us by Funderland is incredible, and if things come to pass, next year could be even better…

(thanks to Richard Bannister for organising our trip again, and for the photo gallery of this years fair on themeparks.ie - I didn’t have my camera with me this time, so there’s a lot of links to his gallery!)

This is the first of a couple of posts relating to the Funderland Dublin trip. We’d been planning this weekend in Dublin, pretty much since the last one - however this is not the post about the fair… that will come later.

This post relates to the fact that our schedule had us (well, James and myself anyway) flying from Bristol to Dublin on Friday 5th and returning today…

Unfortunately, there appears to be a problem with Bristol’s runway in wet weather… this problem resulted in our outbound Aer Lingus flight being cancelled. After we’d already checked in. And gone “airside”…

We only knew this ‘cos we spotted it on one of the screens, there was no announcement about it, no-one from Aer Lingus attempted to inform us - we had to go hunting for information.

Eventually our 1445 flight from Bristol was confirmed as being replaced by an 1845 flight. From Heathrow. About 150 miles away. So 3 hours on a coach later (including a frankly brilliant announcement from the driver, who very much got into the spirit of the event), we are promptly de-coached at Arrivals…

This is your captain speaking, thank you for joining this service travelling to London Heathrow today. We will be cruising at an average speed of 62 miles per hour at an altitude of approximately 6 and a half feet. Once we’re outside the 3 mile perimiter, I’ll be turning the autopilot on, and will come round with the duty free

Having muddled our way round to Departures, with noone from Aer Lingus at all around to tell us where to go and exactly what to do with our useless Bristol Airport boarding passes, we finally checked in for our flight.

Of course, the stories of planes “skating across” Bristol’s runway did not leave us feeling confident about our return journey either - however that was also cancelled (which when we went to the Aer Lingus information desk at Dublin airport this morning came as a surprise to them - they didn’t know the big departures display said that!) - it was not cancelled, despite what the screens were saying - it had been rerouted. To Cardiff. Where I live. So we flew to Cardiff, got a chartered coach to Bristol, I then collected my car, and drove back again.