Did Drayton for the first time in six years yesterday (not going to count that waste of time Christmases event I made the mistake of doing a few years back), just like to share a few opinions of the place.
Park operations:
Finally found a place worse than chessington for operations. Park advertised as 10:30 opening, so we decided to wait five minutes for g-force, only for the ride op to run out and tell us that it won't be opening for 10:30. Since we had been watching shockwave testing (and g-force hadn't tested yet), we thought it might be quicker to go over to shockwave and come back to g-force later. We were greeted by another ride op, who told us shockwave will open 10 minutes late. 40 minutes later, the first train dispatched (special mention here goes to the lad in the queue who opened his bag, to have a large bottle of vodka roll out, which he insisted was water). Later, operations didn't seem to get much better, with pandemonium, the staff seemed to have absolutely no idea what they were doing, and the op on haunting was on the phone through the preshow.
The haunting
Was expecting good things, or at least decent after the refurb. Throughput was clearly not thought about when Drayton decided to put one member of staff on this ride, meaning that the queue moved once every ten or so minutes. The preshow wasn't bad, hard to see the screens but that's minor. The next preshow room was decent, went on a bit, but nice. Could have been a bit shorter, but I'm guessing that if there was more staff that this room would beto allow more groups through while one group is in the madhouse itself. As for the madhouse, Drayton have overdone the UV, and it lacked any finale like hex.
The rides
Some quite good rides here. Could have definitely sed some single rider queues as I was called forwards often for apocalypse and others. Stand out ride has got to be apocalypse, though I was impressed by maelstrom and shockwave to. Can't explain why, but the bounty is by far the most terrifying pirate ship I've been on. Left my seat several times. Ben 10 had a more powerful launch than I remember, and drunken barrels was fun. The worse rides: wild west shootout was a waste of time and pandemonium to ages to load, and the haunting was just bad.
Overall, a good day. Won't be returning for a while. Nothing to bring me back. Just hope air race is open next time
And as much as I hate to give the mail clicks, I found
this. Can't help but compare that to the woman not allowed on smiler as she had one hand. Not really news if it could have been a danger (and yesterday I did see a lot of people walk off the lift hill of stormforce 10)
