Sorry to bump this thread on quite a random tangent, but I was just thinking about Fantasy Island and I’d be intrigued to know people’s thoughts.
After discovering earlier today that Oakwood is shut in the week in May that my family and I are going to Pembrokeshire, I was mulling over the idea of potentially taking myself to a UK park once I finish university. And I was wondering about Fantasy Island, as it’s probably the most noteworthy UK park I haven’t visited, particularly in terms of coaster selection.
So I was hoping to ask; is Fantasy Island worth a long trip? What is it actually like?
I know about Odyssey and Millennium (indeed, these are probably the park’s main draws for me), but I’ll confess to not being the most clued up on the rest of the offering. I gather that it’s become a bit of a revolving door of Mellors’ travelling ride portfolio in recent years, and I’ll confess that the sort of “travelling fair” type look of the place aside from Odyssey and Millennium is one of the things that puts me off travelling a long way out of my way for it. There’s not anything wrong with a fair-type vibe per se, but travelling fair-type rides have never really compelled me to travel long distances, for the most part. If I want a travelling fair-type experience, I can go somewhere far more local to my Gloucestershire location like Brean or Barry Island.
In terms of how long Fantasy Island would take for me to get to; by train (my likely mode of transport), the trip from my local station to Skegness is around 5.5 hours (albeit with only one change, in Nottingham, so not too bad in terms of complexity!), so my total round trip would be 11 hours. My return train ticket cost would probably be knocking on triple figures, and due to the distance, I would probably stay somewhere overnight so that I could have a vaguely substantial visit to Fantasy Island.
For those who’ve visited, is the park worth a visit if you’ve never been? Is it worth a long trip from far away in its own right? As I’ve said, it’s probably the most noteworthy UK park I’ve never visited, and Odyssey and Millennium are certainly substantial-looking coasters, but the rest of the offering aside from that has always looked like “Brean Theme Park: Lincolnshire Edition”, and it does seem like a long way to travel if Odyssey and Millennium are the only worthwhile draws. I absolutely accept, though, that there could be more to Fantasy Island than meets the eye seeing as I’ve never been, and I absolutely accept that my non-visitor’s perception of it being mostly like a permanent funfair could be a low blow on it.
Is Fantasy Island worth a long trip in its own right, in you guys’ view?