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What's your current coaster count?
- Thread starter Skyscraper
- Start date
Poisson
TS Member
- Favourite Ride
- The Giant Squid
Matt N
TS Member
- Favourite Ride
- Shambhala (PortAventura Park)
I agree; I really enjoy adding to my spreadsheet(s) after a park trip!Why did I think you might pipe up?
I make no apologies for my blatant spreadsheet fanboyism - I find it incredibly therapeutic and in a weird way is something to look forward to updating after a theme park trip somewhere, especially if visiting new places. Originally mine were like yours (a somewhat rudimentary list of coasters I'd ridden at different parks), but now it's just that one master spreadsheet and another one to track my individual trip ride counts, the data from which is pulled into the dashboard of the one I linked to above.
Feel free to nick anything from my sheets (ideas, formulas etc) - I spent a long time on it and it still changes from time to time. It's a good way to learn new formulas and how they work if nothing else, and I'd say it's developed skills I've been able to use at work too. I've also created stupidly detailed holiday spreadsheets too, off the back of this, which can work out all sorts, especially useful for groups of friends who are splitting costs.
I also use spreadsheets for plenty of other things too. I make one for me and my sister's combined Christmas shopping each year, and I'm also rather ashamed to admit that I have one to keep track of my university assignment grades...
Shaggy_Dog_
TS Member
- Favourite Ride
- Ride To Happiness
Question for the people that count these things, but do you find it hard to keep track of the various travelling coasters (spinners, wacky worms) on the funfair circuit? I know I’ve been on several kiddie coasters with my kids at fairs but it’s sometimes hard to know what the ride is called or who owns it so as to be able to log it if I was inclined to do so.
Alix
TS Member
- Favourite Ride
- Balder BEEP BEEP
As I’ve said elsewhere, I’m returning to coasters now my daughter is 1.4m - but when I last rode them I didn’t log anything and I’m now regretting it. I’d like to start - and I can remember some that I’ve been on (thunderlooper for example was my first “big” ride and I nearly chickened out but my dad wouldn’t let me after queuing so long 
) I know I “braved it backwards” on The Swarm on a works trip…
Does anyone have any tips/thoughts on how I could retrospectively log things? I’ve asked family to help me out with where we went and when, but other than that not sure how to work out what/how to log. E.g I know we regularly did Towers, Gullivers World & Camelot, we did Florida in 1996/7 so I remember Montu at Busch Gardens and Tower of Terror at Disney.
It’s possibly sacrilege to try and work backwards but otherwise I’ve only got about 10 which feels a bit low!
) I know I “braved it backwards” on The Swarm on a works trip… Does anyone have any tips/thoughts on how I could retrospectively log things? I’ve asked family to help me out with where we went and when, but other than that not sure how to work out what/how to log. E.g I know we regularly did Towers, Gullivers World & Camelot, we did Florida in 1996/7 so I remember Montu at Busch Gardens and Tower of Terror at Disney.
It’s possibly sacrilege to try and work backwards but otherwise I’ve only got about 10 which feels a bit low!
Skyscraper
TS Member
- Favourite Ride
- Nemesis
Yeah I use Coaster Count, it's quite easy to use.
Burbs
TS Team
- Favourite Ride
- Steel Vengeance
I started counting in 2014 and pretty much started afresh from there. I could remember pretty well what I’d done coasters wise before then with a jog of the memory through looking at a list of UK parks and which I’d visited beforehand. (Thanks to family holidays as a kid pretty much all being in the UK I ticked off a lot of smaller parks I’ve never been back to.)As I’ve said elsewhere, I’m returning to coasters now my daughter is 1.4m - but when I last rode them I didn’t log anything and I’m now regretting it. I’d like to start - and I can remember some that I’ve been on (thunderlooper for example was my first “big” ride and I nearly chickened out but my dad wouldn’t let me after queuing so long
Does anyone have any tips/thoughts on how I could retrospectively log things? I’ve asked family to help me out with where we went and when, but other than that not sure how to work out what/how to log. E.g I know we regularly did Towers, Gullivers World & Camelot, we did Florida in 1996/7 so I remember Montu at Busch Gardens and Tower of Terror at Disney.
It’s possibly sacrilege to try and work backwards but otherwise I’ve only got about 10 which feels a bit low!
So you could just pick a date to start from (e.g. when you started going to theme parks with your daughter) and just go from there, then make a note of any other rides/coasters you remember doing as and when they crop up.
Yes, it can be a bit of a nightmare, but as I don’t frequent fairs or kermises it’s not a huge issue. As others have said there’s usually info somewhere about which rides are owned by who - of course that doesn’t help if it gets sold on to someone else!
Matt N
TS Member
- Favourite Ride
- Shambhala (PortAventura Park)
This is similar to what I did. I started counting properly in 2017, and I decided to start my enthusiast record from 28th September 2013, when I first rode the 1.4m coasters at Alton Towers.So you could just pick a date to start from (e.g. when you started going to theme parks with your daughter) and just go from there, then make a note of any other rides/coasters you remember doing as and when they crop up.
I decided to exclude anything I did before then, as my memory gets a lot more hazy before that point, and I feel like going back further than 2013 would risk making things a lot more ambiguous, particularly for statistics like total number of coaster rides and total number of park visits. It would also make things very hard on Captain Coaster, where I have to rate things to say I’ve ridden them; I don’t want to assign things I don’t really remember an arbitrary rating just to say that I’ve ridden them.
At this point, the number of additions to my count would also be fairly nominal, if any at all.
I’ll admit that it’s a slightly atypical idea in hindsight, but I think I’m in a bit too deep to reverse it at this point…
Matt N
TS Member
- Favourite Ride
- Shambhala (PortAventura Park)
I have an interesting update for you all regarding my count. Well, I found it interesting, anyhow!
Anyone who's read my recent Florida trip report may remember that when I left Florida, my official coaster count was at 99. I had hoped to get that count to 100, but the closure of Tigris meant that it wasn't to be.
However, my coaster count and park visit log have only covered park visits and coaster rides after 28th September 2013, the day that I first rode the big coasters at Alton Towers and really started taking this hobby more seriously, ever since I first started trying to keep track of things. It sounds like a weird idea, but I felt that that was a good cut off point to set, as my memory of park visits and coaster rides before that was somewhat variable, and I was unable to pinpoint exact visit dates, order of first rides on coasters and such for my spreadsheet; being the slightly OCD person I am when it comes to exact ordering and dates, I was not keen to introduce that degree of uncertainty into my count and visit logs.
But today, something happened that meant that I could satisfy my own thirst for reasonable exactness in my log while also including all of the theme park visits and coaster rides I have ever taken, even those from before I was properly into theme parks. My dad found an old hard drive with pretty much every photo my parents had ever taken on it (it went all the way back to "Christmas 2004", an album containing pictures of me and my now 22 year old sister as toddlers), including a fair few pictures of some of our earliest theme park visits as a family. It was a rainy afternoon here in Gloucestershire, and I had nothing else better to do... so with the help of these pictures' metadata and our copious selection of old on-ride photos, as well as some recollections of my own from these aforementioned visits, I decided to scrap the "enthusiasm start date" I had always started my count and visit log from and try and piece together my pre-enthusiast theme park visit history so that my visit log could become a truly exhaustive account of every theme park visit and coaster ride I have ever taken, and the order in which I rode coasters and visited parks could be the proper order right from the very beginning (to some extent... some of the ordering of coasters within parks pre-2013, as well as the rides ridden on early revisits, relied on my vague recollection and some assumptions based on our typical park visits at the time).
As such, I managed to piece together my full, exhaustive theme park visit history... and I was able to add a +3 to my coaster count, bringing it to 102! My park count also had a +2, bringing it to 22!
Basically, a visit from my childhood that I had forgotten about when concocting my initial coaster count, and often forgot about when thinking about the theme parks I've been to and rides I've ridden, was a March 2011 visit to Disneyland Paris. I always knew I had been to DLP, and I remembered some of the rides I had ridden, but I could not comfortably sit down and rate them, which made me hesitant to include them in my count as Captain Coaster makes you rate things to say you've ridden them and I always liked the fact that my coaster ranking was exhaustive. I also wasn't 100% certain of the rides I had ridden, and I also wasn't sure of when we actually visited. This was a large part of what made me exclude anything pre-enthusiast (i.e. before 28th September 2013) from my visit log; I didn't like to be sure of what I'd done prior to that point, and I didn't like the idea of including stuff where I couldn't place it perfectly within my timeline of ridden coasters and visited parks. However, I finally managed to get confirmation of which coasters I'd ridden at DLP and when we went... I can now confirm that I rode Big Thunder Mountain in the main park and Crush's Coaster and RC Racer in Walt Disney Studios, and we visited from 24th-27th March 2011!
These coasters, and by extension the two DLP parks, will remain unrated and unranked until I revisit, because as I say, I can't remember the ride experiences and parks on a specific enough level to rank them alongside everything else I've ridden, and as such, my Captain Coaster-listed count of rated rides and the scope of my coaster ranking will remain at 99. However, I've had a change of heart and have now decided to include these 3 coasters within my coaster count, so it turns out that I did pass 100 in Florida after all! And it actually worked out very nicely... because my 100th coaster was Iron Gwazi at Busch Gardens Tampa, the ride I had hoped it would be to begin with!
So yes, I have in fact ridden 102 coasters! I know that this is a slightly anticlimactic way to hit 100 coasters, and I'm conscious of the fact that it's kind of cheating to retrospectively change your coaster counting strategy, but finding that hard drive and getting the exact dates and visits gave me a change of heart and made me want to include my pre-enthusiast theme park visits within my log. Even though I was stubborn in sticking to my "enthusiasm start date" for a few years, I had always been a tad uncomfortable about the fact that my visit log wasn't truly exhaustive and didn't encompass everything, so I was very glad to be able to find the exact dates and confirmation for every park visit I've ever taken!
Following today's discoveries, here are my edited milestones:
1) Troublesome Trucks Runaway Coaster - Drayton Manor (18th April 2008)
50) Nickelodeon Streak - Blackpool Pleasure Beach (14th August 2018)
100) Iron Gwazi - Busch Gardens Tampa (22nd June 2023)
So in short, I'm now in triple figures!
Anyone who's read my recent Florida trip report may remember that when I left Florida, my official coaster count was at 99. I had hoped to get that count to 100, but the closure of Tigris meant that it wasn't to be.
However, my coaster count and park visit log have only covered park visits and coaster rides after 28th September 2013, the day that I first rode the big coasters at Alton Towers and really started taking this hobby more seriously, ever since I first started trying to keep track of things. It sounds like a weird idea, but I felt that that was a good cut off point to set, as my memory of park visits and coaster rides before that was somewhat variable, and I was unable to pinpoint exact visit dates, order of first rides on coasters and such for my spreadsheet; being the slightly OCD person I am when it comes to exact ordering and dates, I was not keen to introduce that degree of uncertainty into my count and visit logs.
But today, something happened that meant that I could satisfy my own thirst for reasonable exactness in my log while also including all of the theme park visits and coaster rides I have ever taken, even those from before I was properly into theme parks. My dad found an old hard drive with pretty much every photo my parents had ever taken on it (it went all the way back to "Christmas 2004", an album containing pictures of me and my now 22 year old sister as toddlers), including a fair few pictures of some of our earliest theme park visits as a family. It was a rainy afternoon here in Gloucestershire, and I had nothing else better to do... so with the help of these pictures' metadata and our copious selection of old on-ride photos, as well as some recollections of my own from these aforementioned visits, I decided to scrap the "enthusiasm start date" I had always started my count and visit log from and try and piece together my pre-enthusiast theme park visit history so that my visit log could become a truly exhaustive account of every theme park visit and coaster ride I have ever taken, and the order in which I rode coasters and visited parks could be the proper order right from the very beginning (to some extent... some of the ordering of coasters within parks pre-2013, as well as the rides ridden on early revisits, relied on my vague recollection and some assumptions based on our typical park visits at the time).
As such, I managed to piece together my full, exhaustive theme park visit history... and I was able to add a +3 to my coaster count, bringing it to 102! My park count also had a +2, bringing it to 22!
Basically, a visit from my childhood that I had forgotten about when concocting my initial coaster count, and often forgot about when thinking about the theme parks I've been to and rides I've ridden, was a March 2011 visit to Disneyland Paris. I always knew I had been to DLP, and I remembered some of the rides I had ridden, but I could not comfortably sit down and rate them, which made me hesitant to include them in my count as Captain Coaster makes you rate things to say you've ridden them and I always liked the fact that my coaster ranking was exhaustive. I also wasn't 100% certain of the rides I had ridden, and I also wasn't sure of when we actually visited. This was a large part of what made me exclude anything pre-enthusiast (i.e. before 28th September 2013) from my visit log; I didn't like to be sure of what I'd done prior to that point, and I didn't like the idea of including stuff where I couldn't place it perfectly within my timeline of ridden coasters and visited parks. However, I finally managed to get confirmation of which coasters I'd ridden at DLP and when we went... I can now confirm that I rode Big Thunder Mountain in the main park and Crush's Coaster and RC Racer in Walt Disney Studios, and we visited from 24th-27th March 2011!
These coasters, and by extension the two DLP parks, will remain unrated and unranked until I revisit, because as I say, I can't remember the ride experiences and parks on a specific enough level to rank them alongside everything else I've ridden, and as such, my Captain Coaster-listed count of rated rides and the scope of my coaster ranking will remain at 99. However, I've had a change of heart and have now decided to include these 3 coasters within my coaster count, so it turns out that I did pass 100 in Florida after all! And it actually worked out very nicely... because my 100th coaster was Iron Gwazi at Busch Gardens Tampa, the ride I had hoped it would be to begin with!
So yes, I have in fact ridden 102 coasters! I know that this is a slightly anticlimactic way to hit 100 coasters, and I'm conscious of the fact that it's kind of cheating to retrospectively change your coaster counting strategy, but finding that hard drive and getting the exact dates and visits gave me a change of heart and made me want to include my pre-enthusiast theme park visits within my log. Even though I was stubborn in sticking to my "enthusiasm start date" for a few years, I had always been a tad uncomfortable about the fact that my visit log wasn't truly exhaustive and didn't encompass everything, so I was very glad to be able to find the exact dates and confirmation for every park visit I've ever taken!
Following today's discoveries, here are my edited milestones:
1) Troublesome Trucks Runaway Coaster - Drayton Manor (18th April 2008)
50) Nickelodeon Streak - Blackpool Pleasure Beach (14th August 2018)
100) Iron Gwazi - Busch Gardens Tampa (22nd June 2023)
So in short, I'm now in triple figures!
Zeock
TS Member
- Favourite Ride
- Journey to the Center of the Earth
That was interesting! Iron Gwazi is a very good 100th coaster.
