Burniel
Mega Poster
In my teens, I watched and read a wide range of content from UK enthusiasts embarking on road trips around Belgium, the Netherlands, and northern France and Germany. Within a few hours' radius of Calais lie a wide variety of well-themed parks and a surprising number of the world's top-rated coasters. In fact, for those living south of London, international theme park tourism can theoretically be as straightforward as a trip to Alton Towers. It's long been an aspiration of mine and was a small but significant factor in my decision to buy a car a couple of years ago, despite living and working near/in a relatively anti-car city.
But there's a lot for the anxious tourist to consider when planning such a trip. Driving abroad comes with its own set of rules and culture, not to mention side of the road. With this in mind, I decided to book a weekend "warmup trip" to Plopsaland Belgium, just 45 minutes from the Eurotunnel terminal, as a confidence booster for bigger trips in future years. I invited some friends to join me, both for the company and help, and to my very pleasant surprise I was met with great interest, to such an extent that two cars and drivers were necessary.
Driving in France and Belgium turned out to be an absolute joy. Our specific route along the A16/E40 was relatively quiet, extremely smooth, and featured a level of lane discipline almost never encountered on motorways in the UK. There's very little non-motorway driving on the route, and even then the roundabouts didn't confuse me nearly as much as I feared. I'm sure the region as a whole has its share of busy areas and poor drivers, but I would strongly encourage anyone with similar nerves to have a go at this exact trip. Frankly, it was a whole lot easier than my regular trips around the M25!
Having stayed the night in the delightful nearby town of Koksijde, we arrived on the Sunday just in time for park opening. The intention had been to start with a smaller coaster to ease in the less seasoned of the group, but we immediately got lost and ended up at Anubis: The Ride (#175). This was easily the smoothest Gerstlauer thrill coaster I’ve done to date, with a very punchy rolling launch, fun little top hat, and a solid set of inversions. My subsequent lap on the front row was better still, where the sensation of speed through the LSMs gives the impression of a ride of much greater stature.
Unfortunately, Anubis was where the park’s unfortunate glasses policy began to bite. I won’t rehash at length what I and others have said countless times on this subject before, but disallowing securely strapped glasses on amusement rides is moronic, not least when other members of our group went unchallenged wearing jewellery and the park permits mounted GoPros. If there were a meaningful safety concern, these far less essential and no more secure items would also be restricted. Do better.
Thankfully, glasses are permitted on K3 Roller Skater (#176), so visually impaired riders are free to enjoy their painfully generic family coaster experience in full HD. It's nothing to write home about, but I’ve not done this layout since 2011 and the queue rapidly ballooned from 10 to 40 minutes after our lap, so it was a satisfying tick regardless of target audience.
Depending on your views on how this hobby should be enjoyed, the “correct” next move would have been to seek out the other low capacity family +1s before their queues met a similar fate. But the call of Ride To Happiness (#177) can only be resisted for so long…
So much has been said about the world’s second (and my first) extreme spinner that I’ll mainly focus on calling out some of the things that surprised me despite having read reviews and seen POVs beforehand:
But then that’s the weirdly conflicting thing about the park. Being of decent capacity and far more extreme than everything else, RTH sat around a 10 minute wait for most of our visit, while other notable rides exceeded 4 times that figure. Indeed, after our next stop at the (otherwise perfectly respectable) Dino Splash flume took the better part of an hour, two members of our group abandoned the rest of the park and went to lap RTH for the rest of the day. While this seems a little dismissive, it’s hard to blame them; in the next hour they managed five circuits of one of the world’s best coasters, while the rest of us rode a Mack powered coaster and had some food.
World class though it isn't, Draconis (#178) is an enjoyable and reasonably well-themed 2-lap powered coaster traversing the park’s Jurassic area, with the added pain/bonus of being deafened by those on the train/deafening those in the station during the fly through. It was fun, which is more than can be said for the wait, as this was marred by the park’s fastpass implementation. On here and most other rides, fastpass users are scanned and loaded from the ride exit once a train is parked and empty. These guests are allowed to choose any row they like, making it a matter of chance whether your group will have to wait an extra train once already in the air gates, as well as introducing a risk that half your group will have their row taken and half won’t. Worse still, the delay is amplified by how long the train sits empty while tickets are scanned. I’m not as anti-fastpass as a concept as I once was, but this implementation felt particularly inefficient and a little unfair - especially when you’ve already waited half an hour for a powered cred!
Another part of the Plopsaland operation I'd been warned about was food prices, and to be fair I wouldn’t describe my €20 meal at Mr Spaghetti’s Restaurant as cheap, but it was very much “real food” and was sufficiently filling to see me through the rest of the park day, the Calais terminal, and back to British soil. I'm slowly starting to prefer at least the option to pay a little more for a higher quality, more filling meal than the usual overpriced fare, and I don’t know who Mr Spaghetti is but he makes a mean stoofvlees.
Surveying options after lunch, I began to come around to our RTH lappers’ way of thinking. #LikeMe Coaster had attracted a 40 minute wait, far longer than a Tivoli deserves. Heidi The Ride was down all day for maintenance, and the Supersplash had only just opened but I didn’t want to risk a drenching two hours before we had to leave (and I don’t think I’d have counted it anyway). Every non-coaster of interest was also sat at a prohibitively high wait. Meanwhile, RTH’s queue hadn’t moved above 15 all day. Given the missed woodie and incredible signature coaster, I’d already started mentally planning a return visit, so why not give the completionist in me a rest and do what would be most fun? While the rest of the group braved the queue for Bos van Plop (very much on the list for next time based on their report), I reunited with those who’d splintered off earlier to see just how much happiness we could squeeze in.
Alas, the marathon wasn’t to be. On reaching the station for my first lap of the afternoon, the ride went down. Neither my Dutch nor my French was good enough to understand the announcements, but any enthusiast could piece it together visually. Restraints won’t go up automatically on front car. Maintenance called. Trains manually unloaded. Restraints go up and down and few times, but the front car still plays up. A communal shrug is shared among the maintenance and operating teams, before the front car’s air gates are roped off and the ride reopens. All standard stuff and handled reasonably well, but the delay was enough for the fastpass and main queues to balloon to similar sizes to the rest of the park. As a result, the answer to how many laps on RTH we could get in an afternoon was a mildly disappointing 2.
But what a 2 laps they were! On accepting the second (my fourth of the day) would be our last, we waited for a back car, where the full extent of the ride’s insanity became clear to me. Genuine disorientation ensued and extreme airtime was encountered at every angle. At last, I understood how this ride has reached the top spot in so many lists; it’s not quite there for me (yet), but it’s easy to see how visiting on a day quiet enough to lap the back row a dozen times could build the kind of attachment that often separates a top 5 ride from a number 1. For now, it’s edged out Voltron to become my #4, though I think freedom to pick your own row on Voltron would make it a very tough call indeed.
Looking back, I’m not really sure what to make of Plopsaland Belgium. I had a lovely time and it’s a relatively pretty park, but objectively I feel it had a number of operational weaknesses which I overlooked simply because efficiency wasn’t a priority on this visit. A major coaster being closed on a busy weekend (I can only assume this wasn’t planned, but still), the inadequate fastpass system, and the glasses policy are all things I would usually judge a park much more harshly for. But here, they seemed not to matter. Maybe it's because I was enjoying the park with friends I don't usually get to do this kind of thing with. Maybe it was because this was only a "practice" trip and I knew I'd be back soon enough. Or maybe Ride To Happiness just makes up for the shortcomings in a way only an elite coaster can. In any case, it was refreshing to be on a trip where these things didn't really matter, where the park felt like a relatively small piece of a highly successful and enjoyable weekend.
Roll on Benelux 2027!
But there's a lot for the anxious tourist to consider when planning such a trip. Driving abroad comes with its own set of rules and culture, not to mention side of the road. With this in mind, I decided to book a weekend "warmup trip" to Plopsaland Belgium, just 45 minutes from the Eurotunnel terminal, as a confidence booster for bigger trips in future years. I invited some friends to join me, both for the company and help, and to my very pleasant surprise I was met with great interest, to such an extent that two cars and drivers were necessary.
Driving in France and Belgium turned out to be an absolute joy. Our specific route along the A16/E40 was relatively quiet, extremely smooth, and featured a level of lane discipline almost never encountered on motorways in the UK. There's very little non-motorway driving on the route, and even then the roundabouts didn't confuse me nearly as much as I feared. I'm sure the region as a whole has its share of busy areas and poor drivers, but I would strongly encourage anyone with similar nerves to have a go at this exact trip. Frankly, it was a whole lot easier than my regular trips around the M25!
Having stayed the night in the delightful nearby town of Koksijde, we arrived on the Sunday just in time for park opening. The intention had been to start with a smaller coaster to ease in the less seasoned of the group, but we immediately got lost and ended up at Anubis: The Ride (#175). This was easily the smoothest Gerstlauer thrill coaster I’ve done to date, with a very punchy rolling launch, fun little top hat, and a solid set of inversions. My subsequent lap on the front row was better still, where the sensation of speed through the LSMs gives the impression of a ride of much greater stature.
Unfortunately, Anubis was where the park’s unfortunate glasses policy began to bite. I won’t rehash at length what I and others have said countless times on this subject before, but disallowing securely strapped glasses on amusement rides is moronic, not least when other members of our group went unchallenged wearing jewellery and the park permits mounted GoPros. If there were a meaningful safety concern, these far less essential and no more secure items would also be restricted. Do better.
Thankfully, glasses are permitted on K3 Roller Skater (#176), so visually impaired riders are free to enjoy their painfully generic family coaster experience in full HD. It's nothing to write home about, but I’ve not done this layout since 2011 and the queue rapidly ballooned from 10 to 40 minutes after our lap, so it was a satisfying tick regardless of target audience.
Depending on your views on how this hobby should be enjoyed, the “correct” next move would have been to seek out the other low capacity family +1s before their queues met a similar fate. But the call of Ride To Happiness (#177) can only be resisted for so long…
So much has been said about the world’s second (and my first) extreme spinner that I’ll mainly focus on calling out some of the things that surprised me despite having read reviews and seen POVs beforehand:
- The hangtime through the first inversion is insane and going through it backwards is one of the most unique experiences I’ve ever had on a roller coaster.
- Going upside down while spinning was actually quite a predictable sensation. I’d always assumed inverting and spinning simultaneously would feel completely new, but the true value of the spin is more in randomising the direction you enter each element.
- The airtime in the second half is extremely aggressive, comparable to similar moments on Voltron.
But then that’s the weirdly conflicting thing about the park. Being of decent capacity and far more extreme than everything else, RTH sat around a 10 minute wait for most of our visit, while other notable rides exceeded 4 times that figure. Indeed, after our next stop at the (otherwise perfectly respectable) Dino Splash flume took the better part of an hour, two members of our group abandoned the rest of the park and went to lap RTH for the rest of the day. While this seems a little dismissive, it’s hard to blame them; in the next hour they managed five circuits of one of the world’s best coasters, while the rest of us rode a Mack powered coaster and had some food.
World class though it isn't, Draconis (#178) is an enjoyable and reasonably well-themed 2-lap powered coaster traversing the park’s Jurassic area, with the added pain/bonus of being deafened by those on the train/deafening those in the station during the fly through. It was fun, which is more than can be said for the wait, as this was marred by the park’s fastpass implementation. On here and most other rides, fastpass users are scanned and loaded from the ride exit once a train is parked and empty. These guests are allowed to choose any row they like, making it a matter of chance whether your group will have to wait an extra train once already in the air gates, as well as introducing a risk that half your group will have their row taken and half won’t. Worse still, the delay is amplified by how long the train sits empty while tickets are scanned. I’m not as anti-fastpass as a concept as I once was, but this implementation felt particularly inefficient and a little unfair - especially when you’ve already waited half an hour for a powered cred!
Another part of the Plopsaland operation I'd been warned about was food prices, and to be fair I wouldn’t describe my €20 meal at Mr Spaghetti’s Restaurant as cheap, but it was very much “real food” and was sufficiently filling to see me through the rest of the park day, the Calais terminal, and back to British soil. I'm slowly starting to prefer at least the option to pay a little more for a higher quality, more filling meal than the usual overpriced fare, and I don’t know who Mr Spaghetti is but he makes a mean stoofvlees.
Surveying options after lunch, I began to come around to our RTH lappers’ way of thinking. #LikeMe Coaster had attracted a 40 minute wait, far longer than a Tivoli deserves. Heidi The Ride was down all day for maintenance, and the Supersplash had only just opened but I didn’t want to risk a drenching two hours before we had to leave (and I don’t think I’d have counted it anyway). Every non-coaster of interest was also sat at a prohibitively high wait. Meanwhile, RTH’s queue hadn’t moved above 15 all day. Given the missed woodie and incredible signature coaster, I’d already started mentally planning a return visit, so why not give the completionist in me a rest and do what would be most fun? While the rest of the group braved the queue for Bos van Plop (very much on the list for next time based on their report), I reunited with those who’d splintered off earlier to see just how much happiness we could squeeze in.
Alas, the marathon wasn’t to be. On reaching the station for my first lap of the afternoon, the ride went down. Neither my Dutch nor my French was good enough to understand the announcements, but any enthusiast could piece it together visually. Restraints won’t go up automatically on front car. Maintenance called. Trains manually unloaded. Restraints go up and down and few times, but the front car still plays up. A communal shrug is shared among the maintenance and operating teams, before the front car’s air gates are roped off and the ride reopens. All standard stuff and handled reasonably well, but the delay was enough for the fastpass and main queues to balloon to similar sizes to the rest of the park. As a result, the answer to how many laps on RTH we could get in an afternoon was a mildly disappointing 2.
But what a 2 laps they were! On accepting the second (my fourth of the day) would be our last, we waited for a back car, where the full extent of the ride’s insanity became clear to me. Genuine disorientation ensued and extreme airtime was encountered at every angle. At last, I understood how this ride has reached the top spot in so many lists; it’s not quite there for me (yet), but it’s easy to see how visiting on a day quiet enough to lap the back row a dozen times could build the kind of attachment that often separates a top 5 ride from a number 1. For now, it’s edged out Voltron to become my #4, though I think freedom to pick your own row on Voltron would make it a very tough call indeed.
Looking back, I’m not really sure what to make of Plopsaland Belgium. I had a lovely time and it’s a relatively pretty park, but objectively I feel it had a number of operational weaknesses which I overlooked simply because efficiency wasn’t a priority on this visit. A major coaster being closed on a busy weekend (I can only assume this wasn’t planned, but still), the inadequate fastpass system, and the glasses policy are all things I would usually judge a park much more harshly for. But here, they seemed not to matter. Maybe it's because I was enjoying the park with friends I don't usually get to do this kind of thing with. Maybe it was because this was only a "practice" trip and I knew I'd be back soon enough. Or maybe Ride To Happiness just makes up for the shortcomings in a way only an elite coaster can. In any case, it was refreshing to be on a trip where these things didn't really matter, where the park felt like a relatively small piece of a highly successful and enjoyable weekend.
Roll on Benelux 2027!