Holiday Park

22 August 2018

As we had spent the previous day swimming and hiking in the stunning Black Forest area, Terror and I were once again ready for some thrill rides!

After spending the evening at the Leonardo Hotel in Heidelberg, we made the short 30 minute journey to Holiday Park – our final stop in Germany.

With our limited time, we were debating whether to include Holiday Park, or Movie Park and Tripsdrill. They all had pros and cons, but in the end we were suckered in by some excellent reviews of Holiday Park’s main coaster which regularly features in the world’s top 10 coaster lists…Expedition GeForce!

Like most of the fast passes we had used on this trip, we had pre-purchased them online to save some money. However one look at the parking lot told us they would not be needed at Holiday Park. Murphy’s Law I guess – but every time we had a fast pass, the parks were never busy.

At $52 AUD this park was the cheapest we had visited, and definitely the smallest too. With our tiny park maps in hand, we headed straight to GeForce.

With no line, I lost count of the number of turns we had on the Intamin beauty, and we were like old friends with the ride operators by the end. The first lift hill was not as tall or long as Silver Star, but still gave us enough time to admire how pretty the little park was, with lots of green spaces and woodland areas. After the first near vertical drop, the coaster wove its way through the woods at speeds of up to 120km/hr, gifting us with an exceptional amount of air time hills.

We really loved this coaster, and had many attempts trialling out some new ride photos before settling on a fighting theme. We were pleasantly surprised when we went to print the picture, and the kids sitting behind us had joined in as well. Gold. Was it Germany’s best coaster? Not in my opinion no. I was not disappointed at all, but Silver Star was bigger, faster and smoother. GeForce was looking a little aged, and needed a fresh coast of paint and some entertainment in the ride load area.

What was left after GeForce? Well, not much, so we got through everything pretty quickly! Wickie Splash was a fun little flume ride with a double drop at the end.

We had two turns on Sky Fly in the Air Show area (individual planes on a rotating arm), and it was driving me nuts that after trying this ride on 3 different continents, I still couldn’t get the damn thing to do a 360. On the plus side, this area was playing 99 Luftballons the whole day which was an excellent touch.

We walked through some lovely shaded areas to get to a beach section, where we boarded a star flyer called the Lighthouse Tower. From previous posts you will know that these are one of my least favourite rides. The combination of height, movement from the wind, and lack of safety harness makes me feel uncomfortable. As always, Terror revelled in this knowledge and spent most of the ride trying to prise my fingers off the lap bar and getting our seats to rock. Jerk. We didn’t want to hang around for the water stunt show, but did make a quick stop on a fun little ride called Beach Rescue. Our individual boats rotated around a carousel at a reasonable speed, but you could kind of steer them to get a bit of sideways action.

For the second coaster of the day, we boarded Sky Scream which is basically a Superman Ultimate Flight (Six Flags) clone. The pre-ride area would have made a great haunted house attraction during Halloween, with lots of dark corridors for staff to hide in and scream at you as you wander past. With minimal wait times again, we had a few turns of the fun little coaster complete with fast launches through the queuing section of the circular track. Sky Scream was nowhere in the same league as GeForce, but does have its place as a more cost/space effective coaster that can still provide a thrill.

The park’s dark ride was certainly the most amusing ride at Holiday Park. Burg Falkenstein looked like it was going to be a haunted mansion style indoor experience. So imagine our surprise when instead we were greeted with knights and maidens, several of whom were drunk, naked, or both. We appreciated the novelty, as something like this would probably not get approval on a kiddy ride in Australia!

We moved on to a small indoor section of Holiday park, which seemed to open later than the rest of the park.

The little indoor coaster Tabalugas Achterbahn was still going through its test runs, so we killed time on the giant slides, and getting somewhat creeped out by the carousel.

The rotating animals were carved out of wood, and although the intention was to perhaps create a cute little farmyard ride, it looked like something out of a slasher flick.

A new attraction called Mia’s Elv flight was also going through testing, but did not open on the day we were there. Tabalugas ended up being the longest wait of the day, at around 10 minutes. You ride a little dragon through an arctic world, and it was quite zippy for such a small track.

We stopped briefly for lunch, and I convinced Terror that we should go and have a look at the Holiday Park Museum. We hunted around for a while, but then realised the ‘museum’ was back in the food hall, and basically consisted of a few photos on the walls and a couple of parts from old rides. I would love it if every fun park had a museum dedicated to former rides, historical information, record breaking days, controversies etc, but Holiday Park was not the best example of how this could be done well…

In the kiddy area, we were surrounded by oversized plants and novelties. This was really the only area that any kind of strong theming, and felt like you were strolling around in mum’s garden. Embracing our five year old inner children, we jumped on Flip, der Graphupfer. We rocked back and forth on an oversized grasshopper as it bounced his way around a single track. As we had no children with us, other adults were giving us strange looks. Yes it was uneventful and thrill-less, but how many other Australians can say they have ridden a grasshopper around a German garden? Hmm I am not sure that came across how I meant it to…

The only other ride we experienced in this area was Verruckter Baum (Crazy tree). We sat inside a hollowed-out log which span around with reasonable centrifugal force. Needless to say, we were both pretty nauseous after this one – sorry Terror!

We still had enough energy to laugh at the cute little Schmetterlingsflug attraction. Let’s take a moment to appreciate the world’s most wonderful way to say ‘butterfly.’

The last ride on our list was the Free Fall tower, which also happened to be the only ride where it was worthwhile having the fast pass. This tower was the first of its kind in Europe, so I was expecting it to be fairly bumpy and creaky. However it was a really good drop tower! The ‘weird stomach feelings’ were wonderful and seemed to last a bit longer than on other similar rides. I am unsure if part of my enjoyment was due to my fear brought on by the assumption that the brakes might not work so well, but either way, the forces on the ride were intense and excellent!

 

After revisiting GeForce a few more times, the day was only half over but we were done and headed home happy. The theming and atmosphere were not on the agenda at all for Holiday Park. This did not bother me though, as Holiday Park was unpretentious, and was not trying to be something it was not. It embraced the green park spaces, carnival rides and small amount of thrill rides combo, creating a family style park that was affordable and enjoyable.

I smiled at the Daddy Cool ice-cream (Bubble O’Bill knock off) on the way out, reflecting on a manic couple of weeks.

Terror and I had undertaken a huge amount of travel, 5 German fun parks, 2 Spanish fun parks (plus an extra 3 in Dubai for me) and would make a quick visit to Ferrari World in Abu Dhabi on the way home.

We spent the rest of the day sightseeing around beautiful Heidelberg, soaking up our last German sunset before the pain of our long distance flights. Farewell Deutschland!