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We got up on time --- ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif){kind=small}
bunny_hugger got up on time, and woke me --- to make breakfast at 8:30 am, just as we figured it'd start. The owner's son pointed us to a seat, and where the cereals were (I got a Weatabix, to feel as English a breakfast as possible, though Coco Pops were tempting too) and he rapidly got ready scrambled eggs on toast, with toast on the side, and a basket of toast come in later. We didn't actually have a toasted toast sandwich, but could have. I also tried, at bunny_hugger's urging, a bit of aptly named brown sauce and that's pretty good a combination. We got the Wi-Fi password, and went back to our rooms to check mail, at 9 am, at the end of breakfast and non-appearance of anyone else. Maybe we misunderstood breakfast.
Before we left the United States bunny_hugger warned me to pack more warm clothes, such as the hoodie I wear pretty much from September through May. I disregarded the advice, since I figured, it's the first week of July; even if European summers are cooler than the United States version, it's not like I can't handle, say, temperatures in the mid-60s.
What I really didn't appreciate was that in 1940 Britain traded all summer heat for 99 years to the United States in exchange for a couple of World War I-era destroyers. The temperature crept up into the mid-50s, Kelvin, with rain. I had carried on in Amsterdam with it feeling cool but not horrible, but, at this point, I gave in: it was just too blasted cold, and we would need to find somewhere I could buy a sweatshirt or hoodie or something capable of holding off the frigid British summer.
So we set off to the Blackpool Pleasure Beach, just about as it opened, with our path walking past a couple school buses full of students entering in a procession which threatened to absorb us into the flow. This probably would have got us free entry, but might have left us with the role of chaperones or, worse, chaperoned. We went around to the other entrance, and with the paid admission got warned that the weather might not cooperate and there were packs of school kids in, so we should probably get any must-ride things in soon. With rain returning --- we would get a lot of rain; after the conference ended I believe the only completely non-rainy days were the ones we spent in transit getting to Efteling (when we didn't get in), on the ferry, and getting to Blackpool (the day we didn't get in). Sheesh.
We scouted out shops and tried to reconcile the very packed map with the very packed location and after running through the rainfall ducked into a small shop where I found a faux-distressed ``Since 1896'' Blackpool Pleasure Beach hoodie that would indeed keep me comfortably warm the rest of the trip. bunny_hugger would decide later in the day to get one herself because ... we probably could have put up with the cool, or the rain, but both together was a bit much.
Anyway. Blackpool Pleasure Beach: who hasn't heard of it, besides all the normal non-British people that I talk to? Well, I'd always figured it a neat spot to get to someday, anyway (and even that amusing Coronation Commentary book pointed out how people wondered why King Edward VII insisted on taking his holidays overseas when Blackpool was on hand, and wouldn't that be fun?). It's an amusement park, packed in a way that the more consciously-designed parks like Great Adventure or Cedar Point aren't: after a century-plus they don't have much more room and either rides have to start overlapping one another or they can't put something in without taking out something, possibly something of considerable historic and sentimental value. This packed-ness gives it a wonderful feel, like what might have happened had Robert Moses liked Coney Island.
One of the first rides we went on was a dark ride --- they've got several --- based on Alice In Wonderland. The cars, designed in the shape of Cheshire Cats, seat four people, except the one car that only fits three because there's a rabbit statue in the back seat. The ride's through a set of Wonderland/Looking-Glass settings, not as long or as packed as Efteling would have, but, hey, compare to Disaster Transport. I'm doing their dark rides a disservice by comparing them to Efteling; these are satisfyingly long, interesting, surprising rides.
We wanted to be sure we got to some historic roller coasters --- the Grand National, for example, a racing wooden roller coaster with the interesting twist that the track is a Moebius strip. If you board the train on the left platform, you get out on the right side. The ride includes overhead signs of ``They're Off'' and ``Becher's Brook'' and such, evoking points within the Grand National horse race track, which I didn't know until after the ride when bunny_hugger explained it to me. I like the overhead signs anyway. This is (again) a fun roller coaster, about two and a half minutes long, and feeling satisfyingly long. That's another point for these rides: they all give a really satisfying ride time. Nothing feels like it's too short.
Outside the ride was a panel advertising the ride and providing quotes from the major national newspapers. We thought it remarkable the park got quotes from the major newspapers singing the praises of the ride, since when did you ever hear of serious criticism of roller coasters in a general-interest publication? (We trusted the criticism would be serious.) Possibly for a ride or park anniversary? But we realized that the quotes were humorous fabrications when we paid a little more attention and noticed that there weren't any typos in the Grauniad blurb. Still, you have to like a park that'd go to that trouble. (The general wording gave it away, particularly points like how each blurb had a key word obviously picked to the newspaper.) It's a good little act of egression.
Our primary aim was to get to all the roller coasters. The oldest, Big Dipper --- almost a generic roller coaster name --- dates back to 1923 so it's certainly among the oldest I've ridden, though I don't know if it's got the record offhand, is also a really potent one, fast, strong, pretty intense. So was the Avalanche, another bobsled coaster and one that gets so fast that when we slide to near-vertical on the faster turns the illusion of going over the edge feels awfully likely. Speed and intensity are maybe the watchwords for roller coaster rides at Blackpool: the Wild Mouse there doesn't just knock one around but it even has the front wheels go off the track before swinging back to normal.
So it was rather a surprise that the Blue Flyer ride, a wooden roller coaster dating to 1934, was, uh, not much of anything. It probably was always meant as a children's coaster; it rises to a maximum height of 25 feet. It does have a ride camera, and I was my usual wide-open-mouthed self on it --- well, it was a ride, after all --- but, yeah, it's probably more a way for kids to get used to the idea of riding roller coasters than anything else.
The tallest roller coaster in the world when it opened in 1994 was Big One, and it's still the record-holder in the United kingdom, and comes out at over 200 feet, which isn't bad, particularly as the ride goes out over the park and you can see to the beach and ... well, the setting and the ride length (it's three minutes) and speed and a splendid combination. A sign announced that there's a roller coaster endurance record being tried for --- most consecutive number of days riding the Big One; the world record was something like 101 days and we were there for number 44 for Richard Rodridguez --- although we had to admit that while some endurance records are impressive, like the continuous hours of riding which Rodriguez had set on Big Dipper, just consecutive days riding seems ... disappointing, somehow. At least like less of a challenge. (I see from Wikipedia that Rodriguez's endurance record on Big Dipper has become a complicated story through the participation of Guinness; he did manage to ride it for 2000 hours --- one week is 168 hours --- but the record was disqualified for some reason; the BBC's report on his 2000-hour endurance ride feels compelled to point out he ``has a girlfriend'')).
Around our ride on the Big One, the ride attendants were loading sandbags into the back seats of the other train, but only one car per circuit. Why? Well, the attentant explained, they wanted to take the train out of service, but if they load the sandbags --- 17 kg each --- into all the cars at once they'll kill themselves. Filling up one car at a time means it takes a half-dozen circuits to get the train ready to go out of service, but they can manage it without injury. (bunny_hugger reasond that the diversion track to take a train out of service is just before the platform, so that the train has to ride the whole circuit before it can be taken out of service, and it needs the weight of a reasonably full load to get safely through the circuit.) (Later, I figured why the sandbags would be 17 kg, rather than some nice round number like 15 or 20 kg.)
One of the attractions at amusement parks early in the century was the Steeplechase, a three-track racing roller coaster where the cars are just carousel-style horses that you ride on top, without restraints. It goes around Big Dipper and near Big One and under part of another roller coaster (Nickelodeon Streak), so not only do you have the feel of a (slow) open ride far enough above the park to feel like you might drop off and hurt yourself (which doesn't seem to happen) but you float through the park. It's not fast, but the openness, the height above ground, and that there's just no restraints make it feel awfully dangerous. bunny_hugger's ex-sister-in-law apparently described it as the most terrifying ride, far more worrying than rides that actually go higher or faster.
The other roller coaster gone by was the Nickelodeon Streak, known just as Roller Coaster from 1935 until a rebranding in 2010 and repainting in orange and green which is not a natural color scheme for a wooden roller coaster. It's a good ride --- and one of those we saw as we got off the train; if we had a different room in our bed-and-breakfast we'd be able to see that --- although maybe the most hazardous part of it was that the entrance queue was a long aluminium sheet that's likely just fine in normal weather but in the cool drizzling rain was pretty slick, and I was worried I'd fall myself.
The last roller coaster we were able to find the entrance for --- the place is rather packed --- was Infusion, a modern-style inverted steel one which goes out over the water and that threatens to soak riders, although they didn't, possibly on grounds of redundancy. Sooner found was Revolution, a straightforward quick loop forward and backward of the kind I knew as Lightning Loops back when a similar ride was at Great Adventure (although Great Adventure's had a pair of them orthogonal to one another). This one starts from dozens of feet in the air, far enough to get a good view of Blackpool the ordinary town beyond the amusement zone.
Roller coasters are great, naturally --- particularly since the last time bunny_hugger was at Blackpool it was in the clutch of in-laws who felt that fourteen minutes was plenty of time to spend soaking up the place --- as was dodging the rain, and the rain maybe served us well since despite the packs of kids there were no major lines for anything. The only attraction we waited more than a couple minutes for was Impossible, a house which starts out as a mirror maze, and then goes into a room full of the sorts of optical illusions that fill a slow spot in an amusement park ride or in a science museum --- the fixed pattern you stare at so it looks like it's spinning, that sort of thing --- and then, past the Chicken Exit (and it warns you, if you can't dare go forward, to take the Chicken Exit) into a Haunted Swing ride.
We'd been on a Haunted Swing ride --- where you sit on a bench that maybe swings a little bit while the room around you pivots, creating the illusion of swinging to vertical, or even upside-down --- at Dorney Park, and then to a huge and (of course) lavish one at Efteling. The one at Efteling even surrounded the house with a mythology of the Goat Raiders (they were going for the goat-as-Satanic-figure thing, made clear when you looked at the sculptures) and several rooms' worth of audio setting up the room which, since it's in Dutch, was lost on us.
The one at Blackpool wasn't so ornate, and was just made up like a normal person's library. The effect set off arguments among some of the other people about whether the swing was moving at all, or whether it was just the walls, until finally someone shouted, ``shut up, you're wrecking the illusion'' and the crowd settled down. I think this one may have had the most effective impression of going upside-down, although I wouldn't mind reriding them all to compare.
Pleasure Beach has one of the three remaining Derby Racers --- large, fast, wide-open carousel horses with, originally, a mechanism that let the horses in one row move forward or back relative to each other. We've been on the other two, at Cedar Point and at Rye Playland. Sadly, Pleasure Beach's hasn't got the back-and-forth mechanism of Cedar Point, and it hasn't got the jet engine speed of Rye Playland. But it gave bunny_hugger and I the chance to be among the people who've ridden all the world's examples of a particularly great kind of ride.
Another attraction we got into because I thought it was another roller coaster (it was clearly a ride entrance and just underneath the trellis of the Streak, so why not?) was the hedge maze. This ``Chinese Puzzle Maze'' claims to be a relocation of the original, putting up yet another Ship Of Theseus puzzle, since not all the hedges of the original were transplanted to make it. We did get pretty effectively lost, but we emerged eventually in what we think was the right spot. It didn't have a clearly marked ``congratulations, you reached the exit'' point --- actually, we got out around the back of a fast food place and some restrooms --- but nothing actually stopped us from going past that point either.
The Ghost Train, another compact dark ride, crosses that boundary into being pretty near an indoor roller coaster; this one goes through a bunch of haunted-house illusions and is certainly in league with Stillwalk Manor at Seaside Heights. Ghost Train has antiquity --- and speed and ride length --- going for it; I'm not sure which I'd say has the more entertaining scenery and scares, though. We did notice that among the ghosts dangling over the front end was the Ghostbusters' Slimer, who had a wide-open mouth, and a fine net over the mouth indicating people were tossing stuff into it. It also has a point where it appears to be getting ready to drop the car along a 30 degree incline into a sudden left turn, although actually it uses a reverse lift hill to slowly wind the car down, which sets up and then avoids a really terrifying moment.
There's a fine old carousel, near the Big One and the Steeplechase and Chinese Garden --- it's all packed together --- and we of course rode that. The song our time around was the theme to The Muppet Show, which is a surprisingly good piece to perform on band organ. bunny_hugger notes the song has basically the form of a march, so it's in the right style for that performance. I would not have thought of something as obvious at that, but she understands this music stuff in ways I fear I never will.
The second-oldest ride we got on was the River Caves, an ``old mill'' style ride, in which we went in a boat through a series of scenes taking us through the great historic rivers of the world, from the ancient Nile through to the age of dinosaurs through Angkor Wat. It dates to 1905, although I don't know how long it's been since the last renovation.
The oldest ride we went on was also the last we reached before the park closed. We'd got close to it mid-day, when we stopped to find a suitable hoodie for bunny_hugger (getting the combination of decent color and attractive look was difficult; they don't have licensed merchandise to the Cedar Fair or Six Flags excess) and some fresh-cooked doughnuts (incredibly good, especially with tea, in the shelter the ride offered from the rain). The ride, the Flying Machine, was --- according to a display inside the gift shop, and the window opening to the machinery underneath --- originally opened in 1904 and constructed by Hiram Maxim, of ``whatever happens, we have got'' machine gun fame, and that while the cars have been changed the motor has not. Imagine that! Riding something built by a person born under the presidency of Martin Van Buren! It's an amazingly smooth ride, too, spinning in a circle and accelerating gradually enough that it's only with surprise that we looked down and saw we were making a considerable angle compared to the ground far below, and we just weren't shaking. We were just flying, if in captivity.
In the gift shop's information panels there's reproductions of newspapers from the opening of the ride, and the talk of how enthusiastically the ride was received is fine. But the other articles were of more interest, such as the person reprimanded for causing an obstruction to the roads with his ice-cream truck, or the people actually given fines for abusing animals. (We wondered about the disparate fines given out, but the circumstances of the abuse weren't obvious to our reading.)
I should mention also the park had restaurants, including an American Roller Coaster restaurant. We didn't eat there, but I noticed the beers at the American restaurant were Fosters, Heineken, and Guinness. So, yeah, they did their research.
The park was closed distressingly early --- only 6 pm again, nearly eleven hours before the sun would set --- so we went back to the bed-and-breakfast to unload the clutter we'd collected, rest up a bit, and set back out again. We'd miss dinner there, but did arrange for breakfast Saturday to be even more English, with beans on toast leaping to the mind of a delighted bunny_hugger and a game me.
And we set out again for the piers. We did want to get on some of the rides, of course, particularly of the scrambler-type rides. I don't often get motion sick, but one that we did ride did leave me feeling woozy and I could easily imagine how one like it brought bunny_hugger's brother to throwing up. Unfortunately the cool and intermittent rain which had served us so well in clearing out crowds worked against us here: there were few people to any ride, and the talkers for the games and the rides and even the fast food shops were desperate for our attention. More hers than mine. We got a tilt-a-whirl ride to ourselves, and while that was pleasantly long and almost perfectly synched up to the theme from Ghostbusters for its length, we weren't enough people for the ride operator to hop out of the station and go around insanely giving our car extra twirls. Maybe next time.
It was far too cold to go for a 99, so we guessed maybe we'd get to that when we reached London or something. We did get a couple pieces of Rock, though. And we stopped at a pier-side restaurant for jacket potatoes that were savoury and warm right as we needed them to be.
One beautiful piece of scenery was a ``tidal harp'', a set of tubes resounding in the air, with the pitch in some way tied to the tides. There's an explanation of how it works in a plaque on the monument, but I don't think I could accurately reconstruct them all and given my camera troubles I didn't get a clear photograph of the details. It has to do with pipes that run out to the sea, and that fill up to different lengths based on how high the water is.
We wandered around the piers not quite to closing, but near enough, and walked back slowly, as if we could make the time before leaving pass more slowly yet.
Trivia: About half the eleven thousand torch-bearers for the 100-day Australian segment of the torch relay before the Sydney Olympic Games were selected by community committees. Source: Encyclopedia of the Modern Olympic Movement, Editors John E Findling, Kimberly D Pelle.
Currently Reading: The 1988 Annual World's Best SF, Editor Donald A Wollheim.
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(no subject)
Date: 2012-08-08 04:22 am (UTC)When I'm Fearless Leader. torch-bearing will be compulsory.
(no subject)
Date: 2012-08-13 01:47 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2012-08-09 01:08 am (UTC)Well, would you trust you in that setting? =:)
Weetabix (http://austin-dern.livejournal.com/801137.html)! Yes! (Although, I'll admit to not being much of a cereal sort anyway - or, indeed, breakfasts. Though I did always love going on the international swim meets, where my brother competed, with the German breads fresh in the morning, and potato pancakes at the events =:9)
Sadly, yes - weather is extra in the UK, and only purchasable prior to entry, although you may be able to reclaim VAT upon departure.
The Derby Racer does sound quite uncommonly spiffy. Could there be hope of more of such? I suppose it's a bit like pinball tables - expensive and fiddly to maintain, but not really replicable, although I'll admit that Zen Pinball is a lot of fun. ^_^;
A Muppet Show themed (if only literally) carousel? How neat! And so fitting. ^_^
the beers at the American restaurant were Fosters, Heineken, and Guinness. So, yeah, they did their research.
Sadly so. =:) You were spared themed Real American actors, though.
(I've not yet quite worked out how, in the UK, beers like Stella Artois and Guinness rank amongst the most expensive you'll find in any pub, versus the local superbly crafted ales, produced in virtually insignificant quantities, yet selling for maybe £1 less. Aren't "economies of scale" meant to work the other way around?)
(no subject)
Date: 2012-08-09 01:20 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2012-08-13 01:50 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2012-08-14 03:59 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2012-08-14 08:22 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2012-08-13 02:00 am (UTC)The Derby Racer's a great ride, but I must admit, Blackpool has the third-best of the set. Cedar Point has the one that goes back and forth, and Rye Playland has speed.
The carousel wasn't specifically Muppet Show themed --- they played other songs before and after. We just happened to be there for a particularly good song.
(no subject)
Date: 2012-08-16 02:53 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2012-08-16 03:02 am (UTC)