Doesn’t everybody love theme parks? Apparently not. Certainly not my long-suffering wife and not even, at first, my children. Or any of my friends.
But if you look past the queues, the cost and the general goofiness, theme parks reveal a fascinating glimpse of cultural trends over the past 100 or so years, as well as the triumphant march of technology.
Aficionados will argue for hours over what defines a park and which was the first but all combine the fairground and the carnival, the charm of the pleasure garden and the darkness of the freak show. Plus the rides are just whizz-bang fun. But that doesn’t mean you can’t go wrong — I have, with varying consequences. Hopefully you can learn from my mistakes.
1. Match the child to the ride
I nearly put my own kids off rides for life by underestimating the power of a small rollercoaster on Santa Monica pier in California. How fast could it be, I reasoned, if it was on a pier? Too fast, unfortunately. Cue two weeping toddlers and a chastened dad left working out how much ice cream it was going to take to get them back in the holiday mood. Spoiler alert: it was a lot.
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2. Don’t overpromise
After some much needed training on the gentler fare at Legoland, the kids did learn to love rides, so much so that they soon wanted a faster fix. I was happy to oblige, though was surprised to learn that height requirements were so strictly enforced — did they even exist when we were young? Queueing for one of the big rides at Chessington World of Adventures was a rude reminder: a health and safety killjoy suspected my two were under the 1.2m minimum and so brought out the measuring stick of doom. Much to my disappointment and theirs, they were two centimetres under. Away we went, shamefaced, vowing never to return to Chessington again. We have remained true to our word.
Parc Astérix in France is higher on the adrenaline scale
ALAMY
3. Pick the right park
Bearing in mind the above, there is a park for everyone. Disney, for example, has good rides but the real selling point is charm and atmosphere over white-knuckle thrills. The attention to detail on its gentle Peter Pan and It’s a Small World rides is astonishing, in my opinion, but they won’t keep a teenager happy for long. Universal Studios in Orlando or Los Angeles registers higher on the adrenaline scale, and in Europe consider PortAventura World in Spain, Europa-Park in Germany and Parc Astérix in France.
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4. Don’t risk divorce
They say worse things happen at sea and we’ve certainly had a few waterborne disasters. There are variations of the almost vertical waterslide at parks all over the world: the Rocket, at Villages Nature in Paris, has a trapdoor entry system which, while exhilarating, shot me out at such a speed as to deliver a fairly atomic wedgie upon landing. Still, I was happy to take this one for the team considering what later became known as the Funnel Incident. This occurred at Lalandia, a lesser-known park practically next door to the original Legoland in Denmark. It has fantastic water flumes and while my wife, Claire, hates this sort of thing, we did need a foursome to make up an even weight distribution on a rubber ring. In all honesty it didn’t look especially extreme but, once we were through the benign entry point, we plunged deep into a half-pipe and then high up into an almost vertical sort of whirlpool feature that was actually outside the building. As we twirled through several 360-degree spins I caught Claire’s eyes and it wasn’t so much a look of fear as sheer, visceral hatred. To this day we rarely speak of it.
You get great views of the Pacific from the Santa Monica pier
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5. Be mindful of local etiquette
To indulge a national stereotype, the Dutch are a pragmatic people, not averse to a quite direct approach to life. But apparently they regard the queue with even more sanctity than us Brits. At Efteling, a fairytale theme park with some pretty cracking rides, the locals looked on with dismay after I had purchased a fast pass to skip the line. All parks sell them and sometimes it’s the only way to guarantee doing everything in a day. So while the kids charged up the VIP lane for the Baron rollercoaster for the third time, I did my best to tough out the disparaging looks. “It’s just not very Dutch,” I was told later. Pah.
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6. Dress for the part
In my defence they were a very natty pair of paisley shorts by Ralph Lauren, which I thought struck the right holiday vibe and, crucially, were marked down by about 1,000 per cent in TK Maxx. The only downside was the rather relaxed fit. So as I boarded the OzIris rollercoaster at Parc Astérix in France, disaster was almost preordained. Why I had kept my phone in my pocket remains a mystery but it certainly didn’t stay there for long. Somewhere between the first loop and the corkscrewing rolls it flew out, destined for a hard landing somewhere below. The pigeons are probably still pecking at its broken screen today, along with many others.
What mistakes have you made at a theme park? Let us know in the comments
