Parque Warner — Jim Winslett

The four jet-lagged travellers split up today, as we had different interests in what to see/do. Rob, Heather, and Ken decided to have a tour of the Royal Palace and I took off to the neighbouring town of San Martin de la Vega to go to Parque Warner Madrid, a large amusement park about a half hour south of Madrid.

Yes, that’s the lineup to get into the front gate. Actually, that’s the midpoint of the lineup. It goes as far back behind this point as it goes forward. Why on earth was I getting here this close to opening, when as an amusement park veteran I should know better?

Well, you might remember from the previous day’s journal that the hotel concierge accidentally got me a ticket for yesterday instead of today. So this morning, when I should’ve been already on the way to the park, I was waiting for the hotel to contact the park and find out whether I could use that ticket anyway and if not, what do we do. I also realized that she bought me the ticket with the Senior Discount. Excuse me, I don’t qualify for that for another nine years! Le sigh. I guess I looked extra-tired yesterday.

Anyway, it eventually got sorted, but it meant having to go to customer service first - and that lineup was around 15 minutes. The lady at the window spoke no English, but I at least had a copy of the email the concierge sent explaining the problem. She punched up some things into the computer, then punched up Google Translate on her phone to type to me that my ticket had been validated and I could go into the park.

Unfortunately, literally thousands of people had already gone in by this time and my usual plan of attack at a new-to-me park went right out the window.

The park has a brand new coaster this year and it’s right up front. I know that it will be the first thing that the majority of visitors will run to first - so normally, I try to get to the park before it opens, so I’m one of the first ones in. Then I’ll ride the new coaster right away and hit up several other ones while most of the people coming in behind me are heading for the new one. Alas, however, with all those people going in while I was in the customer service line, that probably wouldn’t work out.

I got to the turnstiles and scanned my ticket. It wouldn’t let me in. I found an employee and she pointed at the date on it. I pointed to a note that the customer service rep had written on it (I’m glad she did!) and they let me into the park, finally. Yay! I did a quick check of the park’s app to see how bad the queue was for the new coaster. It was already showing nearly an hour. Those app times are always far too hopeful - you can usually add about 20% more time than what it claims. So much for doing the new coaster first! I headed off to Stunt Fall - a Vekoma brand Giant Inverted Boomerang coaster.

I picked this because these types of coaster are notoriously slow to load and unload and the throughput of riders per hour is abysmal, so the queue would get really long, really quickly. I hoped that most everyone was still in the queue for the new coaster and I was right. There was no queue at all for this and I was able to get right on! This was the fourth one of this type of coaster I’ve ridden and while I like the concept of the ride, most of them execute that concept quite poorly and the ride itself isn’t that good.

Here’s the deal: the cars hang below the track like a ski lift. The train is pulled backward out of the loading station up one of those vertical spikes, with riders facing the ground. The spikes are around 18 storeys tall. Once the train reaches the top of the spike, it is released and races straight down the spike, through the station, and up into that curvy “cobra roll” element right above that brown building. Then it does a standard loop (where the train is in the pic above), then heads up the other vertical spike, this time with riders facing the sky. It’s pulled up that spike, then released and the train does the whole thing again, only backward.

Normally, these things have rock-hard restraints on either side of your head and you get pummelled on all those twists and turns. This one, however, had super-soft pads and the track was really smooth. It was easily the best version of the four of these that I’ve ridden. I liked it a lot!

Next up was Superman / la Atracción de Acero (Superman: Ride of Steel). This is one of those monikers that Six Flags likes to slap onto some coaster in their parks, even though the multiple rides with that same name have very little in common. It’s annoying. (This park began its life as a Six Flags park and some of the names remained even after ownership changed).

This particular one is a B&M (Bolliger & Mabillard, a Swiss engineering firm) floorless coaster. So called because after you load the train, the floor literally folds away into the station house and the cars roll out with feet hovering above the track with no floor in the cars.

That’s all you’ll get for a photo, however, since the coaster heads out into a patch of land behind some fences where maintenance have their storage areas. There isn’t a place in the park to get photos of the rest of the ride. What I can tell you, though, is that it’s very, very good. Big drops, fast turns, and seven inversions (upside-down moments). I thought the gold standard for floorless coasters was Superman Krypton Coaster at Fiesta Texas in San Antonio, but I think this one can hold its own against that one any day. The queue was about 10 minutes and by the time I got off the ride, it had grown to three times that. Moving on…

Next, it was off to a B&M standard Batman model inverted coaster. (Inverted refers to the track being overhead and the cars riding below it, like the Stunt Fall coaster mentioned a few paragraphs ago. This one is called Shadows of Arkham. If you know your Batman lore, you may remember that Arkham Asylum is a loonie bin in Gotham City. The coaster itself is a standard “Batman” clone found at nearly every Six Flags park in the world…

While the ride was pretty much as expected, having the queue placed inside the abandoned asylum was genuinely spooky.

By this time, pretty much every queue was stacking up, so I figured I might as well tough it out and do the new coaster. The queue was still an hour long, but that meant that it hadn’t grown much at all since the park opening, so it had reached it levelling-off point. Waiting until later to ride it would still mean an hour-long queue and there’s also that golden rule of coasting: If you want to ride it and it’s running, ride it now. If you wait to ride it later, it might break down and not re-open. So I did.

I was absolutely blown away by this ride. It’s fun, it’s thrilling, it’s smooth as glass, the trains are comfortable, it has moments of airtime, free-fall, hanging upside-down, fast parts, slow parts, four magnetically propelled booster sections, and an OMG moment when you’re riding about 4 storeys up, completely sideways, and the train bucks and you’re catapulted out of your seat, sideways. It was absolutely wicked. (it’s that little bit of track in front of the squarish tower near the centre of the photo). I could go on and on with more details and photos, but if you’re interested in that, you can see the article I wrote on it here :https://www.ellocoaster.com/batman-gotham-city-escape

After that, I headed into the Old West portion of the park. Europeans seem to be fascinated with the American Old West, as nearly every European theme park I’ve been to has had an Old West section. Most are super-cheesy. This one was actually astonishingly good-looking as theme park designs go.

There was a huge flume ride in this section called Rio Bravo, but time didn’t permit me to try it out. All the queues were up around an hour now and I still had three more coasters to go.

Also in this section was a very large wood coaster with the ho-hum name of Coaster-Express. It was built by Roller Coaster Corporation of America, a firm that made a big splash in the late 1990s and early 2000s building huge wood coasters. They didn’t realize that just because you can build a giant coaster out of wood, it doesn’t mean that you should do it. They only built five coasters before the company went bankrupt and that’s five too many, if you ask me. I’d been on two of the five and both were awful. This one was just as bad as the other two. Boring layout, no steep drops, and as rough as riding a jackhammer. Having to wait in an hour-long queue just made me like it even less. Once and done.

From here, all that was left were two family-friendly coasters in the kiddie land section. First up was Tom y Jerry Picnic en la Parque (Tom & Jerry’s Picnic in the Park) a cute Zierer brand Tivoli model coaster with a really long train. It was more fun than I expected it would be.

And the last one was Correcaminos Bip, Bip (Roadrunner Beep-Beep), which I assumed would be a tiny little kiddie coaster, but it was anything but that. It was quite a fun, zippy little coaster with a decent drop and lots of tight turns that I’d have ridden again if I’d had time.

But as time was running out, I had just enough left to snag another ride on the Gotham City Escape - and I liked it even better the second time. It’s just so, so, SO good.

Then it was back to the hotel - I got a couple of shots of pretty buildings on the way back into the city centre.

At the hotel, I met up with the other three travellers in the lounge and heard about their visit to the Royal Palace (it was apparently gorgeous, but they don’t allow photos inside, so I’ll have to google it). Heather got a nice shot of the outside -

And the three of them got photos standing behind period costumes. Fun!

We all had a great time today, doing our separate outings, but it was nice to get back together at the end over dinner and wine. Even though I knew Rob would’ve hated the day at the Parque, I missed not having him there with me.