What a busy day we have planned for ourselves. Our methods of transportation include feet, shuttle bus, escalator, airport tram, shuttle bus to park, coaster, shuttle bus to airport, 3 trains, and a car.
As I said yesterday this is probably one of a couple of amusement parks in Europe that we've always wanted to visit.
Since we were the first to get dropped off last night we happened to be getting on an empty bus this morning. Good thing because by the time we were done going to hotels there wasn't room for our last passengers. 30 minutes after we got on we were dropped off at the airport - a mere 2 miles away.
We needed to find the Parc Asterix shuttle bus ticket booth. After a side trip to the wrong terminal we made it to the one we wanted. $90€ for two Parc tickets and transportation.
We boarded the bus and arrived at the park in 15 minutes. Entering the park with no lines we all waited til 10am for the ride area to open up. Ready, set, go. Walk fast!
It seems like all the teenagers and US headed for the newest ride, Oziris. at the back of the park. Since we didn't know if we would have time to ride again we decided to wait the extra 15 minutes for a front seat ride.
Our seats were like old style ski lift chairs - with feet dangling. This is a great coaster. Very smooth and lots of surprises and new elements for us. At one point we expected to dip down into a hole before going into a loop. But this coaster gave you a little uplift before heading into the hole. Nice touch and wholly unexpected. I can't remember a barrel role on a coaster that didn't go clockwise. This one did that too, BUT near the end of the ride it also went counterclockwise! Another thrill.
We would have liked to take another ride but the line was over an hour long by the time we got off. Bummer.
We wandered through the back area of the park in our way to three more coasters.
We passed a ride that we wanted to do but it was closed for most of the day until we passed it close to our leave time and it was open then.
We hopped into a single rider line on Zeus and cut our ride wait time in half. It was a nice old time wooden coaster with Philadelphia Tobaggan Company cars and it seemed quite long.
Before lunch we had a ride on Le Vol D’ Icar a smaller steel coaster with nice theming in the queue line.
Goudurix was a typical Arrow coaster that banged your head around inside the horse-collar type over-the-head shoulder restraints. Ouch. Ouch. Ouch. That was all I could say while we we riding.
Thankfully it was time for food. We had 3 kinds of breaded chicken, some fries, and a couple of "Coke Lights" for lunch.
There was a ride up high on a track where it looked like you used to pedal yourself around the track. I'm sure there were capacity problems with this ride so they powered it up and they could then actually get people through the attraction. The track overlooked an attraction that wasn't working and we got some pictures of it since we had planned to ride it.
The next attraction, Le Defi de Caesar, was like 4 things wrapped into one. 10 people at a time would put their face into a viewing screen and a camera would take your picture. Then you moved on. In the next rather large room were characatures of Roman soldiers of all sizes and shapes. Your face was projected onto these soldiers on the front screen. After 30 or 40 people came into the room the back screen would come to life and now you as an animated soldier would march across the screen. I'd never seen this done before and it was cool.
We moved on to a room where an audio animatronic Caesar talked to us.
We moved on. The next room was like the Magic House at Gardaland. Two rows of people sit across from each other and our seats sway independently from the wall behind us. It was effective in Gardaland but not here for some reason.
We moved on. The final room was square with a pool of water in the center. They made it rain in here and water splashed around from corners to the ground.
The attraction gets marks for combining all these different elements into one ride.
We grabbed ice cream on our way to stand in line at a bobsled roller coaster ride called Trace Du Houra. We love these rides and wished there were more of them and that they were longer.
We shopped back to the front of the park until 3:20 and headed for the shuttle bus that would take us back to the airport.
We had checked our luggage at the airport and so we went to retrieve it before getting dinner and finding a comfortably place to eat.
It will take us 3 1/2 hours on 3 trains to get to Nathan's city, Maubeuge, north of Paris. He'll be waiting for us when we arrive.
He looks great. And Annie is here too! France (and a fiancé) have treated him well.
The 4 us us go to Annie's house across from the shop and we talk for an hour before we leave her and head for Nathan's apartment about 10 minutes away.
What a busy day THAT was!
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