Come on, Get it on, Riding in our Rollercoaster

Went to PortAventura today - I'd not heard of it before, but Mark had, being well-clued-up in these sorts of things.

Absolutely loads of fun, with some fantastic roller-coasters. Ok, it ain't Eurodisney, but then again it undoubtedly will get better weather than Paris does - and it's also an easy ride for Barcelona and Sitges*.


Furius Baco (pictured - not one of mine from today, but used from Flickr - part of azriel100's photostream), Dragon Kahn and Stampide were the main 3 coasters and they all took my breath away. Dragon Kahn in particular is 1.5mins of screaming, basically.

Bit over-run with buggies - and with the rides scattered across the park, it was quite a challenge to get from one to the next in good speed - and a fair smattering of your local chav of course too, but I can only begin to imagine what Alton Towers/Thorpe Park are like on that score these days, folkettes.

Food was better than Eurodisney (it could hardly be worse), although we're not talking culinary expertise here - however it was edible and hit the spot. The main difference to Disney parks I noticed was the litter  and grafitti - i.e. lots of each, in contrast to spotless parks in Paris and California I'd been to - and also that the attention-to-detail wasn't as all-encompassing. However this did make the rise to the top of the Dragon Kahn coaster quite intriguing, as it revealed a view of the wider industrial port area and general shabby scrubland around the area...

On a related note - in the end, it was bloody easy to get here, but my attempts to pre-prepare and find out which trains to get, how much they might cost etc, were foiled by the buggy, incomprehensible, Renfe website. It appeared that there might only be one train a day - and we almost booked tickets to nearby Tarragona (bidding to be 2016 European Capital of Culture , random fact fans) with a view to getting a taxi. It was only the chaos of the website rejecting all attempts to buy train tickets that meant we didn't... and thankfully, as it turns out there was a decent service running most of the day.

There is actually a Port Aventura station, although it's a mildly bleak halt at the foot of the park which added to the feeling that, out-of-season in mid-winter, the deserted park area could feel as eerie as anything from Survivors.

* insert your own jokes about Sitges and an easy ride here.

Edit 28/12/12: Replaced the picture that used to illustrate this post with a CC-licensed one. Despite Yogi commenting on my use of it, as you can see; at some point it became no longer embeddable