Your Won't Get Me On That!

It takes an awful lot to get Old Grumpy into a theme park, but free tickets always help, and so it was yesterday that I found myself at Drayton Manor with a work’s outing from PAS who I worked for some years ago. With Dawid, Kasia and Peter, I made up a small group, which worked well as most rides are designed around groups of four. And we went on everything – and I mean everything (apart from Maelstrom which was knackered. Sorry, closed for maintenance). Now, I wasn’t overly keen about these rides, given my age and death threshold, but the young ‘uns need to know that some of us oldies can still rock. As a result, if it revolved, rotated, catapulted, bungeed, rocked, rolled, corkscrewed, twisted, dropped you into a pit or soaked you – we rode it. In one case, Apocalypse, three times. We also experienced 4D-cinema, which was great. The rides are a heady mix of anticipation, suspense, fear and an amazing adrenaline rush. It’s an incredible feeling, impossible to put in to words. All the scary rides take pictures of you at a critical point; these are displayed at the end of the ride when you get off in case you wish to buy one – and I’m pleased to say that Old Grumpy didn’t let the side down with tightly closed eyes on any of them – in most cases I was too busy screaming ‘Who’s the daddy now, then?,” at the crucial moment.

The best ride was Apocalypse. You are strapped in a harness, which proceeds up to the top of a tower. Then the brakes are released, and you plummet down to the pit at the bottom. You have a choice on this ride; one side has four seats; one side is standing on a small floor, and for the real lunatics, like us, try the standing no-floor version. We went twice on this side, and returned later to try the seated version - thinking it would be quite tame after our earlier experience. The reason you're seated is that is goes even faster than the standing one; and it's as if you are in a Tom & Jerry cartoon - the seat suddenly disappears and your arse spends the rest of the trip trying to catch up with it. Amazing.

It was a grand day out. Haven’t had such a rush since … actually, I discovered that I hadn’t actually experienced such a rush. It certainly puts sorting out my sock drawer into perspective.


View Larger Map