Emo in a teacup

Went to Alton towers today, with Julie, Adam, Tim, Jas and a couple of other pharmacy guys & girls I hadn't met before. The day didn't start too well, as it involved getting up at the ungodly hour of 8am, which no student should have to do this soon after exams, but other than that, I can't really complain.

We got there at 10, just as the rides opened, after a car ride with a rather odd mix CD (named Berndatte) of Julie's, which seemed to exclusively feature either Howard Shore or Metallica, with a single track by Mussorgsky too.

Started off on the rapids, which seemed designed purely for the purpose of soaking Adam - good for a laugh for the rest of us at least. Pretty fun, if a bit bumpy. Next off we went on the Runaway Mine Train, MC'ed by a very bored employee. I'm fairly sure he had a script full of sizzling one-liners and quips, but unfortunately he strayed into ad-libbing too much, which let the show down a bit. For those of you who aren't quite used to my writing yet, I'll translate; There was a twat making a fool of himself on a microphone whilst we queued, but as he was in control of the magic buttons, we all smiled sweetly and secretly hated him inside. Much like I'll have to do hundreds of times a day in Paris soon...

Nemesis and Air were next, and each was even better than I recall - possibly due to the rather short queues for both this time around. Both great thrill rides, neither of which are particularly nauseating, very well constructed indeed. Air was particularly great, nothing like lying on your back on a roller-coaster, pointing towards the shining sun on a lovely summer morning, might get me one of those for the garden...

Despite all the other great looking things on the map, once we'd finished Air there was one place which stood out above all the others as one we had to visit - Rita's Ribs. This was a really nice bar & grill restaurant which specialised in...oh, I'll let you guess. The chefs managed to whip up something nice for Julie, whilst the rest of us has a full rack of baby pork barbecue ribs, with a bunch of other stuff piled high on the plate (and in fact, falling off it, as soon as anything was touched). If there's one must see attraction at Alton Towers, it's gotta be this.

The food wasn't even too pricy, £8 is about what I'd expect to pay for a meal that nice even outside a theme park - and the rest of the stuff inside was very overpriced. This was a real plus as I'd already happily accepted paying extra for food, thanks to some basic science Julie taught us in the Air queue - adrenaline slows the digestive system. This is what can cause you to vomit when you come off a coaster, but also means that the food sates your hunger for a lot longer - which is why you pay more for the same thing when you're in an adrenaline park like Alton Towers. Either that or they just like making a profit, but I prefer to think the best of large corporations.

Once we'd had this, and abused our free refill torpedo of Coke (£5 for 4 people to drink sugar all day, yes please) some more, it was off to settle our stomach on Corkscrew. Unfortunately, someone else had clearly had this idea 10 minutes before us, and threw up on the train, which caused a slight delay whilst buckets and 'air drying' (ie: running the coaster about) were implemented. The MC for this ride initially described the incident as "Some muppet's puked..." (on microphone), but after consulting his headset, it became a 'technical problem'.

Unfortunately, a few rides after cleaning had been finished, a real technical problem cropped up, and so we jumped out of the queue, leaving a car full of people stuck at a 45 degree angle whilst men with harnesses wandered up and down towards them. In an original and inventive move, we followed the stream of other people leaving the Corkscrew queue to join the queue for Rita: Queen Of Speed, handily located a mere 10 seconds away.

This meant more queueing, with the same bizarre musak playing at us - one track looped, that managed to encompass more genres than I knew existed. Rita was well worth the wait though, I'm sure it's actually a great coaster all around, but the initial acceleration causes you to leave your brain behind, with its 4.7Gs of force, so most of the ride was spent in mute shock.

Still minus four brains, we then proceeded to Hex, which I was sure I'd seen before, and was rubbish, but turned out to be something completely novel. I won't spoil the surprise for anyone who hasn't been on there, but for anyone who has - I completely fell for it - I'm blaming Rita for that one.

After a quick hop on Enterprise (on which the upset to stomach unfortunately outweighs the fun, still quite good though), we had a very quick queue for Oblivion - as the ride had recently broken down, so everyone had left the queue. This was quite a disappointment, and probably the worst of the 'top attractions' in the park. Still worth it for a mere 10 minute queue though.

We ended the day with the Log Flume, which had an upside, a downside, and a very puzzling question. Without consulting search engines - try thinking of three songs with the word 'Bubble' in the title. It's not easy - I may post the answers up later, though I'm sure you'll just Google them later if you particularly care. The downside to this ride was, as I'm sure you guessed, that I sat in the front, and managed to get completely soaked through. On the upside however, there were lots of nice girls coming off the ride to look at whilst queueing, who were either equally soaked, or stripping off to dry.

Actually, that was a slight lie above, we ended our time in the main park with a Log Flume, but couldn't pass up the opportunity for Crazy Golf at the end, handily situated near the car park. The course was 18 holes and absolutely superb, even if I did lose to Tim and Adam thanks to an appalling performance on the last two holes. Each hole represented a ride or zone in the park, which gave the whole thing quite a nice theme too.

Home now, great day - I'll put some photos into this post later, so check back in a couple of days, for when I've grabbed them from someone's Facebook :)

Oh - better explain the title and picture hadn't I. On our way out we passed the Teacups ride, where, amongst all the happy smiling people, there was one emo kid sitting on his own in a teacup, looking depressed and not even spinning the wheel in front of him. At the end of the ride he just put his head down on the wheel for a while, before getting up. I tried to take a photo of him, but just ended up with a video of myself saying "I think I'm recording something" - smooth. Thus, you're left with the Googled image instead.

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Nb: I think my soul really is sliding away, I went to type Microsoft three times instead of 'microphone' when writing the above.