Day 3

Virginia today with another big park/small park pairing, and no doubling-back this time. 

We'd start the majority of the day in Busch Gardens Williamsburg, another park I've been to before. The smaller park would be Go-Karts Plus, after that we'd have a long drive across the state and over the Appalachians. Initial planning had us staying in Charlottesville but given events of this year we decided to not to do that. Having a Pakistani, a Brit and two Germans as a cohesive group that get on with each other might be too much of a headfuck for some of the more unsavoury people there!

But first breakfast and one of many trips to Denny's. I overdid it with my selection, the peanut butter whip absolutely killed me, but it was new to try and I've learnt my lesson.

Busch Gardens is recognised as being one of the best themed parks in the US and has moved from just being themed to European things to be a bit more global, so since my last visit they'd dropped the "Europe" from their name. Today we decided to stick around as a group more than we did at Kings because the rides here are all really good and we were all happy to ride everything again...well nearly everything ha!

Tal subverting the cliche photo that most tourists take at red phone boxes.

The entrance is very British.

Now although the theming is top-notch in this park I am going to call out just how terrible this bus is. Just bring one over Busch people!

The first coaster was Loch Ness Monster located in the Scottish section of the park. It was sensible of the group to choose the best country first. The ride was a walk-on, despite it being the closest to the entrance. It is tucked away behind a building though so perhaps some people have problems locating it. It's an old ride (I'm not sure quite how old) but is holding up well and there appeared to be some effects in the mountain, which I don't recall experiencing on previous visits.

The one coaster I happily skipped this time was the kiddy one. Thomas and Tal rode it whilst Christof and I waited and leaked uncomfortable amounts of sweat out of every available pore. Yes, today was noticeably warmer than yesterday.

Next up was Apollo's Chariot a coaster that I have a knack for remembering as being smaller than it actually is. It's an OK ride with a simple out-and-back layout but lots of hills and airtime. I still don't like the fact being on the edge of the park, you can't really photograph the coaster though.

Stuck in front of Apollo's Chariot was one of the new rollercoasters for me to ride. This is Tempesto, a launched looping coaster with a small footprint, so an easy one to fit into most parks. I was undecided about this addition to the park. All the other rides are unique to the park; this one came out of a catalogue and I've ridden others exactly like it. The theming, of a circus human cannonball, is unique but the ride isn't. It also suffers from only being able to run a single train too giving the park throughput challenges. 

I do wonder if they're able to configure this to run continuously though. I think there's a challenge to ride this non-stop for an hour. 

The first time I came to Busch, this drop to the river belonged to the rather excellent and fondly remembered Big Bad Wolf suspended rollercoaster. On my second visit the coaster had gone; the upkeep of the ride had become too challenging and a decision taken to replace it. So on this trip it was nice to see the replacement Verbolten up and running.

The ride is themed around a car leaving the Autobahn and ending up in the dark haunted woods. There's a large element in which one of 3 stories are told, giving a reason to ride it more than once. We had another reason for doing so, in that it was a really good ride, but disappointingly we seemed to get the same story in the shed every time we did so. A really good ride but Big Bad Wolf sentimentality still has that as the better.

Another ride that had sadly been removed was The Legend of Darkastle indoor dark ride. A ride using the same system as Spiderman at Universal, this was a lot of run and sadly missed. The building now houses private events. It'd be nice if they repurposed it with another dark ride though.

Alpengeist, the large inverted coaster, is showing it's age unfortunately and looks a bit tired. 

The final new coaster for me was InvadR, a Viking themed wooden rollercoaster. It was an unremarkable ride unfortunately. Being a family ride I wasn't expecting it to be earth shattering but it just felt, well, safe. The trains for this came from Gwazi which now sits idle in more famous Busch park in Tampa.

In the Ireland section there's a new VR attraction themed around fairies. One of the challenges with VR headsets is keeping them clean as they pass from person to person; this needed turnaround adds to the throughput considerably. In an attempt to get around this Busch has come up with the novel idea of splitting the tech from the bit that needs cleaning. You wear the plastic frame in the queueline and then clip the headset, which is connected to the chair, to it. It works very well.

However, the ride didn't work so well because I sneezed during the calibration section and instead of looking straight ahead I turned my head into my shoulder centering the film to my left but the motion in the chair assumed straight ahead. So it was all a bit odd and almost gave me motion sickness, although the visual clarity was top notch. Given it had taken nearly 40 minutes to get through the queue I wasn't prepared to give it another go, although the cool indoor section would have been nice to have gone through a second time.

A random lawnmower display, not fitting with the park at all.

The water splash ride is really good on account of the excellent theming in the internal section.

The music coming out of this basketball attraction made it a place I kept going back to. So much good drum and bass!

Seeing "finger" and "fist" in the same text trigger my internal Finbar Saunders for a good 10 minutes.

More rides on Verbolten. The theming is really good. Zierer is the ride maker.

I also quite liked this, the logo is much more dynamic. Nice move Busch!

Also new since my last visit was the rotating Drop Tower. It would be nice to be allowed to take photos from up there.

The little boy must have been taught football by Moshgirl.

The German beer hall gave us more respite from the heat and we grabbed a quick bite/drink here.

We were trying to work out the story with this lot; in fact we probably spent too much time on it especially when we started what the dog's part in all of this was.

So in this report I've somehow managed to overlook the biggest coaster in the park. Griffon, which is probably my favourite of all the dive coasters. It's still running very well but as a jaded 40+ person I'm no longer blown away like I remember being the first time I rode it.

I recall the animal show being really good fun, however with the heat being as hot as it was, the park had taken the decision to run a reduced show, which was obviously the right thing to do. We got a little bit of dog skipping and a parrot doing maths in a very stripped down show. (I'd be interested in hearing how the parrot maths is done)

Griffon did get stuck later in the day, I'd have liked the evacuation.

Some shots of the infamous inter-locking loops on Loch Ness Monster.

We all liked the park and having gone around the park twice we decided we'd had enough Busch for one day. (and I've just triggered that Finbar Saunders again). So we left the park and headed north.

Go Karts Plus is exactly what it says. Predominantly a go-kart track but with a few extra rides.

Our first sign of Sheik Hand Dip, the infamous Arab Oil magnate who is trying to buy all the old German rollercoasters. 

and this was the coaster, a small Python Pit thing that is on the "should know better" side of the ride spectrum. But the staff were cool and pleased we'd dropped by.

A rather odd Wizard of Oz game in the indoor part of the park.

On our drive to the hotel, nothing much happened other than this truck breaching the median and coming right us. Fortunately we realised it hadn't and was being towed backwards by another lorry. 

We'd asked our hotel to welcome us with a red carpet. That didn't happen but they did have lots of rubber ducks waiting for us. A nice touch to have one in each room too! 

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