Day 6 - Europa Park
The only evidence that remains of today’s breakfast
Today marks the halfway point of our holiday and we’re keen to get back into Europa Park and finish off the still extensive list of rides we haven’t got to yet. Despite walking miles we hadn’t yet really found some of the countries (Greece and Switzerland are both tucked away and we ultimately don’t visit Europa Park Ireland aka ‘Children’s World’
at all). After another okay passable campsite breakfast we head straight for Iceland at rope drop.
Iceland is the home of Wodan and Blue Fire, two of the three biggest coasters in the park
and the main ones we hadn’t got round to yet. Wodan is a wooden coaster and features this grand Viking (or Lord of the Rings Gondor?) style entrance-way.
The coaster itself is a mighty beast. We opt for single rider to get in and out quicker and this proves to be a good choice as we’re on in a couple of minutes which helps a lot for the Blue Fire queue.
This ride is exciting but as often with wooden coasters, very rough. It’s like being in a minor albeit exciting car accident. We did both enjoy it but like I say rough and you need to like rollercoasters to appreciate this one. Blue Fire is next and we scoot through with just a 10 minute wait.
This was my favourite of the Europa Park rollercoasters. Fast but smooth with acceleration and plenty of thrills I made it slightly better than Silver Star (which looks the more impressive of the two IMHO). DD enjoyed it too so we’re buzzing by the time we leave Iceland
Next up we are on a mission to find Greece which is weirdly tucked away in the park and seemed hard to access. The main ride we’re after is the second of the water-coasters, Poseidon. This one just edges Portugal’s effort from Day 1 for us. We do a couple of other rides, Cassandra’s Curse (awful spinny inside weirdness
) and Atlantis Adventure - a shooting ride through ala Buzz where shockingly I get beaten in a shooting game by DD for the first time ever.
3073! there must have been something wrong with my gun 
Annoyingly on the way in I had said to DD that I’d noticed in the DLP photos that she wasn't lining the gun up properly with her eyeline and showed her how to do it. This was the result and I also had to cough up bonus pocket money
I took a faux arty shot of some cobbles while I waited for DD outside the loos and we did a few minor attractions before stopping for an early lunch.
For this we moved back to the nice little courtyard area outside France where there’s a pleasingly shop and cafe lined lake that would put anyone in a relaxed frame of mind with the sun shining.
There's also a dessert steamboat
We opt for pizza/salad from the large quick service place Mille Fleurs. Almost all the EP restaurants seemed to be quick service BTW but there was never a shortage of tables.
Pizzas orders taken and fulfilled by a lady who was ruthlessly good at it!
Mine was the diavola pizza, DD the chicken schnitzel salad thing. Both were good albeit with unwanted pumpkin added, they do have several hundred tonnes of the stuff to use up I guess but eating pumpkin is never a first choice!
Followed this up with ice creams outside. DD the usual boring choice and I went for blue candy floss combined with a flavour that the sign, the server and google could only identify as ‘Green.’
YOLO
She was pretty horrified at combining green with blue candy floss but I insisted and on about the third go she scooped it out. Fuss over nothing
neither flavour tasted of much other than sugar and ice cream!
In fact my ice cream wasn’t even the strangest sight of the hour because we went from there into Madame Freudenreich’s Curiosites
a bizarre dark ride through a dinosaur filled garden where an old lady is holding some sort of a dinosaur party.
Yes that is a T-Rex holding a slice of birthday cake
Plenty of oddness here. We decided to leave the dark rides for a while and did another of the Autopia style rides, went on a overhead pedalling thing based on Leonardo da Vinci’s inventions (a bit like Pteradon Flyers at Islands of Adventure but taking adults too) then another slow boat ride (was it Venice?). After this it was time for a proper ride so we tried Euro-Mir in the Russia area. It’s supposed to be a space ride but it’s more like a bad nightclub themed Primeval Whirl
and we left feeling faintly unwell.
The final stops of the day were in Switzerland where we waited about 20 minutes (20 mins was the peak wait time over the whole 2 days) for the Swiss bobsled ride. This looks fairly ordinary but was actually pretty exciting so worth the wait
We probably did another minor ride or two over the two days but I can’t recall them all here, there were dozens of smaller attractions we missed but only one middling looking coaster - Pegasus which was over in a corner of Greece that we didn’t fancy walking back round to. Great rides here and solid (cheap) food, the shopping is a bit weak though.
In the evening we chilled out and packed most of our stuff before the travel day tomorrow. Dinner was in the campsite restaurant (see the breakfast picture from yesterday for the stage). There’s a show on, a country singer basically which was okay. The service is not brilliant in that restaurant to be honest (unlike the rest of the park). They always seemed to be understaffed. We ordered ribs and a burger and were glad to be done in there after an hour
Ribs were excellent. The burger, so-so with way too much bread. DD cleared her plate which was impressive. And that was it for Europa Park, we enjoyed this leg of the stay a lot - just one more night of the tent to survive!