The Tale of the Toe! (Thorpe Park)

Name: lily7star

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Product:	Thorpe Park
Date:	09/08/01 (1250 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Good SEason Ticket Option, New Rides, For all ages

Disadvantages: Expensive for a day

It all started with an argument. The kind where someone gets hurt. In this case it was Alexander, and when his older brother slammed the bedroom door, Alexander’s toe just happened to be in the hinge.

The door broke, the toe, thankfully didn’t, but a bigger, bluer, more painful toe it’s difficult to imagine.

The day after the toe incident we were due to be going to Thorpe Park - a treat which had been promised and looked forward to for a long time – and it was the last day of the holidays so postponing it didn’t look like a good option. Mum being an enterprising type of person, decided that the solution would be to find either a small wheelchair or a very large buggy at Thorpe Park.

*** The beginning of this review is the tale of the toe. It’s important because we saw a whole different view of the park, but if you want to skip to the more general park info, I’ve included that further down. ***

It didn’t begin too well. Having got Alexander to hobble painfully across the vast expanse of car park, in through the entrance, and across the bridge to what looked like a promising place to find Guest Services, we then looked for somewhere to hire a buggy or wheelchair without success. Eventually we discovered someone who looked like they worked there who told us that we would have to walk all the way back to the entrance and find one there. By this time the toe was already making its presence felt, so the nice young man agreed to go and find one for us.

We waited. We waited a long time, eventually the nice young man came back and very apologetically told me we would have to go back out of Thorpe Park to a hut before the entrance where apparently they would hire us one. Back we went, into the queue for Guest Services which was outside of the park itself (yes really!) Here they told us that they only had full-size wheelchairs, and that it would cost me a £50 deposit for one. As I
didn’t actually have £50, they took my credit card number and gave us a large, heavy adult wheelchair.

Thorpe Park is definitely not 100% wheelchair friendly. We discovered kerbs we would never have even noticed before, we struggled with restaurant doors while people stood and watched, and then quite by accident we discovered that wheelchair users get preferential service on all the rides! At last the toe had come into its own and my kids were ecstatic at being able to ride Detonator and Thunder River without a minute’s queuing.

Having said that we had no queuing, be aware if you are going to Thorpe Park with someone in a wheelchair, that although you will get preferential treatment, actually getting on to some of the rides through the exit (which is used by wheelchair users to bypass the queues) is a bit of a trial. Thunder River is definitely not suited for someone who has serious problems walking as the walk onto the ride is long and includes a number of steps. The Flying Fish is extremely difficult to manoeuvre a wheelchair up to and we have all learnt a lot from this particular visit about how difficult and frustrating it must be for a family visiting this kind of attraction with a wheelchair user.(By the way, I just spelled that “hellchair” – do you think that was Freudian?!)

. If you are visiting with a wheelchair user, and have a disabled car sticker, there is disabled parking near the entrance. I think you’d need to ask a parking attendant about parking there. The wheelchairs Thorpe Park have available to hire are extremely heavy and cumbersome to manoeuvre. Be aware of that if you are thinking of visiting with someone who has poor mobility. I am very grateful I only had a child to push around. To get onto the rides through the exit, there are special phones near the rides. These don’t always work, so you may struggle to get someone’s attention.

This was far from our only v
isit to Thorpe Park, and I will go on to talk more generally about the park in a minute, but it was by far the most educational. A final plea to end this section of my review – please be aware of people with wheelchairs. It’s a completely different experience, and we found it quite shocking how people stared at us, especially at Alexander, and how some people watched us struggle with doors without offering to help. Please think of holding doors, please don’t stare, and please remember that people who use wheelchairs are just like you and me.

Ok, I’m off my soap box!

As for Thorpe Park generally, well I’d thoroughly recommend getting a season pass if you live in the area, as this will cover Thorpe Park, Chessington, Alton Towers, Warwick Castle, The London Eye, Madame Tussauds, the Planetarium and the Rock Circus. A season ticket for myself and my 3 boys cost me £220 and lasts for exactly one year from the date of issue. Since entrance to just one of the parks will cost a family of 4 approximately £60 for a day, if you live close enough to any of these attractions to make a few visits possible, a season ticket offers excellent value for money.

Thorpe Park is one of those rare parks which really seems to have something for everyone. From Thorpe Farm, which is open again now after the foot and mouth crisis, and is a little haven of countryside idyll away from the crowds on the other side of the lake, to the new rides Vortex and Zodiac which are not for the faint-hearted, Thorpe Park has variety and space.

Thorpe Farm can be accessed from Model World by waterbus which runs every 15 minutes over the Summer. It has been a working farm for decades and retains a real country feel to it. Here kids can see everything from llamas to the more traditional ducks sheep and goats, not to mention our personal favourites, the guinea pigs! Due to foot and mouth, the farm animals can not be petted at the moment, but thi
s will go back to normal once the risk of an outbreak is past.

You can take a steam train back from the farm to Canada Creek where Loggers Leap is situated. Remember all the TV footage of Princess Di at Thorpe Park? This was one of her favourite rides. We used to know the director of the park who had an autographed picture of himself riding Loggers Leap with the princess and her boys hanging in his hallway. Apparently she loved it. All the more so as she skipped the queues! Canada Creek is one of my favourite areas of the park and there is a Burger King nearby so you could sit and enjoy watching people getting soaked while you eat.

As you enter the park, turn left out of the Atlantis dome and you will find the 2 newest rides alongside the beginnings of the world’s first 10-looping coaster which is due to open in 2002. Watching the coaster being built has been fascinating for my boys as one of their favourite PC games is Rollercoaster Tycoon! They have astounded me with their rollercoaster knowledge, and it really is strange watching the new coaster take shape just as theirs do on screen. Both Vortex and Zodiac involve rotating at high speeds, so avoid them unless you have a strong stomach! Like the other “intense” rated rides, Vortex can only be ridden by those over 140cm in height. Zodiac, however, can be ridden by kids over 110 cms if accompanied by an adult. We rode these rides early in the afternoon and hardly had to queue at all – worth seeing if that’s a quiet time for them. Oh, and when I say “we”, I mean my kids rather than myself! There have been a lot of complaints that Zodiac and Vortex have been closed rather a lot, and Zodiac did have problems the day we were there. I think the ride reliability has improved, and from what I hear, they are more likely to be open now than they were earlier in the season.

If you have little kids, there are a lot of tamer rides in the Octopus’s Gar
den. You could let them ride these and sneak off for a quick doughnut. Fresh, hot and crispy (forget the calorie-laden) they are a real treat and come at £3.99 for 10 or something like 60p each.

If the weather is nice, there are quite a few water rides in addition to Logger’s Leap. Thunder River isn’t too wet even on a cold day, but I’d dare you to try Tidal Wave if the temperature isn’t soaring. There is also a beach area and some water slides, so you could just spend an afternoon pretending you were at the beach…

One show you really shouldn’t miss (unless you have very sensitive young children!) is “Pirates 4D” which we have seen twice and one of my kids has seen a good deal more than that. As an added bonus, you can watch people dropping down the Detonator while you wait to get in. Detonator is one of the only “intense” rides you won’t hear people screaming on….it’s too quick and too scary for that. Alexander’s face was a picture when he rode it – eyes wide open, mouth wide open and no sound coming out! You can ride this one if you’re over 130cm tall.

Thorpe Park is a great place for a day out. Definitely better if the weather is hot because of the preponderance of water rides, but since the addition of Detonator, Zodiac and Vortex this year, X-No Way Out is no longer the only exciting ride to do if it’s cold. To be honest though, my kids do not rate X-No Way Out very highly at all. It’s a backwards rollercoaster in the dark, but the queues are among the worst in the park (approx one hour or more if you can see the queue from the outside!) and we reckon it’s vastly overrated. Forget it unless you feel you absolutely have to do it once, or the queues aren’t too bad.

Plenty of food to be bought throughout the park, but a nice place to eat is the Farm as it feels more like you’re eating out in the countrys
ide than in the middle of a theme park.

All in all we rate this for a visit, it’s easy to find – signposted off the M25, and has improved vastly over recent years. If you buy tickets and then decide you’d like a season ticket, you can upgrade you daily pass for a yearly one and take the day’s cost off it. A pretty safe way to decide if you like the place enough to want to come back again. We definitely do.

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