MOA

The last day of the club leg had us enjoying the Nickelodeon park for an hour before the mall was opened to the public. After a run-in with a security guard on a power trip who to put it bluntly acted like a dick (he ended up cycling off into the distance having made no impact to us whatsoever) we were invited in.

The best coasters have short snappy names like Katun, Montu or Nemesis. The new coaster at this park hasn't learnt from that calling their coaster "Spongebob Squarepants Rock Bottom Plunge". Fortunately you get a smoother ride than pronouncing it.



Its one of those Eurofighter coasters that are starting to pop up in parks where space is at a premium.

The vertical lift reduces the footprint a lot, and makes the ride instantly unique (for those who have never ridden one before that is).

They've done a good job fitting the ride into the park!

and the inversions gave the riders a good reason to scream. During the ERS I got chatting to one of the park PR people and they were saying that whilst the park was doing pretty well since its recent rebranding they were facing a challenge theming the park to a demographic not associated with the parks theme. Basically Nickeoloden is for little kids who are for the most part to small to ride most of the big coasters.

Next to SBRBP is Ghost Blasters, a really fun shooting dark ride where the targets work and the guns for the most part shoot straight. The ride op running this ride was great setting us target scores to achieve. It was quite funny that she couldn't quite get my t-shirt.

She couldn't work out why someone so evil would be smiling.

It doesn't look like these two did too well, or perhaps knowing they were soon going home was getting them down.

They do seem happier on the Barnyard Hayride though.

Pepsi Orange Streak is the oversized coaster that covers most of the park. I'm not aware of any pepsi drink that would leave an orange streak though.

When riding the orange streak should you go "weeeeeeeeeeeeeee"? Or is that yellow streak?

Before the mall was built, the site used to be home to the Metropolitan Stadium, the city's baseball ground. This plaque marks the location of the homeplate, and having seen the photo I've realised it's not in any kind of context so if you're looking for it when you visit this is no hope whatsoever!

The chances of any of us riding this was slim, pun intended.

The rather amusingly titled Airbender is based on a TV show that I don't think has ever aired in the UK. For the same reason the Bruce Willis movie "Bandits" didn't fair too well the word "Bender" has another connotation on this side of the pond.


The airbender ride is one of a small number of half-pipe rides where 2 sets of rotating seats move up a double spiked half pipe track. I'd ridden one of these before at Sarkanniemi in Finland and quite enjoyed it even though it was a quirky little ride. This one was much the same but had the added effect of getting close to the ceiling.

Does anyone have any idea what this is supposed to be?

At southern end of the park is a mini-lego centre where I took the opportunity to update my lego keyring. Spiderman that I picked up in Florida in 2004 was getting a bit bashed so I upgraded him for something that would remind me of this trip.

Well it was two of the best rides on the trip and certainly better than any of the batman rides.

The models had a dinosaur theme on this occasion and looked pretty good.

Back to the park and the amusingly named Fairly Odd Coaster is another spinning Tony Hawk Coaster and just as unexciting.


But the fact it came too close to the scenery gave it a little something more than most but not enough to make it memorable.

The flume interacts nicely with the other rides and disappears at one point into a dark tunnel section.

As with the squished parks you do get the cool moments where one ride passes close to another.

For lunch we ate at Famous Dave's, a restaurant chain so famous that we'd never heard of it. Our waitress was really friendly relaying us of her recent adventures to Europe. She got a good tip!

With the park visit it was time for me to say goodbye to the club, who made their way back home. Now I was onto the final leg and on my own, the first time I'd done this in America!

Bye bye people!

The first thing I chose to do was to go back into the mall and visit the Aquarium, which they also have. It is a big mall.

Two turtles get busy! It wasn't over quickly, I thought I'd check out his technique. Four hours later I was still watching.

I was very lucky to get this shot of a bobcat attacking a passing bird. One of my favourite photos of the trip.

The Aquarium is pretty decent with the obligatory tunnels and conveyor belt. Rather strangely the majority of people chose not to step off it.

(The bobcat was stuffed and mounted, it wasn't an action shot, just in case you'd thought I'd become some super nature photographer all of a sudden)

Feeding time!

They have an impressive shark collection. You certainly wouldn't get this at Blue water, which given its name gives it a nice ironic twist.

This shark has a frikkin' laser beam on its head

The piranha tank has the obligatory cow skull in the tank. Now when did experts decide that the benchmark for piranha meat eating performance would be how fast they could devour a cow. I don't imagine cows would even be near the Amazon.

This is a rather straight forward Finding Nemo themed tank.

I proud claim and not one I can challenge, I was certainly impressed with it but then I thought how many underground ones are there? They are being quite specific.

Buy our fizzy drinks, thankyou please!

next