[Photos taken 06-08 August 2024, posted online 04 November 2024. It’s rainy and warm outside. In November.]
We got up early to arrive at Europa-Park when it opened at 9 in the morning. Our hotel was a 10-15 minute drive away, and when we arrived the traffic was thick but moving. I’d like to applaud the smart team that thought of installing multiple horizontal people-movers on the way from the parking lot to the entrance.
We split up along gender lines, us girls aiming to have lower-adrenaline thrills, while the boys wanted to visit the bigger roller coasters. Team Girls had a pretty good day, finding a small and near-empty roller-coaster that Emma had her eye on quickly and taking three trips in quick succession, while Team Boys got very unlucky and ended up stuck in the same line for 2 hours, which put a damper on the rest of their day.
By late afternoon our feet were very tired, and we got in the car to drive back to home base in Munich. The autobahn speed is so high that even though the car-battery could theoretically last the whole way, in practice it was not happening. Since you have to drain it sufficiently to get the high charging speeds, I waited until we were at the half-way point (2 hours away from Europa-Park) to locate an autobahn exit that looked promising (gas stations and fast food).
We made it back around 10 in the evening, and then Finnur and I spent close to an hour circling the neighborhood, trying to decipher parking signage, discovering after talking to locals that the first spot we’d found was for residential permits only, and then finally finding an apparently legal spot for non-residents, and paying using an app.
The following day was a designated “calm-day” so I got the brilliant idea to take the kids on a quick shopping trip to a nearby mall, as two of us needed closed toed shoes for tree-climbing, and we also needed to recharge the car for its next adventure. Let’s just say that energies were not up to the task!
The day after that was rainy, so we swapped out a trip to the hills for a trip to the Deutsches Museum.
Tuesday 06 August 2024
Anna and Emma by Europa-Park signage as we were about to leave after a long day.
The day began with breakfast at our hotel. It was located in an industrial area, so I was grateful to see that they had something for everybody.
At 9 in the morning we’d entered the line of cars entering the park’s parking lot.
Why a mouse?!
About 15 minutes later we were parked, and slathering on sunscreen. This was predicted to be a very warm and sunny day.
Entering along with all the people.
Inside the gates at 09:35. Not bad. This park is significantly cheaper than the ones in Florida.
It was a cute little thing and I think we went three times in quick succession.
Yeah, yeah…
The idea behind the park is that different areas are themed as different countries in Europe, so the buildings look different depending on where you are. You start out in Germany.
It was already hot at 10:20, so we got ice-cream. Nutrition and fluids make all the difference on a day like this.
We found a park map by the entrance. We were there because we’d managed to score timed tickets to a “fly-over” attraction close by.
Ooooh, there’s an area devoted to Iceland!! Of course it was on the far side of the park…
Pretty houses, but not all very functional, aside from the ground floors.
Waiting for our timed-ticket to come up for the Voletarium fly-over. It’s where you sit in seats that move on large arms, and there’s a big movie screen, and blowers and misters make you think you’re flying. It was really quite well done, and had lots of gorgeous vistas from all over Europe, Iceland included.
The boats on the Imperial Journey were flying the Austrian flag…
I’d injured my heel the day we arrived walking fast and hard to catch a train in unfortunate shoes, and so I was incredibly glad to be sitting down for a bit.
Sculptures by the hotels that sit adjacent to the park.
We spotted these floaters, and decided those would be our next target.
Across a bridge, we were transported to Scandinavia., and even found an Icelandic flag!
We decided it would be a good idea to beat the lunch-time crowds, and had our food and a good table at the Fjord Restaurant shortly before noon. Fair warning: bare-chested wooden sculptures coming up!
Fish-burger! It wasn’t bad.
The decor was ship-themed, and I marveled how this would never fly in certain parts of the world.
Emma by the large staircase.
Such enlightened perkiness!
With basic body needs taken care of, we headed to the line for the floaters, dubbed “fjord rafting“. The line was long, but moved. We even spotted Team Boys ahead of us, but politeness stopped us from barging through the line to reach them.
Our lunch was at that white and blue building on the other side of the water.
Good line management! It matters to keep moving.
Team Boys finally spotting us.
Team Boys about to depart! The platform moves along with the boats, so they never stop moving. It’s quite clever!
Our turn! I packed away the phone for the rest of the ride so it wouldn’t get wet.
Another clever touch: The area where the boats slowly climb up to the starting level is filled with stuff to look at.
Animated gif, for the animatronics!
Enjoying the animatronics.
The house housing the boat-lift.
We went on this “Vindjammer” ship at some point. It was as expected.
We’d just been there doing that!
I was a slow walker due to my heel being messed up.
Second ice-cream of the day!
A very lifeless train-ticket officer for the “Alpine Express“.
The line for this ride was the worst of the lot, as it moved very slowly.
The crowd waiting for the train to arrive. It became apparent that some marketing genius had decided to create a Virtual Reality ride, where the rearmost four seats were dedicated for people wearing VR headsets. Unfortunately, the VR headsets kept breaking, meaning they had to fetch another headset, and this kept delaying the train/roller coaster by multiple minutes much to the obvious frustration of the staff. (Otherwise the train would have just departed less than a minute after arriving.)
So excited to no longer being stuck in that line!
Afterwards we walked around the “alpine” area, and chuckled as some kiddos water-gunned some people.
A pretty cave-ish area.
The dragons looked cute, but turned out to be uninspiring plastic.
People chilling on the grass in the heat.
Next up was the Tirol Log Flume. That line also moved at a steady clip, and yet again the boats never quite stopped, you had to enter and exit them as they moved along the bank.
A photo before packing the phone away.
It was getting hot enough that the splashes of water were quite welcome!
They had Icelandic sayings and poems on the walls! So bizarre! Team Boys also found us, and they were completely exhausted! We told them about the train back to the park entrance, but that we wanted to finish looking at the Iceland area before heading back.
Yes, you’re getting all the sugar in the world to survive this day!
Hilarious misspellings here and there. This one reads “Gus bless this house” (Who’s Gus?! Also the “Petta” should be “Þetta”.)
Pro-tip: It’s probably more fun to sit on the other side of the boat.
“Rólegur þorp”?! Translates to “Calm” and “Village” but the grammar doesn’t link the two.
Google-translate strikes again with “Týnt eignir” (should be “Týndar eignir” or “Óskilamunir”). It’s for “lost property”.
We let that big roller-coaster be!
More random Icelandic, but surprisingly correct.
“Freskur fiskur” should be “Ferskur fiskur” (Fresh fish) and the other signage is probably Danish.
Reglur bryggju?! “Rules Bridge”?! This whole sign is a grammatical disaster.
On the train back to the entrance, at 4:30 in the afternoon. Passing Greece!
Getting off the train. That sphere seems to contain a roller coaster.
Back in Germany.
Oooh, pretty flowers!
Team Boys had located the car, and we left the park shortly before 5 in the afternoon.
Two hours later we exited the autobahn. I had hopes that a fast-charger by McDonalds would work, because I’d used that brand before, but it turned out to be broken! Still stung from the problematic Shell charger the day before (“app is not available in your country”) I still tried plugging in the car, and magically it just started charging!! To this day I have no idea who paid for our charge, but the electrons came our way, and I’m not complaining.
Yay, full power right off the bat!
The burger looked better than it tasted. The kids went off to eat at McDonalds, while Finnur and I tried other vendors. Happily for us the kids didn’t have a great experience, which shut down requests for McD for the remainder of the trip.
We filled the car with enough juice to get us to home-base, and to a charger the following day, and then set out again. Passed a fancy train bridge plus tunnel.
Windmills dot the landscape.
Autobahn-ing, and trying not to leave claw-marks. Finnur still marvels at the time where he was driving at close to 150 km/h (93 mph) and moved from the speediest inside lane to a less speedy one, because a car was about to overtake him from behind. That car passed us at speed, but immediately also went into the less-speedy lane as a second car that was driving even faster came zooming by!
Animal crossing!
We dropped the kids off at home-base around 10 in the evening, and then went hunting for a parking space for our rental car. The parking garages on Google maps turned out to be locked and private or simply not built yet. Every single stretch of sidewalk had its own parking instruction sign and parking machine. After much confusion, and discussions with locals, we determined that we could park where the sign said “werktags 9-23h mit Parkschien ODER…” as it means “weekdays between 9 and 23 with payment OR…” and we could pay using a parking app. Phew!
Sleep tight, dear little (neurotic) car. (It kept beeping at us for going over the speed limit, or if we signed to change lanes too quickly after a car had passed us. It was also feature-locked, so no next-car-speed-matching cruise-control for us.) We finally got home around 11 that evening, and promptly collapsed into bed.
Wednesday 07 August 2024
It was the kind of slow and low energy day where you find yourself marveling at the tasteful art in the ceilings.
Heading out in search of coffee, as I didn’t dare touch the fancy machine at home-base. A Kaleo poster grabbed by attention, as they’re an Icelandic band.
Details.
I found a semi-permanent market, but the fancy coffee shop didn’t offer coffee and cacao in the same cup.
I stumbled into an Italian cafe, where I got a really good tart, but the coffee/hot-chocolate was thick as pudding, and I had no hope of finishing the cup.
Shrubbery encasing a sign.
Somebody had re-hung the Kaleo sign!
More ceiling art. Every room was different.
Close to 3 in the afternoon, I’d finally managed to rally the kids to join me at a shopping mall. Edeka is one of the big chains.
Healthy eating is all the rage on vacation, not.
The mall didn’t have much of interest. We did find a toy store with Lego flowers and…
… and big Lego Yoda.
I’d seen chargers listed by the mall, but most of them were slow ones. Weirdly, the only fast-chargers around were Tesla’s. To my great relief I did managed to get a charge started (the cable almost wasn’t long enough!?) while we went to visit just one more store, and tried to keep our cool, but mostly failed due to tiredness.
Anna had bravely ordered a few things off of German Amazon, that had supposedly arrived at a pick-up location. This was attempt number one to fetch the boxes, but it turned out to be the wrong location. We went through the multiple delivery emails, and found another address that supposedly held the boxes, but it had already closed.
We found a parking spot not too far away from home-base with an “ODER” parking sign.
Legit parking.
Making sure to register into parking meter 5413 in the app. Every single stretch of sidewalk had its own parking meter.
We had planned to drive towards the hills, but the weather forecast was too rainy. We therefore headed to the Deutsches Museum.
The museum is behind them.
Strange building.
I’d read online that you should buy tickets online, and then you don’t have to stand in the long ticket line. That’s what I did, and we waltzed in past the long line. It was probably the most joyous I felt that day.
It was a warm day, and the air conditioning wasn’t really up to the task of keeping the air comfortable. It fit with the whole sensory-themed exhibition.
A neat exhibition of stability vs frequency. It’s possible to keep a ball balanced on top of a saddle-shaped block if you turn it at the correct frequency.
The best rooms had to do with musical instruments.
Tuning a shaking plate. It had a very cool “re-sanding” robot arm, that would evenly distribute sand all over the plate when most of the sand had been thrown off.
Probably not the originals.
There was also a neat chemistry section, but people were tired, and we left after a quick pop in. They did have the full table of elements!
The boys did a quick round to look at all the different airplanes.
Leaving some two hours after we arrived. The kids would have liked more hands-on things, and less warm air.
I was there!
The city is rather lovely in places. I kept moving at a snail’s pace.
We quite liked these dual-direction escalators. Basically they have motion sensors on the top and bottom, and adjust their direction as needed.
