Thorpe Park is just one English theme park that I intend on visiting during my stay in the UK. If you can’t tell by now I love theme parks so the more the 
merrier. Thorpe Park is located in Staines in Chertsey, Surrey and is a whole lot easier to get to than Whipsnade. There are regular trains to both Staines and Chertsey from Waterloo and also regular buses leaving both stations to get to the actual park.
The park is themed into nine “lands” though borders between each them are not really distinct. The rides are rated by the park into Extreme Thrills, Thrilling and Fun and Young Thrillseekers. For the serious thrill seeker definitely spend most of your time getting around to the Extreme Thrill rides. We got to the park at 9.30 and didn’t leave until 18.00 and within that time managed to ride most of the interesting rides. At this time of year (and especially on a bank holiday weekend) and if you’re keen to ride the bigger rides at least once I would definitely consider paying a little extra for the fast pass ticket because there WILL be long lines so to avoid disappointment it is probably worth a few extra quid. Today the park was heaving and without a fast pass we had to make sure to hit as many rides as possible in the morning when lines were relatively short.
Here is my ranking of what we rode today:
| Ride | Thorpe Park Rating | Adrenalin Ranking | Puke Ranking | Laugh Ranking | Overall Good Entertainment Ranking | Comment |
| Stealth | Extreme | 1 | n/a | 7 | 5 | New for 2006. You travel up 205ft at 80mph and then down. This ride is over before you can breathe. I’m not sure its a ride that is worth the 1 1/2 hour wait but definitely try it once. And, if you wait that long you might as well wait an extra ten minutes and get the seats at the front. |
| Colossus | Extreme | 2 | 7 | 8 | 2 | The corkscrew at the end is a killer. Fab roller coaster and a great one to ride up front! |
| Nemesis Inferno | Extreme | 3 | 6 | 9 | 6 | Over too quickly this is a fairly good rollercoaster. Your legs swing free and each twist and turn is a great shock to the body. |
| Slammer | Extreme | 4 | 5 | 10 | 8 | Something I haven’t ridden before. You fly up into the air and then are “slam-dunked” towards the ground as you rotate around an axis. Great adrenalin rush. |
| Vortex | Extreme | 5 | 4 | 4 | 3 | Like Rush but with added spins makes this ride one of the best in the park. |
| Rush | Extreme | 6 | 8 | 5 | 4 | A giant pendulum type swing. Will have you whooping with excitement. |
| Samurai | Extreme | 7 | 2 | 6 | 9 | Does anyone have a sick bag? |
| Tidal Wave | Extreme | 9 | n/a | 1 | 1 | I’ve rated this the best ride in the park. There is some adrenalin as you hurtle down the 85ft decline but the entertainment factor is purely in the soaking you get from the ride. Then, if you’re not careful, you get soaked again once you exit the ride from the next group of people coming down in a splash. Thorpe Park have also thought ahead installing at least two warmer/drier captules nearby. |
| X:\No Way Out | Extreme | 9 | n/a | n/a | 10 | A disappointing ride. A backwards moving rollercoaster that would have been great if we hadn’t stopped every few secons. Also over way too quickly. |
| Logger’s Leap | Thrilling and Fun | 11 | n/a | 2 | 7 | The good old log flume ride. A smaller version of Tidal Wave. |
| Ribena Rumba Rapids | Thrilling and Fun | 12 | n/a | n/a | 13 | Not as thrilling as some other Rapids’ rides I’ve been on and you don’t get nearly as wet. Or maybe having only two of us in the ring meant we weren’t heavy enough to feel the full effect of the ride. |
| Storm in A Teacup | Thrilling and Fun | 13 | 3 | 3 | 11 | Great if you have some nice strong boys in the teacup with you to spin you around. |
| Zodiac | Not rated | 10 | 1 | n/a | 12 | Not rated by the park. This simple ride made us feel the most nauseaous for some reason. Of course it could have been the build up from the other rides! |
Thorpe Park is a pretty good well-rounded theme park with a nice range of rides, reasonably priced food, good ride layout and the usual money making side show alley games. The park, however, could improve on their information on the approximate ride wait times and Stealth, the new ride added in March, needs a lot of work to make sure its running without breaking down (today there were at least three stoppages that we heard of which caused our wait to blow out to nearly an hour and a half!) I think we had a very satisfying day, except I think S was a bit peeved that we couldn’t win a giant Tigger. She was sooo close on the giant claw-thing game too!