Alton Towers

I'm fresh back from a mini-roadtrip! We went up to Alton Towers, well, we went up yesterday and went to the park and drove back today. Alton Towers is a rather major theme-park, especially by local standards. It's up north in the middle of the Staffordshire country-side. As I don't know where that is and I was just there, let's just say it's somewhere north of Birmingham and west of Nottingham. It took more than 3 hours to get there.

The park is located outside of Uttoxeter, which is nearly as exciting as it sounds. I was quite excited that we got to go to a Little Chef for dinner, which is sort of like a Denny's/Shari's wannabe. Knowing how those places are, I opted for an all-day breakfast situation because they are the most difficult to make nasty and Denny's-like. It was not too bad. They have a weird interpretation of 'pancake', but I did not partake. After dinner we hit CineBowl for some bowling. I did not play well. It was horrid, really.

Anyways, so Alton Towers was exciting. I hadn't been to a roller-coaster based theme park since going to Great America outside San Fran like, five years ago (Disneyland is the best place ever, but not roller coaster based). Oh! Background. So Alton Towers is sort of based around this massive old house that people used to live in but it's sort of ruins now and so they built a theme park on the grounds instead, so there are old ruins in the middle. It's a bit strange. But there are quite a few good roller coasters at Alton Towers, as well as a respectable number of non-roller coaster rides, such as the log flume. Only you road around in bathtubs instead of logs. As could be expected when going to a theme park on a Monday, there were quite a few 'interesting' people around, but theme parks seem to be sort of like that anyways. Aside from the old house, there was nothing too great that made the park different than a Six Flags or Great America or those places, aside from the prevalence of England sports memorabilia, that is.

Oh, and the people up north 'have funny accents' that certain Southern-types like to mock. It was sort of like a cross between standard English and Canadian. The scenery up there seemed nice. A lot of green fields with green borders and sheep and cows and such. But I didn't really see too much, I must admit.