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“This is definitely the way theme parks are supposed to be!!” |
Today we headed from Marghera to the Gardaland Theme Park (about 125 kms inland). We checked out of our hotel at about 10am in search of a laundromat. Thankfully, we found one that was open pretty quickly and managed to wash our clothes. As we were all re-using clothes by this stage (we hadn’t really done a proper wash since London some weeks ago) we had a big load and are all very pleased to be wearing clean clothes.
Some 80 minutes later we had clean, dry and folded clothes and we then headed to Gardaland, we got there very quickly and picked out the Gardaland Hotel Resort as our first hotel to try. This proved to be a great idea, it’s only a two minute free bus ride to the theme park and they had one room left that they gave us at 135 euro (40 euro off the regular price).
After checking in, we headed to the swimming pool, a beautiful oasis with multiple pools, palms and a waterfall. We spent at least an hour in or by the pool playing games and having fun. Billy made friends with a small boy (probably about 3 1/2 to 4 years old) and they had fun with a ‘cars’ ball we had picked up from a Disney store in Venice.
At 4pm we headed for the theme park, this was an awesome time to go to the theme park!! Gardaland is open until midnight, so 4-12 is 8 hours at a theme park…enough for anyone at a park. It remains hot all night at this time of year, so it was about 40 degrees at 4pm, and when we left at midnight it was about 27 degrees (much more comfortable). The theme park was amazing. We had an absolute ball, and I can’t remember Kimmy on so many rides. We did all the adventure rides including jungle rapids, pirate adventure, Tarzan, Wild west and many more. Billy is growing up and is much braver now, he even went on a small rollercoaster and loved it so much we ended up on it three times.
The size of everything in the park is huge (apart from the meals I think), the attention to detail is better than any other park I’ve been to, and it’s easy to see why it’s the number one park in Italy. A huge King Kong in the Tarzan ride, enormous statues at all major rides and very impressive range of moving characters throughout all rides plus the length of the rides which were consistently greater than any other rides I’ve been on made this the best theme park in my opinion I have seen. Most of the characters/statues were also in good condition and the sound effects added to the ambience beautifully. The other thing we noticed was how fast the lines moved, no safety instructions and rarely staff checking to ensure every seat was fastened down properly, plenty of seats or cars in all rides meant we waited no longer than 10-15 minutes for any ride. Better still, was being there after 9pm there was practically no queues on any ride, this meant the rides we enjoyed earlier on we just waltzed into and on the Jungle Rapids even went round a couple of times without getting off. This is definitely the way theme parks are supposed to be!!
As a note for anyone visiting, our best rides were definitely the Adventure rides of which there were six (Pirate, Jungle Rapids and Tarzan being the hits). There is also a huge magic tree in ‘Fantasy Land’, which when inside they spin the room around you as well as move your seats to give you the feeling that you are spinning, it’s quite a strange feeling and was the only thing Billy decided he really didn’t like.
Also, after every major ride you are ushered through a shop, which although very tacky had a huge range of very cool items including some fantastic sling shots which we really should have bought for Dennis….ah la Billy the menace. I could have easily spent $1000 on swords and models at the Knights shop as they were probably better quality than I have seen before, and they had literally hundreds of full size swords, bows, slings, halberds etc. as well as models galore and more conventional souveniers.
The day was just about over as we headed very tired back to the hotel room for a well earned sleep.
As I write this I’m sitting by the pool at the Gardaland Hotel Resort, it’s very nice, lots of kids and Billy is having a great time in the pool with Kimmy tossing a ball back and forth.
Tool of the Day
The guys who decided it would be cool to try to tip over the boat behind us on the Tarzan ride (about 10pm). It was very funny, and they had the ride stopped twice and the loud speaker telling them off, followed by a very stern talking to at the end of the ride…boys will be boys.
previous travel blog entry
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