The Rolling Stone

A brief and largely text-only blog for today as it was fun, but not very photogenic. It is Xavier’s birthday and so he got to choose his activities for the day. He wanted an indoor amusement park and a cat cafe , with MacDonald’s for dinner 🙂

Hayley and I split this with me taking Xavier to the amusement park while Hayley and Felix went to a viewing platform on a skyscraper, then Hayley took him and Felix to the cat cafe while I recovered from the amusement park by lying still in a dark room. Jokes. I actually wrote for this blog, but the rides were a great deal more intense than I was expecting.

On the way there I did snap a couple of pictures of the birthday boy:

The amusement park is called Joypolis and the ads made it look great, but I wasn’t sure whether they were over-hyping it. However, if anything I think it was undersold.

The first ride was a Transformers-themed shoot-‘em-up game where Xavi and I sat in a spherical pod together. I had assumed it would tilt around a bit as you flew through the game firing at enemies on the screen, so I was a bit surprised when it had full solid harnesses like the kind you get on the more extreme roller coasters. And even more surprised when its movement was full 360 in all directions. We were turned upside down multiple times as barrel rolls, loop the loops, and out-of-control tumbles were simulated. It was hard to concentrate on shooting anything.

Other rides were almost as full-on. There was a series of simulated roller coaster rides where your carriage moved into an enclosed room with a surround screen displaying things like a plane crashing through a canyon, a boat going through rapids and waterfalls, and a car going down a cliff. The whole carriage would angle to imitate all of this quite realistically (they had roller coaster style safety bars).

There were a few competitively calmer rides like laser tag against mock robots, a Sonic the Hedgehog athletics competition on treadmills, and a Japanese haunted house (though even that blasted hot air at you when everything got set on fire).

The final ride was a thing like a rocket powered bobsled along half pipe through space. And yes the whole cylindrical pod you were in was constantly rotating one way and then the other through 360 degrees. We came first on that ride which was entirely to do with Xavier’s piloting as I was too terrified to do any steering at all.

We went back to the hotel and I got a couple of hours on my own while the rest of the family went to the cat cafe. They’re back now having had a great time and we are about to go and get Maccas.

One ten year old’s birthday successfully delivered.

Tomorrow we head to Kyoto.