Day 5 - Six Flags Belgium

The Park

Unfortunately, we only had about 3 hours at Six Flags Belgium on this, our final day of the trip, due to our arrangements for travelling home. It was just as well though, because the weather had decided to take a turn for the worse (so apologies for the rather dismal pictures!). The park itself (from what we saw of it) was a fairly typical moderately-themed Six Flags park. An interesting feature was that some of the rides were sort of tucked away down their own cul-de-sacs around the perimeter of the park. That made for quite a cosy atmosphere really and tended to make a feature of the rides, as opposed to having them just plonked here and there on a piece of concrete.

The Coasters

[Loup Garou] A quick dash as soon as the park opened its gates to the park's sole woodie, Loup Garou/Werewolf. Built by Vekoma only last year, this proved the best of the trio of woodies on the trip. A nice, fast twister layout with a handful of floater hills made this a fun coaster to ride. And like all the finest coasters, it leaves the best 'til last - a stupendous floating dive underneath the structure before hitting the brakes.


After a couple (or three) goes on Loup Garou, over to the Tornado. This is a Vekoma corkscrew, exactly the same model as in Alton Towers. All I can say is that we haven't got the roughest one! Conncinelle is a Zierer family coaster, and Calamity Mine a Vekoma mine train, proving that Vekoma's steel coasters are best when they don't have inversions! This was a brilliant ride, full of extremely tight twists and turns and quite a long ride too, consisting of two lift hills. See the pictures below.

[Calamity Mine #1] [Calamity Mine #2] [Calamity Mine #3]

Cobra was, surprise, surprise, another Vekoma Boomerang - not a bad ride again, this being another modern one. The park's SLC, Vampire was unfortunately well and truly in hang-and-bang mode and I could only ride it once - although it wasn't quite as brutal as the one at Six Flags Holland.

The final coaster of the trip turned out to be Turbine. And what a classic this is! A Schwarzkopf catapult shuttle-loop, the same model as the ex-Thunder Looper at Alton Towers. Enclosed somewhat bizarrely in a building themed to be a power station (they had to enclose it due to noise restrictions apparently), this actually seemed to emphasise the speed and the crazy acceleration felt upon launch. Looping in the dark is very disorientating too, and even more surreal was when the operator (who turned out to be a coaster enthusiast himself) turned on the lights for us on one go. Believe me, looping around the inside of a box is extremely weird!

[Turbine #1] [Turbine #2] [Turbine #3] [Turbine #4] [Turbine - inside the station]

Other attractions

[Dalton Terror] I didn't really have enough time to explore the rest of the park. I believe there was a Vekoma Mad House/Haunted Swing there, but I didn't see it and I'm sorry that I didn't complete my collection of pictures of all four of them on this trip! The only other ride I tried was Dalton Terror, an Intamin Giant Drop tower. This one, I believe, was a higher-than-average model, probably about 250ft. And it's one of the best I've been on. Going higher means, obviously, that you get a second or so more freefall sensation. That doesn't sound a lot but.....you just have to try it to see what I mean! And I think Intamin have also been tweaking their magnetic braking system. If you look at this picture, you should be able to see that the braking fins seem lower down the tower than normal, even allowing for the extra height of the tower. This means that the freefall period is extended as much as possible and makes for a really intense experience.



[Danger, there's a Dave about!] So that's the end of this trip report. A word of warning if you're tempted to join us on one of these trips - this is what happens if you fall asleep on the coach.