What I did on my holidays, or "Why I don't have any knitting progress this week"

Today is the first day I've had since Wednesday where I haven't been massively busy. Unfortunately, none of the busy really involved working on any of my active WIPs. So instead of showing you amazing knitting progress, I'm going to show you photos of where I've been this week.

On Wednesday afternoon we drove up to Northampton to stay overnight with some friends. We were welcomed with beer and pizza, before spending the evening playing with their cats and watching Tremors.

This is Grimlock.

We got up fairly early on Thursday morning, waited for more of our friends to arrive, then drove to Alton Towers! Quite a few supermarkets, shops and products give away 2-for-1 vouchers for a fairly comprehensive group of British attractions, including Alton Towers, Thorpe Park, Legoland, Sea Life Centres and Warwick Castle. Between us all, I think we had about twenty vouchers! Luckily, as there were seven of us, we did have some which were 50% off rather than 2-for-1, so everyone got in for half price.

I had been to Alton Towers once before, a couple of years ago. I never went as a child. This was mostly down to the fact that it was a very long way away from us in West Wales, plus we had Oakwood Theme Park just down the road. Of course, that meant the scariest rollercoaster I'd ever been on prior to visiting Alton Towers was Megafobia:

When built, it was the largest wooden rollercoaster in Europe!

So you can imagine how I felt on arriving at Alton Towers to be faced with this statue:

This is the corkscrew part of the track from the original Corkscrew rollercoaster.

Bearing in mind, of course, all of the main rollercoasters they have there now are far, far scarier than the Corkscrew ever was!

I won't bore you with the details of our day; because the queues were so short (we didn't queue for longer than 15 minutes for anything, even the big rides like Rita and Nemesis) we went on everything, some rides we went on twice.

I had been on a few of them before, but Thursday was my first go on Nemesis (I absolutely hate being upside down, so an inverted rollercoaster was something I'd never done before).

The second inversion on Nemesis, as seen from the queue.

I wasn't sure I liked it when I came off, but later on in the day when we were having second runs on rides, I went on it again. I had to keep my eyes closed the whole way around on the second ride!

I did, however, point blank refuse to go on Oblivion

This file photo is better than the ones I took!

The one thing that was a disappoinment was not being able to go on the newest ride, Thirteen, There is very little information about what the Thirteen rollercoaster involves on the Alton Towers website or in the park itself, so we had no idea what we were missing. The ride shut down while we were queueing for Rita (we think there was a minor accident in the loading station) and didn't reopen all day. Having now read the description on Wikipedia of what the ride actually is, I am even more disappointed!

We did foolishly go on the River Rapids ride just before leaving, which meant quite a few of us were a bit wet getting into the cars to go home!

We stayed in Northampton again on Thursday night, as we were very tired and couldn't face the drive back home. This did mean we got to go to the pub for dinner and see some of our other friends who live up that way, and then stay up later than we should watching Whoops! Apocalypse.

Friday morning we crawled out of bed and drove back to Reading, to prepare for the weekend visit of my parents. I'll tell you about that later on in the week, as there are a lot more photos!