Europa-Park

Joey discovered his Doppelganger!
Apparently he's a commercial model
in Deutschland. Joey couldn't
stop laughing: "What am I doing
on the sign?"

Even after all of my patience and cajoling last night to get everyone to bed at a reasonable hour, Dennis and Alex had to roust Joey and me up this morning. Ella had gotten up by herself: she'd quietly slipped into the bathroom and finished up her math homework, bless her.

We gathered our things quickly and grabbed another bag full of pastries for breakfast: chocolate and plain croissants, enormous macaroons for the kids (Ella's chocolate one tasted exactly like a gooey brownie), and things with marzipan and berries for Dennis and me.  I do love vacation.

We needed to take two slow trains to get to Rust, Germany, our destination. Dennis, while we were riding, talked about the summer he spent working with our friend Anita in Stuttgart: he and Anita were able to buy very cheap weekend tickets that allowed them to go anywhere in the country, just as long as the used the slower trains to get there: they went clear from Stuttgart to Berlin and Konstanz and other places lost to memory.  Pity he didn't write a blog.

Solving puzzles with daddy on the train ride to Rust.

Our reason for going to Rust? That would be Europa-Park! I'd never heard of it before moving here, but I haven't stopped hearing about it since. Ella's German tutor, particularly, told Ella that she needed to encourage us to take her there, promising it was "a great place for families."

The website touts it as "one of the world's leading theme parks." A family-run park owned by the Mack family, longtime makers of vehicles from circus wagons to roller coasters, it was opened in the mid '70s to show off some of their roller coaster models. Unfortunately, most of the roller coasters are closed in the winter season, but, looking at their website, there certainly seemed to be plenty in the park to keep our family busy for two days. And we loved the idea of going off-season, with one of our park days being a weekday, no less. We'd learned our lesson after visiting Disneyland Paris during spring break.

And it's fair to compare Europa-Park to Disneyland, as you'll see: clearly that the the Mack family had a close eye on their largest competitor as they developed their park and surroundings. In the past few years, they've started opening resort-style theme hotels, similar to the ones in Disneyland, but with a bit of Vegas splash.  We stayed at the Hotel Colosseo, their largest hotel, with a Roman theme.

Although the park is planning to connect the train lines to their campus, they're not there quite yet: the station in Rust is plop in the middle of German farmland. There's a bus line that can take you to the park and hotels, but there was also a van-sized taxi waiting, and I'm incredibly glad that we decided to hail it and be delivered to our hotel's front door, saving us a lot of time. The driver nudged us to watch the skyline for the roller coasters as we edged toward the top of a hill: "It's often a very magical moment," he nodded.

The hotel was pretty magnificent, "the nicest we've ever stayed in," Ella and Alex decided. The kids ran all over the lobby, exclaiming over the Christmas tree and decorations, and then ran into the hotel courtyard, criss-crossing each other as they tried to see everything at once: the animatronic gondolier, the fountain, the little merry-go-round, the petting zoo, the open fire pit.  I was a little surprised at having an open, unattended fire in the middle of a hotel, until I remembered where I was.  Ella, conversely, was very approving: "It's not easy to build a fire that high!" What a good little Swiss child she's become.

And then they found the hotel's play room: three stories of habitrails with all kinds of nooks for hiding in and slides and obstacles.  They didn't even glance at the nearby television: they dove in.

It was a good thing that there was so much to amuse the kids, because the check-in line was massive.  It was before lunchtime when we arrived, so our room wasn't ready, but we were invited to go into their large baggage room and stow our stuff.  Since they were inviting everyone else to do the same, to slip their bags into unlocked cubbies, we sighed and resigned ourselves to carrying Dennis's laptop and our other valuables around for the day.

And that was no small thing: the park is huge. It's divided into twelve different national themes, from Greece to Iceland, and three little children's lands as well, with fairy tale, viking, and jungle themes. We started our visit with a train ride clear around the park, just trying to get our bearings, with Ella exclaiming at every attraction, "Oh, I am so going to go on that!"


Each of the different countries had several rides, but most of them also had an extensive playground for the kids. I suspect that these would be especially welcome on hot, crowded summer days, when little kids easily grow tired of waiting in lines. My kids enjoyed these, too, but we spent most of the day quickly hopping from ride to ride. And the only attraction that we needed to wait for, all day long, was the giant ferris wheel, and that's only because we got there between loading cycles.

But I'm getting ahead of myself. After our train ride, we started walking through the park, only covering the eastern half of it today, in the end.  The best way, I suppose, to describe the park is as a Disneyland, but through the looking glass.  As I said, you could tell they trained a sharp eye on Disney, and in some cases they way they'd copied Disney were absolutely comical.

For one thing, they have their own mouse mascots: these have an international cast of animal friends, one from each country. Refreshingly, meeting these mascots wasn't the ridiculous, hour-long affair it is at Disney: we just walked up to them and gave them hugs as they strolled through the park.

Oh no, that's not Jack Sparrow at all.

Some of the rides, too, were obvious copies.  They have a Pirates ride, for example, the Pirates of Batavia.  Apart from being set in Indonesia, the ride was shamelessly similar to a certain Caribbean boat ride: after you board your boat, you slide down a hill into a battle scene, and then from there float through the ransacking of a village.

Lunch in the Pirates ride.

Three prisoners cajoling a key from a...dog? Oh, no,
it's a monkey.

There was even a waterside restaurant at the end of the ride, just as you would find in Anaheim, but instead of being an impossible-to-reserve sit-down affair, this one served fast-food Asian.  Fried rice and curry sounded good to us all, so we paused for a late lunch, something to top off the fresh-fried donuts we also got ourselves.


The thing was, although the park was filled with, well, let's call them homages, to Disney, I honestly think they do most things better. For one thing, all those playgrounds in the park were wonderful. Our hotel room ended up being larger and more comfortable than any we've stayed in at Disney. The eye for detail was there in all the buildings and pristine landscaping, and the sidewalks were immaculate. And the food, both in the parks and in the hotels, was better, fresher, and more varied.  Whenever Dennis and I visit Disney, we're always sad that the only source of caffeine is soda or Nescafé; here, they had fresh-pulled coffee, with a splash of Bailey's, if you want it. We did!  And, of course, they provided us with an empty, line-free park.  That was particularly awesome.

There was one odd little walk-through ride that you wouldn't ever see in Disney.  The park has a mine-themed roller coaster, but instead of the gold mine that Disney's coaster features, this one traveled through a dwarves' gem mine. We skipped the coaster, but you could also walk through the mine that the coaster flew through. And the animatronic dwarves inside weren't Snow White's singing, happy dwarf friends: these were sorrowful looking, enslaved dwarves, looked over by a menacing dragon and some demanding overseers. Coupled with the screams of roller-coaster riders, the whole thing was very unsettling, and poor, confused Joey kept asking why the dwarves were crying. Yikes!

The walk-through maze emptied out into a glittering shop alley, where plump, well-dressed figurines glittered with the recently mined jewels: we couldn't help but identify the whole ride as a thinly-veiled commentary of the diamond industry.

Then, we were invited to join the well-to-do animatronic figures in a mineral shop at the very end and, shamelessly, we did. Here, the kids found their souvenirs: a vial of silver for Alex (treasure!) and a precious rock, to be chipped out of a sandstone bar, for Ella.

After our lunch, we continued exploring the park, making our way through the Netherlands and Scandinavia. In Iceland, we warmed up (for it was almost freezing, all day) in a Pavilion of Energy, where Alex, irrepressible ladies man that he is, got to pose with a princess, all three kids got to meet Father Christmas, and our own personal magician performed card tricks for our amusement.

Something else to warm us up.

Instead of mouse ears, they sold a lot of
hats similar to this one, with your head
jammed inside a given animal's bum. There
were also a lot of people wearing hats like
this in Strasbourg (no, not just Americans)
with a stork being the animal of choice
there.

But we spent most of the time outside. I particularly enjoyed the Märchenwald, the Fairy-tale-themed children's section of the park.  You'll see quite a bit of footage in the video at the end from there: they had a lot of magical houses to walk through, including a gingerbread house that had Hansel and Gretel's witch pop out and heckle you if you knocked three times. They also had a Grimm's museum of fairytales, with relics such as Cinderella's slippers and Jack's belt, interspersed with interactive portraits, à la Harry Potter.  They also had a short movie about a magical book owned by the Brothers Grimm, and Alex was delighted with a picture of himself, captured at the beginning of the show, was posted on the big screen.

As enthusiastic as he and Ella were about this section, Joey was most enthralled of all. He's at the special age where everything is believable and magical: you could tell, as he rode on a tiny tot ride through fairyland, that it was all so very real to him.  Even his brother, calling hello to him, couldn't rip his eyes from the fairyland that was unfolding.

We wandered and wandered, making it through England, where Ella found her favorite attraction, a timed laser obstacle course that she slipped through easily, and then ending in the Viking-themed children's world, where the kids squeezed out their last bits of energy climbing and flying down the slide tower.

We'd made a 6:00 dinner reservation back at our hotel.  Our restaurant was sparkling with candles and fairy lights and peacefully quiet, until we were sweetly serenaded by an Italian duet. I do know for a fact it's the fanciest place the kids have ever eaten, and they behaved so beautifully while Dennis and I enjoyed our multi-course, multi-forked menu. Oh, that was nice.

It probably helped that the kids were absolutely exhausted.  Dennis and I had rented a stroller for Joey, anticipating a nap out of him, but the little, rickety, wooden cart, coupled with joggling cobblestones across the park, had kept Joey wide awake.  So he was quiet during dinner, fighting sleep as he doggedly ate his spaghetti.

And Alex, at one point, stretched across his chair and my lap, sighing "Ich bin müde," then informing me, "That means 'I'm tired' in my secret language."  That led to Dennis commenting on how telling it is, the particular phrases that our kids know.  Laughing, he told me that, when he and Ella were reading together, they came across the phrase "Ohren spitzen."  "I wonder what that means," Dennis mused, but Ella knew: "It means 'pay attention.' People say it to me sometimes." I'm shocked.

The kids all got a second wind after finishing their plates of pasta, and they left Dennis and me to eat and enjoy a quasi-date while they ran off to play in the adjacent indoor playground that had had them all drooling this morning.  They found a pair of German brothers inside and the sibling sets faced off in a wonderful and elaborate game of capture the flag.  It was awfully cute, when we came to collect them, listening to Ella, in her careful German, invite the boys to play again tomorrow night.  Unfortunately, they were checking out in the morning. On our way to our room, Ella and Alex discussed their new friends, Ella smiling that "they were as nice as boys can be," to which Alex indignantly responded, "What about me?!"

Our room had bunk beds for the kids, and a crib for Joey, which he crawled into enthusiastically, chirping, "Yay, my little bed!"  Before we put the kids, quite easily, to sleep, we watched from our window the hourly water show in the courtyard below, the kids, all three, with their noses pressed to the windows.

What's that Christmas song, the one about the perfect ending to the perfect day? That.