Had to be at the airport early this morning, but I’m an early riser anyway, so no biggie. The Maple Leaf Lounge (Air Canada’s lounge) was really quiet and not crowded. Nice. Nobody sitting next to me on the plane. Even nicer!

Got about half an hour of snoozie time, then had brekkie. Here’s a photo for all you who love the food pics.

The flight was uneventful and arrived a bit early. That’s awesome, as it gave me a few minutes extra to drop my bags at the hotel before heading to Wonderland. Staying at the Hampton in Brampton. I could probably write a song around that. Anyway, it’s nice and clean and has coffee available 24/7.

Off to the park! Canada’s Wonderland has a staggering EIGHTEEN coasters. Lucky for me, I’ve been on all but three of them, so the long queues aren’t going to put me in panic mode. I need those three, then everything after that is gravy.

Went straight to Alpen Fury, the new coaster from German engineering firm Mack Rides. I usually like their stuff and one of my favourite parks, EuropaPark in Germany, is chock full of their coasters, because Mack owns the park.

This, though… this was something special. I mean… just look at this hot mess!

I’ve been keeping tabs on this one and nearly everyone I know that’s ridden it has put it in their top five. Some have it as their #1. So expectations are high… and lines are long.

That’s just a tiny piece of the queue. The sign said 2 hours. Luckily, there’s a single rider line - what that means is whenever there is a group with an odd number or people in the main queue, that leaves an empty seat next to someone, since the rows of seats are two-across. So they fill that seat with someone from the single rider queue. Often, that can mean a substantially shorter wait time. But not today. It was still 1 hour, 56 minutes to get to the ride.

In the queue, though, I met two nice local guys, brothers Jonathon and Kyle.

Turns out, they know one of my coaster friends and asked me to say hi. Then they seemed surprised that I would fly from Calgary to Toronto to ride a coaster and I said, “it’s not as bad as flying 27 hours round-trip to go to a concert.” They said, “was it worth it?” I said, “hell yeah, I got to hang backstage with them for most of the evening and even got to do a song with them on stage.”

They said, “awesome! Who did you go see?” And I pulled up this pic:

Their eyes got wide. “That’s Pete and Bas! You got to hang with Pete and Bas?”
So at least the time passed a bit more quickly after that.

As we neared the loading station, you could get a better look at the launch system. Alpen Fury doesn’t do the clickety-clack up the long hill, it rolls out of the station into this launch track full of Linear Synchronous Motors (LSMs).

How does it work? That’s going to take more typing than I’m willing to give it here, but here’s the short answer. There are fixed electromagnets on the undercarriage of the train. There are more of them on the track. When the train approaches the launch section, the magnets on the track are controlled to have the “attract” polarization as the train approaches, pulling the train toward it. Then it switches to “repel” as the train passes over, pushing the train farther along the track. These switches are timed down to tiny fractions of a second and there are a LOT of them, as you need that much oomph to push a heavy train full of people. A short little burst of energy and the train dives down into a tunnel beneath Wonder Mountain.

In that tunnel, more LSMs kick in and catapult the train straight up out of the mountain, 17 storeys in the air. With a 180 degree twist on the way up. Then an upside-down bit, another twist, and a vertical dive with an s-shaped zig-zag maneuver that you can stare at for hours and still not comprehend it.

Considering this was my 935th coaster that I’ve ridden and considering that I’d seen POV videos of this thing, you’d think that I would have a pretty good idea what that was going to feel like.

Nope.

It was a wild, disorienting, WTF moment with G-forces coming and going in all different directions. It’s surprising, it’s bonkers, and it’s smooth as glass. But that’s just the beginning. I can’t give you a play-by-play, since most of it is still a blur, but before we got to the end, we’d had two launches and been upside-down nine times. I wondered how it would compare to my current #1 steel coaster, the insanity-on-rails beast in Madrid called Batman Gotham City Escape.

Well, Alpen Fury didn’t quite top that one, but it slid easily into my #2 steel coaster slot, which is no small feat considering the number I’ve been on.

I’ll be back here tomorrow and I plan to hit this up at least twice more.
After Alpen Fury, I headed to another of the three that were new to me: Yukon Striker

Yukon Striker is a “dive coaster” model from Swiss engineering firm Bolliger and Mabillard. The two gentlemen the firm is named after are a fun pair. Walter Bolliger is very stoic, very German, very business. Claude Mabillard is fun-loving and carefree, often seen riding the coasters at the media previews. He’s the Costello of the pair.

Anyway, scroll back up the picture of the coaster train and notice that it’s 8 seats across instead of two. Dive Coasters come in 6, 8, and 10-across seating and the ends are hanging out well beyond the edge of the track. But why “dive coaster”? Because the signature feature is an impossibly tall lift hill, followed by a near-vertical drop. Just before you go over the precipice, brakes hold the car right at the edge for a few seconds before finally letting the cars plunge down the drop. It’s terrifying if you’re already afraid of the thing when you get on, but that pause doesn’t really add anything for me.

Now, I’ll admit that Dive Coasters aren’t really my cuppa - I don’t dislike them, but they aren’t my favourite. This one, though, is really good. It’s easily my favourite of all the Dive Coasters that I’ve ridden (this was my 7th). A friend at the park happened to get a pic of me on it. Back row, black shoes, 3rd from the right - or 6th from the left. Yes, we were upside-down at this point. Maybe 16 storeys up, or so.

That friend was Colin (bearded) who was visiting the park with his friend Jerome. We had to play text-tag for awhile before we got together in the park, but finally worked it out.

After a quick bite, we headed over to ‘Planet Snoopy’ to see if the lines were getting shorter over there after dark, since lots of families would be heading home with the kids. The Snoopy coaster I still need to get had quite the long line, so I’ll get that one tomorrow. We did get over to the little wood coaster called “Ghoster Coaster”

For a little coaster, this one has a lot of zip in it. Lots of fun. Then we headed over to the big guy in the corner of the park. The 30-plus-storey Bolliger and Mabillard giga coaster called Leviathan.

(The photos that follow were taken from the parking lot when I first arrived, which explains why it’s daylight again)
Where Alpen Fury is all about wild aerobatics, Leviathan is more classic thrills: Up. Down. Repeat often.

Of course, these ups and downs are ginormous. The first several hills on this ride are designed with nice camelback parabolic humps, which lift riders’ butts off their seats for that delicious, elusive, much sought-after experience: airtime. Sailing over these hills is like flying. Super-fun.

The only beef I have with Leviathan is that it’s short. Well, it’s really long, BUT it’s still pulling 150-foot drops when it hits a long brake run and just ends. It could easily power through seven or eight more hills.

But coasters such as this are seriously expensive, so you build until you run out of budget, then you build a brake run. This particular coaster cost $39mil CAD ($28mil USD) thirteen years ago when they built it. That’s why there aren’t seven or eight more hills, even though there’s plenty of speed to do it.

I like this ride a lot.

Afterwards, it was well past time to head out. The fountains in front of Wonder Mountain gave a nice good-bye view for the day.

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