Maximising Europa Park Experience

In our road trip through the Black Forest, we planned to visit the rated best theme park in Europe; in the world even: Europa Park!

Best Theme Park in Europe

The Game Plan

Being mad coaster junkies, Bel and I lit up when we saw the magnitude and number of rides there are. Part of me still chatters at the sight of vertical drops and loops, but the screams of adventure beats louder.

In our excitement, we came up with a game plan to maximise our time in the theme park. The worst part of theme parks is the queue. A popular ride can potentially drain 2 hours of your time just for a minute of the ride. Thus we planned to come very early and catch the most popular rides within the first opening hour to minimise the amount of queueing. We would also pack a portable lunch so that we can eat wherever we can sit, completely avoiding time spent getting lunch amongst the crowd. Moreover, we’ll eat lunch early so while everyone is having lunch, we’d be taking rides with less queue.

In the same morning we were going to execute our epic game plan, we also wanted to spend some time in the Freiburg Münstermarkt. Bel especially mentioned that she wanted to visit it.

However, to stick to our plan to reach europa park at the earliest, we will have to visit the market when it opens and leave for Europa Park within 30 minutes.

Come the morning of our theme park day, we woke up early, packed our bags, and headed onto the church grounds where the Münstermarkt would be. However, even though officially they are open from 7.30 AM onwards, apparently most farmers only starts rolling out their carpets from 8 to 9 AM.

The mostly empty market grounds…

There was only one butcher shop open, about five stalls setting up, and a whole lot of empty space. Since we were already out and about, we decided to hike up to a high viewpoint in Freiburg to admire the antique city in its fullness. It was a short quick hike as we strode up and back to the market at 8 AM.

Our quick-hike view

By now there were enough stores around that captivated us. There were the fresh vegetables and fruit store, florists, cheeses, more butchers, and rows of hotdog booths. We got ourselves quite a haul. We saw a mushroom shop selling a whole truffle. We wanted to grab one to bring home, but we restrained ourselves considering we still had 18 days of travel ahead. The poor truffle would not have survived the travel.

My personal favorite was the cheese-hotdog. Each bite reveals crispy-soft toasted bread, coarse savoury sausage, melty cheese, and sweetness of onions.

By this time we were already very late for our plans! We scrambled back to our hotel to collect our bags and hurried to our car.

The Arrival

Evidently from the long queue of the highway exit into Europa Park, we were not the only ones who wanted to arrive early. I obediently joined the queue. My obedience brewed into frustration and anger as numerous cars audaciously cut into the line of cars. It made me question if I should just leave the line and cut in since people are doing that. Then I thought of how it much worse it will be if everyone does that. So I acquiesced myself to wait in line and be contented to pass retributions in the form of thunderous honks.

We were welcomed into the 1/3 full carpark. As I was parking, Bel asked

“Are we on time?”

Considering that we wanted to reach at 9 and it was nearing 10, I sighed

“NOPE. We’re late.“

Then she was furious. Then I was upset that she was furious.

She was furious that I was so hard on about our schedule. She finds my clock watching and rushing from point to point too stressful, especially when we’re supposed to be relaxing on our honeymoon holiday. She doesn’t think we should be onto our clocks as much.

I was upset that she thinks it is not important to follow our schedule and plans. It is especially infuriating because I had painstakingly planned out the activities and timeline for each day. I seek to enforce it daily so that we can optimise our vacation time doing as much vacation things, but now Im getting told that it’s not important. What about the last few days that we know what are the next things to do? Isn’t it nice that we had a plan? What if we did not enforce our timeline and end up arriving in Europa park so late, then unable to ride much of the attractions? Wouldn’t we end up feeling disappointed that we wasted our time when we could have done more?

After a moments of begrudging silence along the entry queue, we finally swallowed our anger and faced each other.

I admitted that making our holiday too strictly round the clock might snuff the joy from the stresses of trying to meet it. But I had to know, if we have too many things to do but too little time, how do we decide what to do? It was then we agreed that we rather cut the number of things rather than squeezing minutes in between.

It was not that she did not appreciate my planning and scheduling, it was that too much of it is being a killjoy. Which I had to agree. The whole morning I was saying things like.

“We have 30 minutes here.”

“5 more minutes before we have to leave.”

“If we don’t leave now we will be late”

In retrospect if I heard myself I should have known better! All in all, I’m glad that from this occasion Bel and I get to communicate our priorities and eventually understand each other better. Life is a roller coaster, and I’m happy she’ll ride with me!

Now that we were here and it’s already well into 10am, we galloped to the nearest coaster that we stalked to be exciting!

MUST RIDE in Europa Park

1. Silver Star, France

The G force in this is exhilarating

2. Woodan, Iceland

This ride brings you to NECKBREAKING SPEED

3. Blue Fire, Iceland

This ride is actually very short, but that’s because they rapidly accelerate you to SPEED. This ride had the highest acceleration I’ve ever felt.

4. Euro Mir, Russia

It was an interesting experience being spun around upside down at high speed.

5. Poseidon, Greece

It has good slopes and momentous water-ful ending

6. Eurosat, France

It doesn’t look like much from the outside. But inside, you’ll be spun around in high speed across and under pop culture references. Similar to USS-SG Mummy themed ride.

Additional Tips for Europa Park

One additional strategy that worked very well for us was using the virtual queue in their app. Supposedly it was for people who wants to queue virtually while chilling at a nearby cafe. But for us, we were virtually queueing while physically queueing, maximising our ride opportunities! Indeed we had to time our physical queue so that we wont miss our virtual line, but it was worth the walk-in ride. Felt really good when you see a long queue outside but you can just legally skip the line.

See the app download guide here!

We had an amazing day! I would highly recommend this theme park to anyone, even if they don’t like rides. The themed decorations are in themselves worth the visit.

I would recommend spending 1-2 days though.

We were only able to experience the big boy rides and walked through most of the themed areas. If we had 2 days it would be much more relaxing.

Also, it wasn’t ideal that i had to manage a 2 hours night drive to our next accommodation. So I’d recommend staying the second night and leaving in the morning instead!