Two Days at Europa-Park

There are a handful of places a serious coaster person is supposed to get to before they hang it up, and for me Europa-Park had been the big unchecked box for years. I'd tried to bolt it onto work trips to Poland and never quite made it happen. Every time, it stayed just out of reach. So when we started sketching out this family trip to Europe, I drew a hard line in the sand: whatever else we did, we were spending two days at Europa-Park.

That instinct had backup. When I told coaster friends we were doing Disneyland Paris, more than one of them said the same thing — some of them told me to skip Paris entirely — but every single one of them said the same thing about Germany: get to Europa-Park, and give it two full days, minimum. When the enthusiast community is that unanimous, you listen.

Getting there, and a first night at Krønasår

We rode the TGV out of Paris Gare de l'Est — a fast, comfortable first-class run of a couple and a half hours straight to the little Ringsheim/Europa-Park station — and worked our way into the small town of Rust, in Germany's southwestern corner near the French and Swiss borders. This is farm country, quiet and green, and then suddenly there's one of the great theme parks of the world sitting in the middle of it.

A little background, because it explains everything about why this park is the way it is. Europa-Park opened in 1975, and it's owned and run by the Mack family — and the Macks are not hotel people who got into rides. They're Mack Rides, a family manufacturing company that traces back eight generations to 1780 — they started out building wooden wagons and coaches and have been building amusement rides for well over a century. Read that again: the family firm behind the park is almost 250 years old. The park was originally conceived as a showroom — a place to display and demonstrate the coasters, water rides, flat rides, and dark rides that Mack builds and sells to parks all over the world. That origin is the secret ingredient. When the company that owns the park also builds the rides, everything is a prototype and a sales pitch at once, which means the hardware is exceptional, the theming is lavish, and — as I'd learn over two days — the operations are the best I've ever seen anywhere. Today it's the most-visited seasonal theme park on earth and one of the busiest parks in all of Europe, organized into twenty themed areas, most of them built around individual European countries, so you can "travel" from Iceland to Italy to Russia to Greece in an afternoon.

We arrived in the evening and checked into Hotel Krønasår, one of the resort's crown-jewel hotels. It opened in 2019 as "the museum hotel," themed top to bottom as a grand old Nordic natural-history museum — weathered Scandinavian timber, glass cases of artifacts and specimens, a great skeleton suspended in the soaring lobby atrium. It sits directly across from Rulantica, the resort's enormous indoor water world, and being a hotel guest comes with the golden ticket of early park entry, which we'd lean on hard both mornings.

Once we'd dropped our bags, we walked down to Bubba Svens, the hotel's boathouse-style restaurant, and grabbed seats at the bar just as a World Cup match was kicking off. The place was filling up, and they'd set out little flags of the two competing nations on every table — a nice touch. We ordered a couple of small plates and picked at them while we watched the game, and it was exactly the right way to ease into the visit: no agenda, no lines, just a beer and some football in a beautiful room. Afterward I wandered the grounds and took pictures of the property lit up at night. It really is a stunning resort. I went to bed genuinely excited for the first time in a while — the box was finally about to get checked.

Day One: the headliners, and a masterclass in operations

This was another of those unpopular alarm-clock mornings, but there was no way around it. Early entry is the single best tool in the box for hitting the marquee rides before the crowds arrive, and I wasn't about to waste it.

I went straight for Blue Fire. This is one of Mack's signature launch coasters, opened in 2009 in the Iceland area — a launched machine that goes from zero to 100 km/h in a couple of seconds and runs four inversions across a long, swooping layout. I walked most of the way onto it during early entry and had a ride within ten or fifteen minutes. It's very smooth and very fast, genuinely top-tier, and while some of the newest coasters coming out have pushed the envelope to the point where Blue Fire feels a touch tamer than it once did, that takes nothing away from it. This thing is great, and above all it's incredibly re-rideable — the kind of ride you'd happily lap all day.

Next door I went for Wodan – Timbur Coaster. Wooden coasters are a big deal to me, and this one absolutely delivers the goods. It's a GCI export — a Great Coasters International woodie, opened in 2012 — and it's got all the makings of a great wooden coaster, with pacing that's flat-out relentless from the first drop to the brakes. No dead spots, no catching your breath. A proper woodie.

Then, right as the park opened to everyone, I went to cash in a ride reservation I'd booked on the park app that morning — a great feature, and a preview of how smart this place is about moving people — and walked onto Voltron Nevera powered by Rimac with barely a wait. Voltron is Europa's newest headliner, opened in 2024 in the brand-new Croatia area, and it is amazing. It's a Mack multi-launch coaster with seven inversions and the steepest launch of any roller coaster in the world — a beyond-vertical 105-degree ramp that fires you up and out. It's fast, it's intense, it's packed with unique and unexpected elements, and it deservedly won Best New Roller Coaster the year it opened. More on this one tomorrow, because I wasn't nearly done with it.

Coming off Voltron, Preston and I jumped on the Schweizer Bobbahn in the Switzerland area — a Mack bobsled coaster. It's not the monster that the bobsled at Parc Astérix is, but it's a very fun ride, and by now the park was filling in; we waited about thirty minutes, which honestly wasn't bad at all. From there we did the Jungfrau Glacier Flight, also in Switzerland, because Preston loves a good spinning ride and they don't really bother me. We watched it run a full cycle first — it looked pretty mild, sort of a suspended Troika — but once we were strapped in, all bets were off. I think it runs multiple programs, because ours had all the seats swinging and sweeping in ways the cycle we'd watched hadn't hinted at. It wasn't intense, exactly, but it did some genuinely weird motions, and Preston climbed off a little out of sorts.

We regrouped in the France area with Madame Freudenreich Curiosités, a good long dark ride and a welcome break from the heat wave that was still baking Europe. This one has a strange history — when it opened it was essentially an odd riff on EPCOT's old Universe of Energy, and since then the dinosaurs have been dressed up in clothes, which somehow made it even weirder. I mean that as a compliment. It's exactly the kind of quirky, fully-committed oddity that these European parks do so well and the American parks would never greenlight.

By this point I needed coffee — I don't function especially well without it — so we stopped at Bar Chez Marianne, a café in the France area that turned out to have terrific cakes and pastries. It made for an excellent light breakfast and became our go-to caffeine stop for the trip.

Properly fueled, we kept working through the park. Castello dei Medici in the Italy area is an excellent little haunted-house dark ride, and it's worth pausing here to note something remarkable about Europa-Park: there's a dark ride in nearly every single land, and there are a lot of lands. Most parks ration their dark rides; this one hands them out like candy. We also did Piccolo Mondo, Italy's take on It's a Small World — not an especially long ride, but a cute one — and Voletarium, the park's flying theater. We had an app reservation for it, though the line wasn't bad anyway. Voletarium is almost identical to Soarin' at EPCOT in its execution — a hang-gliding simulator over sweeping scenery — right down to the scents piped in, and there are lots of them. Really well done.

For lunch we split up: Preston grabbed a burger near the park entrance, while Catrina and I had a light lunch at the Black Forest House in the Germany area. A brat and a burger felt like the correct way to experience the German section of a park that is, after all, actually in Germany.

After lunch we caught the park's monorail from the Germany station and rode it back around to the Paddington station — a nice, breezy way to cross the park and get off our feet for a few minutes. That dropped us near Arthur, which Preston and I rode together. Arthur is presented as a family ride, and technically it is, but it's one of the most unique things in the park: an inverted powered coaster — which is a genuinely uncommon animal — that threads through an elaborate indoor dark-ride world based on the Minimoys. The scenes are packed with sights, sounds, and smells, and one is permanently seared into my memory, because it drops you into the opening bars of Dr. Dre's "Still D.R.E." — completely unedited. In a family ride. In Germany. I still don't fully understand it, and I love it.

Then the whole family did Pirates in Batavia in the Dutch area. Yes, it might be a copy of Pirates of the Caribbean, but it is a very good one, right down to a drop in the middle of the ride. It's loaded with detailed scenes, and at one point the boats float right through a working restaurant, exactly like the old Blue Bayou trick at Disneyland. (There's a poignant backstory here too — the original burned down in a fire a few years back and the park rebuilt it even better than before.)

From there we backtracked toward the Russia area for Euro-Mir, which I'd been staring at in photos for years. It's a strikingly picturesque coaster from the outside — those mirrored spiral towers — and it's a unique beast: a controlled spinning coaster with an odd soundtrack and an even odder spiraling lift. It shows its age a little bit these days, but it was bigger and more thrilling than I'd ever guessed from the pictures. Another box checked.

European parks tend to close a lot earlier than their American counterparts, and Europa-Park was no exception — the gates came at 6 p.m. With a little daylight left and the weather still warm, I managed to talk Catrina into closing out the day with a couple of water rides, which is where the "Mack showroom" idea really comes full circle. Because the park is Mack's showcase, the water rides aren't afterthoughts — they're demo units for products the company sells worldwide. Atlantica SuperSplash in the Portugal area is a Mack water coaster with a couple of real tricks up its sleeve, and I was pleasantly surprised to get off it without being totally soaked. Then the Tirol Log Flume over in Austria — a fun flume with two drops that, like everything else here, ran with ruthless efficiency and almost no wait. We stayed dry again, and I found myself hoping it sticks around for a long time, because classic log flumes are quietly disappearing from parks everywhere.

To dry off the little bit of water I had picked up, Preston and I rode the Vienna Wave Swing 'Glückspilz', a swing ride with fountains playing underneath your feet, and then closed the day on the Alpine Express 'Enzian'. I'm out of the loop enough these days that I didn't even realize they'd done a complete replacement of the park's original 1984 powered coaster — after a fire, they scrapped everything but the station and rebuilt it, reopening in 2024 with a new open-air mountain design. These little powered coasters are always fun, and they take me straight back to the very first one I ever rode as a kid, Thunder Run at Canada's Wonderland.

Back at the hotel, Preston wasn't hungry, so Catrina and I went to Bubba Svens to check out the buffet. It was full of unusual items, and we got to sample all kinds of things we wouldn't have ordered à la carte. I never quite feel like I get my money's worth out of any buffet, but this one was at least something different, and a fun end to a long, full day.

Day Two: re-rides, the parking-lot legend, and mopping up

In a rare display of paternal compassion, I let Preston and Catrina sleep in, and I headed into the park alone for early entry to re-ride a few of the signature attractions before the family surfaced.

I started, again, with Blue Fire. I'd meant to lap Wodan next, but its line hadn't opened yet, so I crossed to the other side of the park and grabbed another ride on Pirates in Batavia — as good the second time — before circling back to the one I really wanted: Voltron, three more times. This ride is top-ten material for me, no question. It's very intense, but it's also fun and surprisingly re-rideable, though I'll admit I was good after three back-to-back laps. Between the app ride reservations and the single-rider line, my wait never once topped five minutes. That is not normal. That is Europa-Park operations, and it spoils you fast.

Then I finally rode Silver Star — the most famous parking-lot coaster in the world. It sits right out by the entrance, a giant B&M hypercoaster you can see from the lot, and riding it is a lovely flashback to the era when B&M coasters just delivered smooth, floating, powerful airtime without rattling the fillings out of your head. The queue runs through an immense building full of Formula 1 and Monaco exhibits — it's genuinely worth walking through even if you have no intention of riding a coaster.

By then I needed my fix, so I went back to Bar Chez Marianne for coffee and a light breakfast, and Catrina and Preston made their way into the park and met me there. Reunited and caffeinated, it was time to work through everything we'd missed the day before — and there was plenty.

Preston had never been on a haunted-swing ride, so I had to get him on Cassandra's Curse in the Greece area. I didn't think it had quite the story or the fun of Houdini's Great Escape at Great Adventure back in New Jersey, but it's still a proper version with some good moments and a nicely disorienting payoff. Right nearby was Atlantis Adventure, and Preston was thrilled to discover it was a shooting-style interactive dark ride — one of his favorite genres, probably because he always wins. I made it close this time. I still didn't beat him.

Since we were close and I still had coasters to grab, I hopped on Matterhorn Blitz in Switzerland. It's "just" a wild mouse, nothing crazy on paper, but the vertical elevator lift, the wooded setting, and the way it darts around and through the buildings make it a lot of fun. And — I can't say this enough about this park — the operations were spectacular: the ride was designed to load two cars at once, so a long-looking line moved fast. We grabbed a quick slice at Marios Pizza in Italy to hold us over until closing.

From there, the day turned into a happy tour of the family rides. Preston and I rode the Bä-a-a Express, a tiny kiddie coaster — I am what I am, and I rode it anyway — and then we hit a whole cluster of gentle attractions in a row: an elf ride, a puppet boat ride, Jim Button – Journey through Morrowland, the Snowflake Sleigh Ride (which Catrina had been hunting for all day — nice and cool, and a genuine break from the heat), the Arena of Football, and the Snorri Touren kids' boat ride. The standout of the bunch was Grand Prix EDVENTURE, a clever new interactive shooting ride — very much in the Toy Story Mania family — that had opened in 2025. There was no line at all, so we rode it twice.

With closing time creeping up, we planned out our last rides and drifted back toward the front of the park. We watched Nikola Tesla's Beautiful Croatia, a beautifully produced 360-degree film promoting Croatian tourism in the new Croatia area, and then Snorri 4D, a fun 4D movie in a blessedly air-conditioned theater. Snorri, for the record, might be my favorite character in the park. I finished on the two Greek-area water coasters: Pegasus, a family coaster tucked behind Poseidon that's a lot of fun and a good size for what it is, and then Poseidon itself — another Mack water coaster, the first one the park ever built, and so similar to Journey to Atlantis at SeaWorld Orlando that I have to think Poseidon was more or less the model Mack used to demo and sell that ride. Showroom logic again.

We left the park and walked over to the neighboring Hotel Colosseo for dinner at Pizzeria La Romantica — great food in an even better setting, the Italian-themed hotel doing its full Roman-piazza thing around us. It was the perfect way to close out our time here before heading back to pack our bags for the two-leg train journey to London.

Final thoughts

So: did the place that had eluded me for years live up to a decade of anticipation? Completely. Europa-Park is, I think, the best-run theme park I have ever set foot in, and quite possibly the best theme park full stop. The coasters are world-class — Voltron alone is worth the trip, and Blue Fire, Wodan, Silver Star, and the rest form a lineup most parks would kill for. But it's the whole package that gets you: a dark ride in every land, water rides that double as engineering showcases, hotels themed to the hilt, and operations so sharp that a packed summer day never once felt like standing in line. Owning the ride company turns out to be a serious competitive advantage.

My coaster friends were right, and so was the line I drew in the sand. Two days barely scratched it, and I already know we'll be back. But for now, there were trains to catch and a very different kind of city waiting. Next stop: London.