We got to Goteborg (or Gothenburg, in English) today around noon. Goteborg is Sweden’s second biggest city after Stockholm, and I have to admit to a few tense moment of driving in a city where I can’t read the signs. But we’re here, and our room was even ready at noon, so we dumped our stuff before heading out.

Just as Stockholm has an in-city amusement park called Grona Lund, Goteborg has one too, called Liseberg. Liseberg is bigger and has a good-sized hill in the park (which is important). Mer had also determined that this was where we were going to spend this beautiful sixty-degree day.

Liseberg has seven roller coasters – five adult coasters and two children’s coasters, as well as various other rides. Mer wanted to ride all of the coasters, as well as see Swedes at play. The park opened at 1:00, and we were inside at 1:30. Not bad for coming from three hours away this morning.

We did very well today. The park felt busy, but that didn’t translate to ride wait times; those seemed to be running at fifteen to twenty minutes in general. We ended up riding all seven coasters, including one twice, as well as three other rides. So we rode eleven rides and ate two meals and dessert, all in a park that was new to us (so we didn’t always know how to get to the next coaster efficiently).

A brief rundown on my opinion of the coasters, in the order we rode them:
– Stampbanan – (steel kiddie coaster) – A warm-up ride and checklist ride. Nothing too special, except you get to go around the loop three times.
– Rabalder – (steel kiddie coaster) – Great kiddie coaster that goes around twice. It has some real banked turns that are pretty fun.
– Lisebergnbanan – (steel contour coaster) – My favorite, hands-down. I’ve always wanted to try a contour coaster, for which the track follows the contours of a hill. This coaster never gets more than about thirty feet off the ground, but is really long, at two minutes and fifteen seconds. It has some wonderfully kicky corners, including three horizontal loops into the same part of the park. Much fun. We rode it twice over the day, finishing with this coaster as well.
– Luna (steel coaster that goes backwards as well) – This is a fun coaster that backs you up a bit and then uses the hill to generate speed to “launch” you vertically to the moon before going backwards to the station.
– Balder (wooden coaster) – As always, the wooden coasters are rougher than the steel ones, but this one is long, loops around on itself often, and focuses on throwing tons of bunny hops at you. It always alarms me to come out of my seat on a coaster.
– Valkyria (steel coaster with six seats across, letting your feet dangle) – This is a smooth ride, and the highlight is that it holds you for three seconds while you face down the first big drop hill. I had to close my eyes – I couldn’t handle it.
– Helix (steel coaster with 1.75 million inversions) – Oh, my. This was quite a coaster. The track inverts you as many times as they could cram on the course, and it launches you not once but twice while you’re out on the track, including one late in the ride when you think you’re almost done. Then, whammo!:  you cross a launch pad and scream up into an inverted loop. It gets to sixty mph and pulls over four Gs and inverts you seven times – but the twists and turns are such that it feels like a lot more than that. The engineers for this ride are very bad people. I still can’t get over that second launch when I thought the ride was ending.

Since Mer and I are in our fifties and our bodies take time to recover from being turned all around, we need to pace the coasters out. We did three coasters and then lunch. The we did one more coaster and a log flume ride (which, because of the hill, had two lift sections and two downhill splashdowns – we got wet). We did a set of two coasters, then did supper and the Ferris wheel. We then rode a kiddie ride that was a car on an elevated track designed to let you see the park from fifteen feet up. We finished with Helix and then, after dessert, we did Lisebergbanan  one more time, finishing up a little after 9:00. Good amusement park day.

One odd cultural thing for carnival games. In general, instead of winning stuffed animals, you win huge (like three feet long) boxes of various chocolates. You win them on the spin of a wheel instead of any game of skill. These games were very popular. It seemed strange to me to essentially gamble for candy, but people were walking around the park with huge boxes of candy.

So today was a bit of an unorthodox touring day. We’ve been to amusement parks in Europe before, but then we only did an individual ride or two just for the experience. Today was the first time we ever spent a whole day at an amusement park while on one of our European jaunts. We did get to see lots of the city from unusual angles.