Saturday 8th February 2014
Another amusement park season and another Pleasure Beach event to begin a year of fun. Strangely enough, we started this event with ice skating in the Arena with everyone predicting Mike would fall over, he did but not before showing some impressive skating skills! The craziest part of the day was BPB announcing they were opening early and if we wanted our 'first public rides' on the Big One, we needed to be over there asap! Sprinting happened...
This event included the usual Pizza Kitchen buffet and was the beginning of our annual opening day 'Log Flume take over', which we still do to this day!
The day came to a close with an ERT session on Avalanche in the dark. It was a really enjoyable session, except for the part where me and Mike decided to share a carriage!
Saturday 12th April 2014
Oakwood, a crazy day which ended with one of our best ERT sessions ever! Oakwood organised park entry, a group takeover of their skycoaster Vertigo and an ERT session on Megafobia.
In truth, it was a normal kind of day you'd have at Oakwood but with an ERT at the end, perhaps not our most memorable event lineup but the evening ERT on Megafobia was exceptional.
Saturday 31st May 2014
This was a Big One, literally! Our first proper anniversary celebrations, the Big One turning 20 and the Revolution 35, so we called it Arrow Mayfever. Thankfully the event itinerary was better than the event name.
The event started with the usual breakfast arrangements, followed by the group being split into two smaller groups, group one had a 30 minute ERT on the Revolution while group two had a tour of the Big One's maintenance area beneath its station, after 30 minutes the groups swapped over.
We also had a behind the scenes tour of Valhalla followed by a tex-mex buffet at Coasters restaurant and later on in the day a BBQ opposite Avalanche.
The day ended with an ERT on the Big One, it was due to be an hour long but ended up as two due to several wheel check stoppages. We got seriously good value for money on this event!
Saturday 4th October 2014
Word on the coaster forums was that Fantasy Island was about to go under, causing the UK's two tallest Vekoma coasters to close and potentially never reopen! The only thing to do was give the park some much needed support and add to our coaster counts at the same time, so we organised a very short notice event.
The park has improved so much since, new owners and a whole new appearance for the park. We had a good day on this occasion though with ERTs on both the Vekoma coasters and the park pretty much to ourselves in horrendous weather!
8th & 9th November 2014
Our excellent season of events in 2014 came to an end with two more event days at Blackpool Pleasure Beach.
The season ended with hour ERT sessions on the Grand National in heavy rain, plus ERT sessions on the Big Dipper and Steeplechase during different times of the weekend. There was also a behind the scenes look at the Derby Racer, rides on W&G's Thrill-O-Matic with the lights on and excellent catering throughout both days. As an added bonus, Pleasure Beach was open through to midnight on the Saturday!
Something I'll always remember from this event was an engineer on the Derby Racer tour warning us all not to lean on anything due to the grease used, but by that point Mike had already had his arm in the stuff and had to be escorted into the nearest shower room to get cleaned up!
This event was named as "The Final Furlong" because I felt it could be the last one, my health didn't seem 'right' at the time and I wasn't sure the interest was still there to keep doing similar events year on year. I'm glad that we didn't stop here!
