Come back for more? Hurrah.
I should probably do some explaining here. Towards the end of the week we did more fun activities, such as a very short lived water balloon fight (have you ever been hit by a water balloon? Those things hurt, man!) and Ten-Pin Bowling which, to me, was deeply unfair.
I’m not crap at bowling. My ball was magnetically attracted to the gutters, I swear!
That doesn’t really bring us to the Inverness Aquadome. But I don’t care.
The Aquadome! Kind of like Europa Pools (Our local moistworld) on steroids. This thing had ‘awesome’ flumes!
The Cyclone
Yeah. You lie down in this one, go very fast then land in some water. Average.
The Vortex
This slide is, quite possibly the most infuriating thing in the history of swimming pools. The idea was that you would go down a normal slide in a rubber donut thing for a bit, then go into a whirlpool at one side, go around 180 degrees and go down another tube. At least in theory. In reality you go into the whirlpool, then go around… and around and around and around for all eternity while a pipe above drips ice-cold water on to you. Pretty much everyone I saw got stuck in the first whirlpool until they gave up, got off their donut, (which would invariably turn over if you even hinted at getting off it), dragged it to the other pipe, hopped back on it (turning it over again) and going down. After TEN MINUTES of rotation that’s eventually what I did. And guess what they had put at the bottom of that little bit of tube?
ANOTHER WHIRLPOOL.
And another one ofter that. This slide isn’t so much a water ride as a life ambition – get down it without starving.
The Loch Ness Monster
Now this was good. This thing has a vertical drop in it. It takes two seconds to get from top to bottom as you fall about four storeys. Riding it is like this: you slide down a slope that gets very steep (like 80 degrees or something) very fast, then you feel zero gravity. Then you hit the bottom of the tube again, doing about mach 4. Then your femurs shatter as you hit a wall of water designed to slow you down, but instead rips your face off. Then you drown. All in all, jolly good fun. And the queue was tiny as people were too scared to go on it. Or they knew it’s wrath.
There is more to the Aquadome than this, but it’s getting late so I’ll write more tomorrow. Goodnight!
-James
© James Plant, 2008.
All trademarks acknowledged.
