It’s understandable why my surfer friends wanted to go to Thorpe Park last weekend and check out Tidal Wave, the previous record holder for Europe’s tallest water roller coaster. Now, I’m all for roller coasters and I’ll go on pretty much anything at a theme park, but wet rides have never really been my thing. But even after looking at the range of Blackpool hotel deals, my friends very firmly decided that they were going to book us in to a Thorpe Park hotel for the weekend. A scorching weekend, might I add.

Indeed, it was a blisteringly hot Saturday and we would probably have liked to have peeled off our sweat-stained t-shirts if it wasn’t for public decency. The queue itself was quite long as well, taking probably an hour. Normally the wet rides have the shortest queues, but I think that everyone was desperate to get wet in this sultry heat. It was only when we made it into the perspex windowed shack that I realised why my friends were so desperate to come here. The boat/roller coaster thing itself had come crashing down the slope, hurling up a one hundred foot wave, which was racing right at us. The water smashed against the perspex like a battering ram, and that’s when I realised that the one window I was standing opposite of was empty; I may as well have just had a bucket of water tipped over my head. Guess I was wishing I’d never left that Thorpe Park hotel in the first place.

Soon enough, we were on the ride and right at the top of that slope and I thought about how wet I’d got just from just a tiny fraction of that wave. Too late now, we were in a screaming descent into the water below. Badummmfff! Everything went white and then I felt a truckload of water landing on all of us. I wish we’d looked at the Blackpool hotel offers instead.