Saturday 7th July 2012
It all started with a meeting in the Grill restaurant at the Pleasure Beach in February 2012, I quite fancied putting together an Exclusive Ride Time (ERT) event after doing so four years previous for another BPB site, so one or two emails led to a meeting, the meeting led to this event and the rest is history! Organising it with the Pleasure Beach was easy, but it was going to take a minimum of 40 attendees to sign up to ride the Big One for an hour to make the event go ahead!
We managed to do so, just! As part of the day, we had the Big Pizza Kitchen to ourselves for an hour before the ERT on the Big One, pizza before the Big One, who's idea was that? Don't ask (woops!).
Thankfully, no seats were covered with pizza or sick, just 40 happy roller coaster enthusiasts enjoying the Big One after the Pleasure Beach had closed for the day. The day ended with the group watching the Hot Ice.
A few weeks before this event took place, I was offered to take over the running of Club Pleasure Beach, the Pleasure Beach's official club, an offer that simply couldn't be refused! I didn't want to call time on Pleasure Beach Experience though, so was given the opportunity to merge the two with the Pleasure Beach's blessing. It would open many doorways of opportunity for Pleasure Beach Experience.
Saturday 3rd November 2012
Officially, our first event as 'Club' Pleasure Beach Experience following the event in July 2012. This event was when 'running' a coaster club started to sink in, the itinerary was loaded from start to finish.
Firstly, the most important meal of the day; breakfast, followed by guided walks around the Ghost Train & Alice in Wonderland. In fact, writing about this reminds me of a phone call to the Pleasure Beach to confirm our group size, a good friend of mine Mark replied with 'how many?!', the group size was significantly bigger than expected meaning we had to split into two groups for the tours. The dark ride walk-through session was followed by David Cam's legendary history tour around the usually unseen areas of the Pleasure Beach.
A big feed in the Pizza Kitchen was much needed after the morning tours, followed by free time around the park and at ride close, an hour on the Grand National!
An ERT on the Grand National after dark in the November wind and rain was fantastic, made even better by BPB's operations department swapping the trains over so the much loved in 2012 Grand National train, the purple train, was in use! We even had glow sticks!
Check out the gallery below for more event photos from 2012.
