Daily Mail

IT’S CHEAP AS FRITES!

Forget Disneyland Paris, this nearby theme park is a bargain – and has a new 70mph ride

- By Antonia Windsor

MY NINE-YEAR-OLD son holds my hand firmly and leads me in the direction of a benign looking mound of fake neolithic stones. ‘Come on, Mum! This is the new ride, we have to try it.’ if i’d looked more closely at the skeletal track beyond, i would have opted out.

The ride is called Toutatis — Parc asterix’s record-breaking new attraction, which accelerate­s at 70mph (a record speed for France), before abruptly reversing and dragging passengers 51m up a vertical boom and plummeting them back to earth again.

i’m not counting how many times my bum leaves my seat as we hurtle around sharp bends and are thrown upside down. When i finally emerge on jelly legs, and take a proper look at the carriages hurtling up and around the steel tracks, i realise it looks as terrifying as it feels, even so i go again the next day with my eldest daughter.

The sign of a good roller- coaster, according to Toutatis project engineer Julien Simon, is that you go on the first time to brave it and then go on again because you love it. Judging by the 70-minute queues at 10.30am, there are clearly thrillseek­ers all over europe who are either braving it or loving it.

i’ve come to Parc asterix, just north of Paris, with my three children aged seven, nine and 11. it’s a post-SaTs treat for my eldest, who was hankering after a visit to disneyland. Parc asterix is half the price. My eldest had chanced upon an asterix comic book at school, and so already knows something of the warrior’s scrapes and mishaps while defending his Breton village against the march of the romans. The other two have a crash-course in the story of asterix and his sidekick, obelix, in the park’s 4d cinema and don’t seem to even notice the film is in French.

it’s the ‘Frenchness’ of the park that makes it so appealing. Who wants to go to France to engage with american culture? Here, they are surrounded by the language and those Gallic characters created nearly 65 years ago, by albert Uderzo and rene Goscinny.

The park is beautifull­y landscaped with forests and lakes, and is divided into zones: egypt, with a thrilling inverted roller-coaster called oziris; Greece, with wooden coaster Tonnerre 2 Zeus, which was renovated last year, and the family coaster Pegase express (a maximum speed of just 30mph, and a chilling — for my youngest — encounter with Medusa); and there’s also rome and Paris. The new area, Festival Toutatis, is an extension of asterix’s Gaulish village.

Throughout the park the food is exceptiona­lly tasty, and you can sit on a restaurant terrace and imagine you are in a Provencal village, rather than a theme park.

There are many smaller attraction­s, including a 19th-century carousel, seven water rides and a daily programme of shows, including the excellent les Plongeons de l’olympe, in which olympic- standard divers jump off increasing­ly high platforms (all included in the park’s €39 day entrance fee).

As the sun sets behind the trees, we wander back to the three-star la Cite Suspendue hotel, a fairytale collection of wooden huts hidden deep in the forest.

It may not be disneyland, but it’s the stuff of which childhood dreams are made.

TRAVEL FACTS

TWO nights at La Cite Suspendue cost from £582 per room for a family of four. Price includes accommodat­ion, breakfast and tickets to the park ( parcasteri­x.fr/en)

 ?? ?? Thrills and spills: The new Toutatis ride. Inset: Antonia and her children
Thrills and spills: The new Toutatis ride. Inset: Antonia and her children

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