The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly of Solo Theme Park Trips

Long, long ago, I lived in Japan for a year as part of my undergraduate degree. I was definitely already a theme park fan back then, but amongst trying to complete my studies and learning a notoriously difficult language, I just didn’t have the mental capacity to fully commit to making theme parks a whole segment of my personality. That’s probably why, when presented with the costs and time of taking the bullet train up from my city of Kyoto, and more importantly, a lack of willing mouse-loving travel companions, I did not manage to visit Tokyo Disney Resort once in the entire twelve months of my stay. Sure, I got to enjoy Universal Studios Japan once, and yes, my "hometown" of Kyoto was beautiful, but Tokyo DisneySea has that really cool fake volcano, and so through my dorky theme park lens, it will always be the One That Got Away.

I didn't go to Tokyo DisneySea, but I did travel hundreds of miles just to see these faceless red monkey folk toys and purchase one (or four).

Although logistics and cost did play a part, what really stopped me from making my Disney dreams a reality was my perception at the time that it was wrong to visit a theme park on my own. Instead of enjoying what is often considered one of the best theme parks in the world, I got to twiddle my thumbs in my dorm room for days on end, because at least that wasn’t having fun on my own, am I right?

As my interest in theme parks has grown over the years, I’ve reflected on that particular brand of self-limiting behaviour and decided to embrace solo theme park visits. With the pandemic especially, I’ve come to realise that life is too short to wait for the stars of ‘friends who want to travel to X theme park’ and ‘friends who have the means and time to travel to X theme park’ to align. Keeping this in mind, in summer 2020, I had my first foray into the world of solo theme parking, starting with familiar turf: Thorpe Park. I didn’t hate it, so from there, I’ve also done solo trips to Chessington and Alton Towers in the UK, Phantasialand (twice!) in Germany, and Efteling in the Netherlands.

My first solo visit, at Thorpe Park in July 2020.

Visiting a theme park on your own is certainly a completely different beast from a group visit, and in this blog post, I want to explore what makes it a rewarding experience, what makes it a challenge – and what makes it at times downright scary.

The Good: An Incentive to Learn a New Language

I marvel at people who are able to go to another country with only the word “hello” in that country’s language and an overconfidence in the prevalence of English under their belt. I am very much not one of those people. I like to think that it is a thirst for knowledge and culture that influences my decision to learn things, but deep down I know that at least half the time it’s probably fear. Few things scare me more than the thought of a food outlet employee staring at me blankly as I fruitlessly try to communicate that I would like fries without mayo please, as the line of hungry park-goers builds behind me.

Travelling on your own raises the miscommunication stakes even further, as people you interact with won’t necessarily get any forewarning that you’re not from that country since you won’t be engaged in English conversation as you approach. You’ll cause even further confusion if you’re a solo female theme park visitor as they’re such a rarity in comparison to the Male Solo Enthusiast that people may initially struggle to comprehend that you’ve travelled from another country just to ride some coasties. This all leads to some awkward nodding and smiling as a park employee launches into a jolly explanation for a good thirty seconds before you get the chance to reveal yourself as a useless Brit. The employee will then experience language whiplash as they hesitantly (yet basically fluently) switch to accommodate you, and you can always tell you’re now getting a lesser interaction because you’ve thrown them into the linguistic deep end without time to get their grammar in order. I’ve been there with Japanese; suddenly swapping between languages with different word orders is a recipe for nonsense and brain freeze.

In an attempt to keep these awkward interactions to a minimum, I crammed the Duolingo and Memrise apps a month or so before my visits to Germany and the Netherlands. Was I able to engage in anything resembling a conversation in these countries after these efforts? Not even close. Was it all a waste of time then? Definitely not. My appreciation for the lyrics of the German metal band Rammstein has never been better, and I can even make a stab at reading Dutch theme park news articles. On a more practical level, I could at least read signage and follow very basic instructions at the European parks, so I felt that little bit more at ease.

Me trying to recall a single word of Dutch at the front of a queue.

The Bad: Awful Photos

As the saying goes: if an enthusiast goes to a theme park and they have no photos of them standing with any of the major photo opportunities, did they even go?

Sadly, as a solo visitor, with no friends to be your personal photographer, your options are pretty limited for proving that you did in fact go to a theme park. You can buy into on-ride photos, but saving that, unless you’re willing to flag down another guest or an employee to take a quick stilted snap of you in front of something, looking like a kid standing outside their front door on their first day of school, then you’re on your own, bucko. Your camera angles are limited, your face is going to look huge; it’s all a bit of a mess really. Cue flailing your phone around in an attempt to line up your face close to anything resembling a recognisable bit of a ride. That eye stalk coming out of the back of my head? Yeah, that’s Nemesis, actually.

The Good: On-Ride Photos

On the other hand, there’s something equally special about on-ride photos when you’re a solo traveller as when you’re with a group. Some of my absolute favourite photos from holidays as a kid are those with unknown people in the background, going about their own holidays. Whenever I look back at photos my parents took of the three of us at Disneyland Paris in the 90s, the other kids feel familiar: trying to get Genie’s attention for an autograph, or joining in with the parade dances in the Festival of Fools; they’ve all been captured in a moment in time that’s now forever preserved in my family photo album, to be revisited over the years. Rather than them being an intrusion onto your perfectly curated images, I feel that getting a tiny glimpse into other peoples’ lives through your photos makes those memories that much richer – the parks feel alive.

Disassociating in the white t-shirt, at Disneyland Paris, 1997.

Many of the photos you can purchase will naturally feature other unknown guests and I love it when these capture a small shared moment with your fellow riders. Some of my favourites have been when we’ve all somehow coordinated, striking matching poses without even saying a word to each other as we fly past the camera. At their best, rides can create an incredible camaraderie with strangers that even transcends language barriers, and sometimes if you’re lucky, on-ride photos manage to save a moment of it.

The Bad: The Crushing Loneliness

If you don’t enjoy time alone with your own thoughts, don’t visit a theme park on your own on a busy day. Even when you’re surrounded by other guests in a queue, if their conversations are mind-numbingly tedious or unintelligible, you’ll soon feel like you’re stuck in some kind of isolation chamber. Your phone battery will plummet as you desperately try to find some way of stopping the deafening silence amongst all the chatter and safety announcements from getting to you. Read a BBC News article on disruptions to bus services in the North of England? Don’t mind if I do, if it’ll take my mind off of the looping reminder to not smoke in the queue that’s now engrained into every cell of my brain. Over the summer, I visited Oakwood Theme Park in Wales with some fellow enthusiasts, and after queuing for Megafobia for two hours, I realised I would not have been able to cope on my own, what with Oakwood’s infamous lack of phone coverage.

Riding Speed at Oakwood Theme Park, August 2022; a park that cannot be done solo.

Once you get onto the rides, matters don’t necessarily improve either. Some rides can absolutely be enjoyed fully on your own, but some are definitely team sports. Let me tell you, there is nothing enjoyable about being placed alone on a river rapids ride with two young boys who just wanted to sit with the rest of their classmates, but there wasn’t enough room and the two of them didn’t make the cut. You’re not responsible for the classroom politics that got them booted, but oh boy are you going to have to stew in it, as you bob about in stony silence for the duration of the experience.

The river rapids ride in question, at Efteling. Langnek for privacy.

The Ugly: Unwanted Attention

Whilst I am certainly not saying that this is never a problem for other folk, being a woman on your own at a theme park can be rough. When I’ve been at theme parks with groups, I’ve never for even a moment felt uneasy, but go on your own, and your interactions with other guests – and staff – can vary wildly. Most enthusiasts like to think of theme parks as safe spaces, where everyone is united in the shared goal of having a good, wholesome time. From reports of predation in the “theme park community” over the last few years, we know this not to be entirely the reality, but it still comes as a shock when you’re on the receiving end of unwanted attention in what is essentially a family friendly environment.

Ridiculously excessive mist, not misogyny.

During my recent trip to Efteling, I was left feeling bitter about my solo female traveller status after a frankly bizarre encounter with another on-site hotel guest at Efteling Village Bosrijk, which is nestled amongst woodland away from the park itself. On my final night, I was waiting for the lift up to my room when a man staying with another man and a woman with a baby in a pram struck up a conversation with me. He asked if I spoke English, and of course, I answered, not wishing to be rude. I asked where they’d all travelled from (Germany) to make polite conversation in the lift, and then things turned a little weird. He wanted to know if I knew where they could party – were there any clubs nearby? I essentially replied that if they wanted to party, they shouldn’t have chosen to visit a Dutch family theme park in the middle of nowhere. Efteling is not Disney World’s Pleasure Island in the 90s. I thought this would be the end of the conversation, but as I got out of the lift and realised they were staying on the same floor as me, the man hovered outside my room and asked if we could chat on Whatsapp (???) I politely declined and locked my door behind me.

The man didn’t technically do anything wrong, but he did ignore the etiquette of not intruding on solo female hotel guests. Whilst he may have thought he was just being friendly, I was now distinctly aware that I was staying in a hotel building that was a good 10-minute walk in partly pitch-black forest away from any hotel staff. This might seem like an overreaction, but you never know which interactions with strangers are going to escalate, and so you learn to keep your guard up. I had thought the Dutch World of Wonders would be immune to this sad reality, protected by some sort of veil of childlike fairy tale wonder, but alas.

Cute by day; maybe not by night.

Making yourself safe as a solo female traveller comes at a cost. To reduce the chances of running into any trouble, I’ll always pick to stay onsite if possible, and will choose the most reliable forms of transport with the most regular timings, and the airlines with the best track record for not leaving you hanging out to dry with route changes or cancellations. Unfortunately, all these options are usually the most expensive, so I cannot do as many trips as I would like. It does however seem a small price to pay for some sense of security – even if that’s occasionally ruined by some German guy wanting to party.

Sure I paid a fortune, but at least I got to relax on a very large bench at 10pm. Hotel Charles Lindbergh, Phantasialand.

I have even had two negative encounters on separate occasions with staff at one theme park that I will not name, with one encounter being unpleasant enough for me to not ride the ride that member of staff was hosting on for the rest of my visit, just to avoid them getting physically close to me again. I believe both of these encounters only happened because I was noticeably on my own, and it’s by far the most miserable thing about travelling solo to theme parks that I’ve experienced.

The Good: Better Ride Service?

One of the most obvious perks of travelling alone to theme parks is making full use of single rider lines. At Alton Towers, a forty-five-minute Smiler main queue was walk-on as a single rider, and I got the most delicious of death glares from guests who had waited forty minutes for Symbolica at Efteling, only for me and a couple of other single riders to waltz on into the Royal Palace within five minutes.

A less obvious perk is that sometimes very nice ride hosts may give you preferential treatment because you’re giving off massive enthusiast vibes with your commitment to those solo rides. Particular mention should go out to the fabulous Taron team at Phantasialand, for spotting a coaster dork from a mile away during Covid operations (i.e. no separate front-row queue) and always asking me straight out whether I wanted to sit in the front or back row without hesitation each and every time.

The Bad: Limiting Yourself

Whilst I’ve said that I’ve overcome my self-limiting behaviour surrounding theme parks, I do still have my limits: ‘kiddie’ rides. It’s amazing how some rides that are one hundred percent geared towards young children are completely acceptable to ride when with fellow adults (it’s ironic!), but when you clamber on by yourself and see all the parents proudly waving at their little ones, you immediately want the earth to swallow you up. Where I draw the line is a little vague, but it’s somewhere around ‘swinging ship = acceptable; Rockin’ Tug = not acceptable’ and unfortunately, the entirety of Legoland falls under my ‘not acceptable’ category, which is a shame because it’s a park that I adore (on a quiet day). If someone is comfortable visiting Legoland as an adult on their own, more power to them, but I just can’t do it. Checking in with my favourite mining moles will just have to wait for some friends free to visit them with me.

Legoland Windsor, looking pretty in autumn, September 2020.

The Good: Setting Your Own Pace

Ending on a high note, by far the greatest benefit of travelling to theme parks on your own is being in charge of your own day. I confess: I’m an insufferable ‘rope-dropper’ and visit maximiser. Spend a day with me at a park and you’ll notice me gradually radiating an annoying nervous energy if we pause too long to eat, or stop for one too many toilet breaks. Food and peeing are for the weak, and the weak don’t knock out every major ride before lunchtime. I still feel that visiting with friends and loved ones results in the best overall experience – nothing beats getting to share your first thoughts as you come off of a ride – but sometimes you just want to cut loose from those indecisive pauses that always arise, and just go. If you’ve never gone to a theme park on your own, do give it a shot. I’m forever hopeful that the 2023 season will allow me to share visits with other big ol’ nerds more, but if not, at least I’ll be able to absolutely blitz everything like a madwoman.