Busch Gardens Williamsburg - Review

Busch Gardens Williamsburg is known as one of America's favorite parks, and it has to rate as one of the most beautiful and best themed parks in the world. In fact, it won the Golden Ticket Awards for Best Landscaping, Best Food, and Cleanest Park in the year 2000. If you like theming, you'll love BGW. The park is divided into nine themed lands based on European countries, with the latest addition being Ireland. Each has shops, restaurants, and rides themed on the country's heritage.

The park is also home to several world-class roller coasters such as Apollo's Chariot and Alpengeist; several of which are well-themed and make the most of the surrounding landscape. Unfortunately, the collection of coasters is small, as is the selection (and quality) of flat rides. The park has three water rides including a very short Log Flume, a River Rapids Ride, and an excellently themed chute-the-chutes splash ride called Escape from Pompeii. It seems that this park has focused more on theming, shops and eateries, rather than providing lots of rides the more traditional amusement parks offer. Of course, not everybody wants bombarding with thrill rides and you only need to look at the clientele to see this.

Being from the UK, all of the England, Scotland, and Ireland theming doesn't do much for me, and some of it is a little unrepresentative! However, it is very pleasant to walk around, and the guests seemed to be enjoying it. Like Busch Gardens Tampa, the park has a good variety of things to offer and attempts to please all members of the family, from young to old.

On both my visits to the park the staff were quite slow on sending out trains, but were friendly enough. The park is large and I found it somewhat difficult to find my way around the park! Although I could see Alpengeist towering above the trees, there were very few signs leading me to it, and the park map didn't make things much easier either. The first time I visited the park entrance was chaos with crowds of people standing all over the place. However, on my last visit to the park they had things very organized, with staff directing guests to the next available ticket booth.

BGW is a very nice clean park with detailed theming and wonderful landscaping. It also offers a variety of quality food at reasonable prices for a theme park. However, for the park to become one of my favorites it needs to build a good woodie; reduce the amount of braking on some of the coasters, and build more rides as the admission price is a little expensive considering the number of shops outweighs the number of rides.