Every great vacation must include at least one trip to a theme park. On our trip to Sweden, we visited Grona Lund...twice. Confession time, the second time Dan and I snuck back to the park for an hour without the kids to go on all of the coasters. It wasn't planned, but we were walking by the park and we noticed that it was empty, so we seized the opportunity. This review is a composition of pictures and wisdom gained from visiting the park on both occasions.
Depending on the crowds, Grona Lund can be done in a few hours or an entire day. It's not very big, but when it's busy, they cram a lot of people into the park and the lines are massive.
Some of the best pictures were taken from the ferry.
The ticket booth is unique. Rather than waiting in a queue, you take a number, like at a deli counter and watch for your number to come up on a giant board. I'm not really sure if this was better than simply having a queue, as it was crowded and created one mass of people waiting at the ticket counter.
There are different tiers of ticket pricing. You can simply buy a pass to enter the park and then buy individual tickets for rides, like at a carnival or you can buy an all-day wrist band. When we went with the kids, we opted for the all-day bands. This would have be great, except for we didn't factor in the crowds. Most of the lines were thirty minutes within the first half-hour of park opening. The lines ballooned to around ninety minutes by lunch. In this case, tickets would have been cheaper, as we only managed to go on a handful of rides. When Dan and I visited on the slow night, were opted for tickets, since we only wanted to go on a few rides. However, had we wanted to do more, a slow night is a great time for the wrist bands.
Grona Lund has a bunch of characters that were unfamiliar to me. Like these guys at the front entrance.
The park is filled with creepy characters that race up next to people on unicycles or rolling balls and startle you. I don't like to be startled! I was on edge the entire time.
Most disturbing of all, was this...
Grona Lund is one of those parks, where every ride just feels unsafe. They probably were extremely safe, but I was double checking the safety restraints and just feeling a bit unsure about everything.
One of the most "I'm about to die" rides is the Vilda Musen, a crazy mouse type of little coaster. It is zippy and terrifying.
The scariest thing that I experienced in the park was an old fashioned fun house. It took about ten minutes to go through and it was filled will obstacles like spinning floors and uneven stairs. Just to get inside, I had to climb up a moving staircase. I almost ended up in the hospital before going through the attraction! It's a wonder that we made it out unscathed. The only picture that turned out was this bumpy conveyor belt slide. Ouch.
Grona Lund fits a lot of rides into a very small space. The coasters cross paths and have a lot of sharp turns to fit into the area. It's a marvel to see the layout. It's also extra miserable on a crowded day. Here are bunch of miscellaneous pictures that I took during our visit.
In another theme park first, when we left the park to eat lunch, we only had to give our names at a reception podium. They didn't stamp our hands or need to see our park tickets for reentry, we just showed back up at the podium and gave them our names. I think that this says a lot about trust in Sweden. Really, they must not have too many people trying to cheat the system.
Grona Lund was just so crowded that we felt like we had to get out of there for lunch. We needed a break. We walked directly across the street to a fast-food restaurant called Big Shark. Specializing in all things junk food, at Big Shark, we had Korv (hot dogs), onion rings and fries.
Grona Lund had a lot of advertising for their summer concert series. Kacey Musgraves was even there in July!
The park was absolutely filled with carnival games. Everywhere. The attendants were really aggressive in trying to get us to play. The funniest games were ones where the prize was a giant candy bar shaped box, filled with smaller bars of candy. Plus, there is candy called Plopp and that's just funny.
Grona Lund is a fun park, especially if you want to live a little dangerously.
