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Since 11th May, I've had the whole house to myself and I'll admit that the house has been really quiet but thankfully I've had the two budgies to keep me company while I've been in the house. Other times it's been either seeing my friends or for the last weekend, another trip to London. Although, this has been my first trip to London this year since there's been very little happening this year so far. This is just a year to have London events overhyped and make it hell for other things to be planned in the city, particularly live shows.

Friday was just a quick trip to Oxford Circus HMV seeing as the train I booked was too early for my sister and her fiance due to work. I had a strange experience at HMV this time since there was one guy who was asking me about Metallica albums and I got him to pick up their first four albums. It didn't end there since we continued talking about other things which ranged from Alice Cooper to pricing issues with CDs and with that, he was able to recommend me some Alice Cooper albums which I feel I have so little of so I'm happy for that.

Saturday was the main deal of the weekend since we agreed to go to Thorpe Park which despite being one of the major theme parks in the UK I've never been to before. With a car hire, it was only an hour away from the flat so the location worked out fine. From seeing the car park, it was easy to tell just how small the park really is in comparison to Alton Towers. With that theme park the space for the car park was so huge that they provide monorails just to get to the parking entrance but not here. It was just right there in front of us and the rides aren't that far apart either. The only roller coaster that was hard to see at times was the Saw ride but that was due to being hardly as tall as the trees.

The visit to Thorpe Park was a peculiar one since from all the roller coasters I've been on, none of them had you going up vertically (but downhill a few times with Oblivion) so with Stealth and Saw: The Ride, there were two rides of that kind to finally experience what it's like to go straight uphill. Although Stealth is just over and done with before you know it, the Saw ride made me feel like I was going to fall off. That saying, it was a fun ride, even if I don't care for the Saw franchise in the slightest. The other three rides were Nemesis Inferno, Colossus and the new ride The Swarm which I wasn't even aware of its existence until the night before. Funny enough, the one roller coaster I heard of the least turned out to be my favourite for the day as well as having the best concept to it. While Nemesis Inferno and Colossus were fun to ride on, the former is really a downgraded form of the original Nemesis from Alton Towers and having very little theme to it and the latter only got the record for having the most inversions (or at least at the time) by shoving in a bunch of heartline twists at the end.

As a Saturday, it was a fairly busy day but nothing over the top, although the longest queue was for Nemesis Inferno for an hour. Afterwards, going on Colossus was only 10 minutes and then a revisit to The Swarm was 20 minutes. By nearing the end of the day, Stealth had hardly a queue so it was worth squeezing in one more ride for the day. I will admit that by then my head felt like it took enough from all the rides for one day alone. Overall, seeing Thorpe Park was a great experience and I got to go on all the big rides in a single day. Probably not a place to rush back to in a few years time, unless the park heavily expands over the next few years.

The rest of the time in London was just myself trying out Diablo III which I got given a guest pass for. It was working well for the first day and for my aging laptop, it didn't look bad but on Sunday, it was showing the random frame rate drops and this is what really screws me with PC gaming for the most part and is why I've mostly concentrated on console gaming over the last six months. When I was able to enjoy it without the laptop crapping up with gaming performances, I found Diablo III to be a fun game and if I had something better to play PC games with, I would have definitely continued with this game as well as picking up the full version. Thankfully I only had a guest pass so I didn't spend money on a game that wasn't satisfyingly playable.

The London weekend was certainly good overall but unfortunately, nothing else has been planned to go down there again this year just yet. Seeing Manilla Road live is definitely out of the window now that it's pretty clear that it being on the Jubilee weekend the city will be hell then so no go with that. On the other hand, it's possible to see Megadeth live next month so fingers crossed on that!