Fort Fun 2025

A year later, I returned to Fort Fun Abenteuerland in Germany. Fort Fun is an amusement park aimed primarily at families with children. It’s located in the hills of the Sauerland region near the town of Bestwig and is themed in a Wild West style-like a “small Wild West town” in the middle of nature, mixing rides with entertainment and shows.

This year again, the contract was arranged through Folco Team (stuntmanindustries.com) - an Italian company I’ve known for a long time and have always worked well with. They do stunt shows and similar action-based performances, and for me the best part is simply knowing what I’m getting into. On top of that, I get to meet people I already know - Patrik and Darix are my friends, so it doesn’t feel like “work somewhere abroad,” but also a return to a familiar environment.

To connect it to last year: in 2024 the show was built around the Santa Fé Express, a steam train that the audience boarded to ride around the hill. The train stopped in a small western town, and the performance took place right there - people watched from the train cars, so everything happened really close to them. Back then it had a clear storyline and a lot of humor. It was hosted by Steffen, who played an inspector traveling through western towns and looking for the best place for a rodeo. The guys did parkour, and I had my part on the trials bike.

But in 2025, the park wanted to change the show. The train version is great because the audience sits right in the cars and everything happens just a few meters away, but it also has one drawback - capacity is limited, and at any one time only as many people can see it as can fit on the train. So this year they came up with the idea of putting the show right in the middle of the park, in an open area, so many more visitors could stop and watch at once. And with that, almost everything else changed too.

The new show was called Circus Mechanica, and this time it wasn’t the Wild West - it was steampunk. That “old mechanics, steam and metal” kind of style, designed to look interesting at first glance even to people just walking by. For example, I had a brimless helmet with retro steampunk goggles on it, and the bike was also slightly modified to match the look - fenders taped over with black tape, the front fender cut shorter, and similar small details.

From last year’s show, I was the only one who stayed. This year there were three of us: me on the trials bike, Nicholas on BMX, and Elix, a parkour athlete. Each of us brought something different, and together it worked well. Even though it wasn’t built around a story like last time, it still had a shared rhythm. Some parts we did individually, some together, and over time we got comfortable with those “shared sequences” of tricks.

Because everything moved to the middle of the park, the way the “arena” was built changed too. I had my trailer setup as usual, it was placed on a wooden platform that had to be adjusted so it could be ridden even when wet. In the end they coated it with a non-slip resin mixed with sand, because without that it’s basically unridable in the wet. Besides the trailer, they also had logs and concrete blocks prepared, so I had more obstacles and more options for how to set my lines.

The contract was again during summer (July and August) and this time it came out to 51 days in a row. At most we had three shows per day, but if it rained or there weren’t many people in the park, we did just one or two. Honestly, this schedule felt more reasonable than last year, because three shows a day is still a lot, and you have to be able to ride safely every time.

I’m happy we got through the whole thing healthy. None of us got sick, which is actually a big win on a contract this long. The only moment that scared me was when, after landing a flip, some tendon or attachment in my leg started hurting. For a while I could barely walk properly. Luckily in the next show it hurt only a little, and after a few days I didn’t feel it at all anymore.

Just like last year, I also turned the stay into a kind of small training camp on the bike. I rode my gravel bike, and during the stay I logged a bit over 1,000 km, so besides the show I also kept up my “cycling” mileage and gave my head a nice break in a different way. Another big plus was that our accommodation was the same as last year. I didn’t have to get used to anything, I knew where everything was and how it worked, and overall I felt almost like at home.

So what’s next? From what I’ve heard, next year they’d like to improve the area even more and push the whole show another step forward. I’m curious whether it will work out again for 2026. I’d love to take part because I enjoy it, and I’m genuinely interested in what it will look like when it gets even better space and conditions.

Below you can watch short videos that the guys and I recorded. However, these are not clips from the actual show.