Last weekend’s to-do list: mow lawn, buy food, take gran to garden centre, burn sausages on barbecue, sleep. This weekend’s to-do list: Shockwave, Submission, Apocalypse, Pandemonium and Oblivion.

Daughter Daisy and I are off to Staffordshire to brave Britain’s nastiest battery of shock-and-awe rollercoaster rides. As well as two world-class theme parks – Alton Towers and Drayton Manor – the county has the SnowDome, a surreal real-snow ski centre, and WaterWorld, “the UK’s number-one indoor tropical aqua park”. It’s the undisputed capital of scaring people silly.

Now, a super-ticket called the Thrill Hopper allows you to visit all four attractions at a thumping great saving. Perfect for half term, we thought: let’s book some digs and do the lot in a fun-packed few days. A really good idea. At the time.

Too late for misgivings... take off your specs, secure all loose clothing and hold on tight for Britain’s loopiest weekend.

DAY 1: Tamworth to Alton 11am: In 1950, when Drayton Manor Theme Park (0870 872 5252, www.draytonmanor.co.uk) opened on Sir Robert Peel’s ancestral estate near Tamworth, it was a cheery postwar pleasure-ground with swingboats and dodgems. Clearly things have changed.

Beside the turnstile where Daisy and I punch our ticket looms G-Force, a coaster ride whose demented red tentacles contort through physics-defying loop-the-loops, cobra rolls and corkscrews. The screams are deafening. And there was me hoping Drayton Manor would be a nice steady warm-up for the bigger thrills tomorrow...

11.20am: This is Extreme no warm-up. We are speared to a tower 180ft above the park, legs flailing, eyes agape, with nothing but sky separating our soft heads from the concrete below. This is Apocalypse, a sadistic bit of kit billed as the “world’s first stand-up tower-drop”. In a minute we’ll be plunging back to earth, praying the magnetic brakes kick in and prevent us making a crater the size of Uttoxeter. We came on this ride first because there wasn’t much of a queue. Now I know why.

There is a horrible grinding noise. Is it supposed to do that? And... we’re falling. Anyone know how to spell “aaaaaaaaaargh”?

We stagger off. “Dad, you embarrassed me up there,” Daisy says. “You were whimpering like a baby.”

2pm: Lunch was probably a bad idea. The curly fries at the Miner’s Diner look exactly like my stomach feels. Drayton Manor’s “big six” rollercoasters have taken their toll: especially Pandemonium, where you’re clamped to a wind-turbine and somersaulted towards the boating lake; and Maelstrom, which feels like being strapped to an ogre’s yo-yo.

Happily for me, Drayton Manor has not grubbed out its gentler roots: you can still sneak off for a zero-adrenaline steamboat ride or a game of crazy golf. And soon it will be meerkat-feeding time at the zoo – ideal if you’ve brought little monkeys.

5.45pm: Phase two of sensory pummelling is a 10-minute drive away, across the A5, inside a lumpen green hangar called the SnowDome (0870 500 0011, www.snowdome.co.uk).

The Thrill Hopper pass includes 30 minutes of hardcore whizzing down the 560ft indoor ski slope here, either on a plastic tea tray (which they call “tobogganing”) or a giant rubber ring (“tubing”). Neither looks terribly secure, but luckily there is a safety briefing: “Take care on the snow surface: it is slippery.”

No need to fret. After a couple of scaredy-cat descents with brakes jammed on, we’re soon racing each other for death or glory, cutting corners and generally hollering our heads off. Sliding down a hill at -5C inside a disco-lit silver condom while being screeched at by Christina Aguilera shouldn’t be this much fun. It’s so good, in fact, that we decide to splash out for an extra half-hour.

8pm: A bubblegum weekend break requires bubblegum barracks, and that means the Alton Towers Hotel (0870 458 5146, www.altontowers.com; family rooms for four from £156, B&B), an hour’s drive north through some surprisingly scenic Staffordshire hinterland.

The hotel is hilarious: a Phileas Fogg fantasia of jewel-encrusted elephants and vintage balloon-ships.

We get Creme Eggs with our key-cards at reception; there is a water park in the atrium; even the lift is a thrill ride, themed like a Victorian diving bell.

Dinner is at Flambo’s Feast buffet – not cheap at £19 for an adult or £13 for a teen, but considered well worth it by those who aren’t paying. Daisy chooses profiteroles, ice cream, grapes and marshmallows in chocolate sauce, chased down by fajitas and soup.

DAY 2: Alton Towers

10am: The top treat for hotel guests at Alton Towers – apart from double-choc doughnuts for breakfast – is a head start on the day-trippers. By 10am, when the main gates open, we’ve had an hour to ourselves in the park’s Forbidden Valley zone, with its (gratuitously horrid) rusting-scrapyard theme.

We’ve jogged past the signs that say “Queue time from here 45 minutes” to ride Nemesis, which looks like a ski lift twisted out of shape by a particularly nasty fire and catapults you at 50mph into cataracts and canyons. I preferred Air, where you’re fastened in, tipped forward into flying position, and soar like Superman through the treetops. Liberating.

2.15pm: Queuing for Oblivion, a face-first vertical plunge into a smoking black abyss, I get a scary glimpse into the even blacker recesses of the 13-year-old soul. A delay is announced because the ride has malfunctioned. “We’ll be the first people on after they fix it,” Daisy giggles. “That’s so cool ... ”

Clearly out of my depth, I head off to ramble among the ruins of Alton Towers itself – a bashed-in, mock-gothic castle that is every bit as hokey as the haunted-house ride now housed in its vaults. Upstairs, though, all is cobwebs and shadows – authentically atmospheric and utterly deserted. A mildewed plaque in the Earl of Shrewsbury’s ballroom recounts how 30,000 people came to watch acrobats and lion-tamers at Alton’s first public opening, in 1890. Afterwards, I walk the ravishing estate gardens, its pagodas and pavilions preserved since the earl’s day.

6pm: Back at base, it’s time for our free go in the Cariba Creek water park, set in a giant greenhouse inside the hotel. The temperature is tropical and the flumes are fun, but the Wacky Waterworks steals the show – an aqueous adventure playground with pistols to squirt and cannons to fire. Every so often a siren parps and a giant wendy house overturns in the eaves, deluging everyone below.

If Willy Wonka had gone into water, Cariba Creek is what his factory would have looked like. I daresay it is designed to appeal mainly to the under10s; I thought it was fab.

DAY 3: Alton to Trentham

9.30am: The final attraction on the Thrill Hopper pass is WaterWorld, in Hanley (01782 205747, www. waterworld.co.uk) – but that’s a bit like Cariba Creek, so instead we’re off to Aerial Extreme (0870 850 2808, www.aerialextreme.co.uk; £17 adults, £12 children), just south of Stoke, to play at being apes. This is an arboreal assault course: imagine the adventure playground from your local park – but magnified to adult size and strung 40ft above ground amid a sun-dappled oak wood.

Forty feet feels higher than I’d anticipated. Boss man Alex Dick shows us the ropes (“Those are the ropes, right up there – you’ll be tiptoeing along them”), we strap on harness and helmet, then it’s up the ladder for 90 minutes of fairly hairy monkey business.

We balance along logs, swing between trapezes and scale spider nets. It’s sweaty and exhilarating. The climax is a 50mph fizz down a zipwire back to Alex’s cabin – so fast that I completely forget to do my Tarzan yodel.

The Thrill Hopper pass (0870 500 4444, www.thrillhopper.com) is £39.95pp, or £119.95 for a family ticket (two adults and two children under 12) – a £29/£91 saving over buying separate tickets for each attraction. You don’t have to use all four admissions in the same weekend, and the pass is valid until October 28, excluding bank-holiday weekends

Times recommends

• The Times travel photo competition
• 10 classic Paris travel ideas
• Airlines investigated over baggage check-in failures