We had a busy couple of day’s on Thursday and Friday. All fuelled by sweet, sweet, PR freebie goodness.
On Thursday we went to Drayton Manor, a theme park and zoo in Staffordshire. We’ve been to Drayton Manor before, once we even went in the company of the UK’s premier daddy blogger:
I’m afraid to say that every time I’ve been to Drayton Manor I’ve enjoyed it less and less. The main problem is the bloody queuing. We were in the park for 5 hours, and in that time went on 6 rides. Each of the rides lasted about 2 minutes each. I can just about accept this for the faintly bigger rides (we went on Stormforce10, and Ben 10 – Ultimate Mission), but a 45 minute wait to get on some cable cars?
I’m too old for this shit.
Ian recently posted about his recent trip to the theme park, and offered the advice that if you wait until near the closing time many of the queues will be lower as most people have gone home. This wasn’t our experience – the queues were as big as ever and in addition we had to queue for 40 minutes to get out of the car park.
You failed me Ian. I put my trust in you, and you let me down. I demand you delete your blog in penance and renounce your premier blogger status. Shame on you. For shame.
To be fair to Drayton Manor the kids did enjoy themselves. All were exceptionally tolerant of all the waiting we had to do. It was by no means a wasted day. But unfortunately I ave to bite the hand that feeds us here – if we’d paid the £75 family admission price advertised (plus the extra £15 we paid for non-included rides – don’t get me started on that one) I’d have felt rather disappointed.
From Drayton Manor we drove down to London and stayed in a hotel in order to attend the Lolliebop festival in Regents Park. We paid for the hotel ourselves, but the admission to Lollibops was kindly given us by Activision, who had a exhibition for their new Skylander Giants computer game there.
Lolibops is a festival aimed at kids under 10, although I’d say it’s weighted towards the younger half of that age range. Despite our record levels of over tiredness we had a really good time. Highlights for us were Dick and Dom, the exceptionally entertaining storyteller Booster Cushion, the hula hoop workshop, the Moshi Monsters bus, the Laser Tunnel, and of course the Skylanders exhibition (which I’m going to talk about more in another post).
Booster Cushion
Kerry also got “recognised” by former Blue Peter presenter Katy Hill, who was convinced she knew her (she didn’t). No one spotted me however, probably because our Midnight Movie Club glossy photos have yet to come back from the printers.
The festival was very well organised and thought out. There were a number of shade tents dotted around the field which were very welcome havens from the sun, and the site didn’t feel overcrowded at all (it may be different on the weekend however).
One of the many street entertainers floating round the festival
A rather impressive hydraulic, flame spewing dragon
Overall I’d highly recommend it, especially for children of around four who would get the most out of the heavy Cbeebies presence there. Looking at the website it looks like all the tickets for this weekend have pretty much gone, but there is always next year.
All in all not a bad couple of days, although the fact that the kids had about 5 hours sleep throughout both of them may colour the quality of our weekend slightly.