This time last year, I was lucky enough to win a Merlin family pass. It was an amazing prize, made even more amazing by the moment that we got the pass and the lovely lady at Warwick castle that it would have cost over £600 to buy it and my husband’s jaw quite literally hit the floor. £600! That is a lot of money. My husband had talked about buying one in the past, but clearly had never looked at the actual real price.
Over the last twelve months, we have really tried to use the pass as much as we can and we have had many visits to Alton Towers and Legoland, Warwick Castle and we even had a ‘Merlin’ day in London. I feel as though I am a bit of a theme park connoisseur and whilst I am more of a fan of getting back to nature, we have had some great days out.
Yesterday, we decided to give Chessington World of Adventures a go. It was our first visit there and the boys were quite happy as there appeared to be the right mix of death defying terror rides for R and lots of animals for nature loving L.
I very foolishly agreed to go on a ride called Ramasses Revenge, which after turning me upside down and suspending me head down above jets of water, it really seriously did have it’s revenge on me and I decided to take on the job of chief toddler and pushchair watcher.
Far from being a boring job, I spent much of the day watching the world of a theme park going by and it is an interesting one. As I watched the pampering parents and hyped up children running around me, I couldn’t help but wonder whether the world of theme parks had really been hit by the current economic crisis. I mean wherever you look, there is excess, indulgence and gluttony. Fun, yes of course, there is no denying that, but at what cost?
As I said, we have been so lucky to have won the pass as I dread to think how much of a bill we would have racked up by paying for all of these trips. I did look to see how much it would have cost to pay for the five of us and it would have been £150. That seems like a lot of money to me. It is a good day out, but on a busy day, you could spend all that money to stand in a queue. As it was, we only spent £31 for A (it is worth noting that the rule for toddlers at Chessington goes on height and not age – a fact that a lot of pass holders didn’t realise it would seem) which was great for the day that we had.
Then there is the food. Food plays a big part of the day at the theme park. Children with large cups of colourful pick and mix or tubes of miniature multi-coloured balls, ice creams, donuts, pancakes, hot dogs, giraffe shaped waffles dripping with chocolate sauce, popcorn, marshmallows, the list goes on and on and on.
I dread to think how much a theme park makes in food revenue alone as let’s face it, it’s not exactly cheap is it? I am a ‘meanie’ apparently as I won’t pay theme park prices and we always arrive with picnic food aplenty to keep us going throughout the day. Don’t get me wrong, the children love picnics but they do think that I am mean not buying food in the park. I’m not so bad that I don’t get them an ice cream, and I might buy the odd cup of tea, but that is it.
Then there are those lovely round the neck drinking cups that they sell you with the premise of free refills throughout the day. They are surely something that seem like a good idea at the time until you are so full of fizzy pop, you could be wind powered home if you didn’t need to stop at the motorway services every ten minutes for a pee. Plus, what do you do with the cups when you get home? Keep them as souvenirs, water the plants with them? I suppose you might reuse them, but I bet a lot end up in a landfill somewhere.
Then there are those stalls with the soft toys that are big enough to fill your living room. You know the ones, I’m sure. You have to bounce a ball off a bucket or climb up a rope ladder, that sort of thing. I only have one word for these stalls. Why? Why would you want one of these hideously large stuffed toys in the first place? Why would you want to win said over-sized piece of fluff and then carry the thing around a crowded theme park? What possesses people? Something obviously as wherever I looked yesterday, they all had their giant doughnuts, Mario characters and other such ‘lovely’ toys. In fact, one family had four of the giant Mario characters and as far as I could see, they were for a child of around two who was smaller than the toys herself.
Then there are the fast passes. Now we are lucky that we won a family pass and so technically we don’t pay to get in to these places, but if we did, we would be paying around £150 to get in, why would we then want to spend another ridiculous amount of money on fast passes. Queueing is part of the theme park experience. I may occasionally buy individual passes if the queue is beyond a time that I deem reasonable. But that is rare. and I have to admit that I find it mildly irritating if you have stood in a queue for a long time mainly due to the people with fast passes; they should just let everyone queue up together, it’s character building.
The most overwhelming thing I noticed as I was watching the world go by was the fact that a lot of the children were not happy. I witnessed lots of tantrums, strops, crying, ‘I wants’ and a general amount of tired looking miserableness. Are these places just too much for the children of today? Mine amazingly didn’t strop which made a change and we all came home happy that we had enjoyed a nice family day out together.
As for the economic crisis? What economic crisis? If you look around the average UK theme park on a nice summer weekend, your wouldn’t know that we were in one at all.
The thing about this is that it is personal choice. Indulgence and excess are certainly around every corner. But if that is the way you want to live your life, fair enough. I think that taking my children is enough. We make the most of the facilities available and I always take plenty of supplies. Does that make me mean? I don’t think so. Will I be renewing the pass? I definitely will not! It has been fun, but I really want to go back to basics and spend our summer holiday climbing hills, exploring beaches and I think I may even look at a National Trust pass and calm things right down again.
whoops wrote that from son’s blog – it is I!
Brilliant post. We haven’t been to a theme park for a couple of years because some of us (me!) aren’t huge fans. I think the food and drink and spoilt kids and the cost are all horrible. I too am mean mum! I don’t get how people can eat and drink all that crap then go on rides without feeling sick!
hmm, I perhaps see it a little differently, as the only time really we go to a theme park is when we go to Disney. Then all my thoughts of excesses go out the window. Indulge becomes my middle name!! 😉
We’ve had Merlin passes for a couple of years and had a lot of use out of them, but we bought them with Tesco points so they were ‘free’. I often wonder how people afford the big theme parks, although I suppose there are a lot of special offers about. We are cheap though and take our own food and drink and never buy anything in the gift shops! They can be overwhelming and tiring places for young children, we tend to get there early and leave by mid afternoon which is plenty long enough, rather than dragging it out beyond tolerance levels.