We absolutely love a sculpture trail. It all started with Gromit Unleashed trail in Bristol way back in the summer of 2013. We found lots of sculptures and discovered a wonderful new city in the process.
So the news that there would be a Gromit Unleashed 2 trail this year in Bristol with over 60 sculptures of the Aardman Animation Gromits, Wallaces and Feather’s was really exciting. We put it on the calendar and as the boys weren’t that bothered this time, my daughter and I decided we would spend a couple of days ‘Gromit hunting’ by ourselves.
Fine in theory. However, you can’t walk to all of the sculptures. Well, you could, but it might take a few days.
There are lots in the city centre and probably about 30 or so could be found on foot around the city centre and the harbour. But no, I don’t ever take the simple route. We decided to start our search at Cribbs Causeway. There are some seriously good shops there, so although we found our first three quite quickly, we did get slightly sidetracked by shopping. And lunch.
Then I spotted there were a couple of sculptures within a few miles. Cue a hilarious car journey with me trying to remember where to go. With a sigh, my daughter opened the app and within minutes, she was directing me. We managed to find three more Gromits thanks to her amazing directions.
Feeling quite pleased with ourselves, we decided to head into Bristol centre and find our hotel for the night. There are huge roadworks in Bristol at the moment, which unfortunately turned out to be right next to the hotel. Great.
Cue another hilarious half an hour of me driving around in circles, in very heavy traffic trying to work out how to get to the hotel. Once again, my daughter had it sorted. She had spotted the sign for the car park and she also spotted another sign redirecting hotel customers to a special slip road into the car park. If she hadn’t spotted that, I think we would possibly still be driving around now.
A quick walk into the city centre got us into double figures and again that was largely due to my daughter having more directional sense in her little finger than I have in my whole body.
A good night’s sleep and an even better breakfast set us up for day two and we walked miles. I was so proud of my little girl. She doesn’t mind walking but we walked around 11 miles in total and found over 20 sculptures taking our total to 34 overall, just over half of the total. We were pretty pleased with that. My daughter is keen to go back and get a few more, but with the last couple of weeks filling up, I’m not sure if we can get there before it finishes on 2nd September. But we had a great couple of days and saw some fabulous sculptures.
If you are in or around Bristol over the next two weeks, I really recommend you have a go at the Gromit Unleashed 2 trail, it is great fun.
Your daughter is amazing! Mine was the navigator too, I just can’t manage to read maps and apps at all. Love that you stayed over in a hotel to do it. You found a few there that we don’t have. We’re going to go back just one more time and accept that we’re not going to find the ones on the South and East trails.
We have tentatively booked in a slot to go back and find a few of the ones on the outside but we will never find them all but that’s ok
AUGUST 20, 2018 / 11:27 AM
I think these look amazing. I’d love to have seen them and loved seeing the photos. A fun thing to do with your daughter xx
They are such a fun way to explore a city, I wish there were more of them around
I love these trails! http://jenikya.com/blog/2018/08/gromit-unleashed-2.html
They are great fun. We love them too
These sculptures are just beautiful, and how lovely that you got to do it with your little lady. She sounds very good at directions, far better than I could probably manage, and wow what a distance you both walked. Did you get to do many more before they stopped ?