Shrek's Adventure! London - Our Review

Shrek's Adventure! London
Last Saturday the girls and I set off to meet our friends in London for a visit to Shrek's Adventure! This is perfectly placed by the London Eye making it easily accessible to many main line stations such as Charing Cross and Waterloo and the District, Circle, Jubilee, Northern and Bakerloo underground lines. We had booked our tickets online and this meant we had timed entry and didn't have to worry about any queues, result!

My family had visited Shrek's Adventure! when it first opened back in July last year (check out my full review from then) and we had a good time but there was one big niggle for us and that was the queueing internally. Well I am super glad to say that this issue really has been sorted out and it meant that we were in the attraction about 70 minutes, which is pretty close to the 75 minutes that the attraction advertise it as.

Family Fun at London's South Bank

Everyone in my family loves the South Bank in London, there is so much to see and do there and what I really love is that much of it you can enjoy for free. I have to be honest and say I'm not entirely sure how far the South Bank stretches but I'm sure you won't mind if i mention some places that are beyond the remit of the South Bank. Basically it is all easily walk-able along the river.

Shrek's Adventure!
We visited here last weekend and had lots of fun, my review will go live on Sunday but you can read how we got on last year when we visited for the girls birthday. The niggle we found back then has been totally rectified so they are doing a good job. This attraction takes about 75 minutes to go round and it is like an interactive theatre show. Something really different to everything else available.

Other Merlin Attractions
You can buy super value combo tickets if you fancy a day of high energy fun and so many of the attractions are all grouped together in the same area of the Thames. There is the London Eye, Sea-life Aquarium, London Dungeon all literally next door to each other.

I really can't grumble - Reasons to be Cheerful #R2BC

Morning friends, how are you this week? I'm well, despite numerous aches and pains that I am sure would suit a body at least thirty years older than mine! lol

But enough of my niggles, it is Thursday morning and that means for me and the cheerful gang that we will share the reasons this week why we are feeling grateful. There are so few of us who join in with this linky nowadays that it would be really tempting to just give up and to be honest there have been a couple of times I've handed over the reigns and walked away for a bit but I can't get it from under my skin. There is nothing better than giving thanks and acknowledging that there is always a silver lining, a glimpse of blue sky and that when we choose to approach the world with a thankful heart even the roughest times can be got though.

I've learnt so much from some of the women who have (and still do) joint in with this linky over the last five years. Thank you especially to Becky, Candi and Rachel who tirelessly post and encourage me to look again at my own life. I am especially thankful that Reasons to Be Cheerful gave a prompting to some people in their darkest times and helped them through a rough patch.

If you are new here this week, why don't you join us? All you need to do is link up a post that is making you cheerful, one where you share your gratitude, or boast about your kids or look for the silver lining?

Shrek's Adventure! comes to the South Bank

If you are a fan of the Shrek films then this new major attraction on London's South Bank is sure to delight you. It is different to any other attraction I've ever visited in the UK and reminds me of a mix-up of a theme park, Ripley's Believe or Not and Madam Tussuad's all rolled into one.

After slowly plodding along the South Bank in a crowd so thick we had to hold tightly onto our children we were super pleased to see that the queue for Shrek's Adventure! was very short. I assume this is because it only opened on 1st July and perhaps it is not as well known yet as the other Merlin attractions like the London Dungeon that had an appalling queue. You can pre-book or turn up and pay but the attraction is timed and as it gets busier you would have a longer wait from buying your ticket to the time of entry I expect.

Looking for cut price days out this half term?

Not long until half-term now and I can't wait to spend some time with my family but I'll be honest I hate to pay full-price when we go for a day out. There is always a deal or a bargain to be found and I've recently been introduced to KidsPass, which is a new site that you can join for free and access some great savings, up to 50% off top UK attractions to be precise.

Joining KidsPass was one of the easiest websites I've signed up to in a long time. I literally filled in about 6 fields and checked out the T&C's and then was emailed a password straight away. Once I logged in I had access to the members area and could find out about the deals on across the country. You can search by county or by region and first off I had a look at my local area, I was pleased to see that we can visit -

Fortfun in Eastbourne - this gives a free child entry with every adult purchased (this is a very good deal as normally the kids cost more than the adults!).  My kids will be super pleased to hear this as they have been pestering me to go to this soft play and come next summer we will definitely check out the massive outside splashland there.

Knockhatch - We visited this farm and playpark for Mothers Day earlier this year and the kids had a fabulous time, so I know they would be happy to go back and so will I now that we can get 2 for 1 entry there!

BlueReef Aquarium - I've heard lots of good reports about this aquarium in Hastings and we have not yet visited so it seems sensible to add this to our 'to visit' list, especially when there is a £2 per person discount when we print our KidsPass voucher.

The girls feeding the deer at Knockhatch

KidsPass is currently being re branded to KidsKard and more deals are being added daily, so it is worth checking back regularly. There are some really good national offers too like 15% off at Go Ape or 40% off at Odeon cinemas.

If you own/manage an attraction or restaurant it is super easy to add it to KidsPass too, you can easily submit your details on line and then start to be exposed to their rapidly growing community.

A new feature that has just launched is an events listing, so you can again check by county or region and see what is going on in your local area, at the moment it is all about the bonfires but soon it will be the Christmas fayre's and grotto's.

You can like KidsPass on Facebook and join the other 20,500 fans or follow them on Twitter.

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Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park, London - Great for the family

If you are a regular reader of this blog you will know that I love to get the family out to explore new places. We don’t have to go anywhere fancy or spend loads of money, the fun for us is in the discovering something new and exploring where we have not been before.

Or in this case where some of us have been before. Last weekend on my birthday we headed along to the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park in Stratford, London. This of course is the home of the London Olympic games from 2012 and my husband and children all went to watch one of the Paralympic events whilst I was at work back in 2012.

They reliably inform me that whilst a couple of landmarks still remain and mean they can recognise this as the Olympic site generally the park has undergone such a massive redevelopment that is really is very different. One of the great legacies of having the Olympics here means that the area is very easy to access by public transport and there is also a massive multi-story car park, so you can travel in whatever way suits you. The Westfield shopping centre is also right on the parks doorstep and there is something there for everyone, what a wonderful cornucopia of shops, restaurants, street performers, fun activities and relaxing space.

First off there is no fee to enter the park and you can spend as much or as little time there as a you fancy. We arrived about 3pm and stayed until near 8pm and in that time we hardly even touched the surface of what is available, so I will happily go back again.

I often think that pictures tell a better story than words, so let me share with you some of the sights of the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park. First, the dancing fountains, which children were having so much fun with and there was plenty of bench seating around the outside for the adults. As the day was a bit chilly and we did not come prepared with towels our kids stayed pretty dry and had fun avoiding the water sprays!

The park itself is a visual feast, between all the enormous buildings that housed the games you have walkways that have beautiful planting and interesting things to look at - walls with blocks that turn, large wooden sun loungers and interactive areas where you can learn about some of the medals that were won by Team GB in the games.

Such a lovely birthday spending time with my family and I had the most delicious piece of banana cake and latte from one of the stalls selling food at the park. Of course they were not cheap, but I didn't really expect them to be here and JJ was super happy with his Nutella waffle, which set me back £4.00.

We found two good play areas as we explored, one right by the main heart of the park (close to the original stadium) and this had a variety of climbing areas, swings, slides, climbing walls and a fab sandpit.

The second one was a much further walk (down the canal, over the road and past the wetlands) on the north side of the park and by the time we got there it was deserted but we could see what fun it would be when there are lots of kids. There are water pumps which pump water down a big slope and you can build dams to stop the water. There is also a big rope bridge, sandpit, swing, wobble boards and balance beams.

As I mentioned earlier there really is so much to see and do here and it is a great place to be able to talk to your children about the Olympics and what they meant for this part of London. Next time we go and visit the 560 acre site I'm going to print off some of the trails for us to follow, there are kid specific ones, ones to follow the Olympic trail and an art one too.

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A Birthday visit to Ripleys Believe It or Not! London

It was my birthday last week and with my 40th last year being a bit of a wash-out I was determined that we should celebrate as a family and have some fun. So it was decided that an overnight trip to London was needed and we had a very lovely couple of days walking, eating and exploring some new places.

One of the places we went to visit was Ripleys - Believe It or Not! in Piccadilly, London. I'd not heard of this attraction before they contacted me recently but when I mentioned it to my 10 year old son JJ, he got all excited 'oh yes Mum, I so want to go there. There are loads of interesting facts and all weird stuff. I've got the book'.  So on that strong recommendation I arranged a visit for the weekend.

Arrival

Last Saturday was super busy in London, far too much for me. You literally could not move in Leicester Square, so I was expecting Ripleys Believe It or Not! to be uncomfortably busy but I was very pleasantly surprised to find a queue of just about 15 people in front of us and this was gone through within 5 minutes. JJ was super happy anyway as he found a door you could open that screamed when you did and this set his expectation that loads of fun would follow.

One of the first exhibits you see is the swarovski crystal covered Mini Cooper, worth over £500,000. This new exhibit has travelled from America to be in London and uses over a million crystals in 50 different colours to represent the 50 states in America, it also depicts many classic American icons like the Statue of Liberty and Mount Rushmore.

I'm not really sure how to explain what Ripleys Believe It or Not! is, so I'll use this bit from their website -

At Ripley’s Believe It or Not! London visitors can marvel at an unbelievable collection of jaw dropping artefact's from across the globe – many of which were collected by the ultimate explorer Robert Ripley himself. With over 700 astonishing exhibits, galleries and interactive experiences spanning across 6 floors, Ripley’s Believe It or Not! London celebrates the weird, wonderful and bizarre in all its forms, which are sure to excite, delight and thrill the whole family. Want to see how will you measure up to the world’s tallest man? Or come face to face with our rare collection of Amazonian shrunken heads? Will you dare to venture into Ripley’s Marvellous Mirror Maze and defeat the Impossible LaseRace?

And actually look at this short video clip as this gives a really good insight and idea.



The Best Bits
Probably my favourite part of the attraction was the artwork. It is truly amazing what you can use to make great art - bottle tops, tape from cassettes, keyboard keys, matchsticks, leaves, dung and even toast!

I also enjoyed the hall of exotica as it was interesting to see what other cultures use.

Of course the part the kids loved best was the interactive exhibits and JJ said he would have liked more of these. There was an awful lot of things to just look at and for my boisterous and busy kids this is not what they want to do generally.

I asked JJ for a comment about Ripleys Believe It or Not! and he said 'It was good but not the best' and I then asked him to compare it to going to somewhere like the Science Museum and he said he would prefer the museum as there is more to get involved with and explore. JJ also commented that he thought Ripleys Believe It or Not! could make their signage/ commentary more interesting. Other places we have been to have made the kids lift doors, looks in boxes, match up answers etc but at Ripleys Believe It or Not! it was mainly just reading a straight forward sign about what the exhibit is.

In fairness there were a few areas where you could watch. There was an excellent holograph of Ripley himself at the beginning explaining about how all the artefact's were gathered and then at others times there were short explanatory shows. Like about the shrunken heads and then another showing a man doing some odd swallowing and regurgitating trick, that one felt a bit like an old fashioned circus side show if I'm being honest. JJ tells tells me there was a few clips together that we could have stood and watched but they were shown in a big empty room which felt as it if should have had chairs or benches in so you could sit and watch for longer if you liked.

I asked my 7 year old twins about their favourite bits and Miss E (who is dyslexic) said she liked seeing all the art as she wants to be an artist herself when she is older but she thought lots of things were boring as she could not read the signage herself.

My husband said there were some interesting areas within Ripleys Believe It or Not!, he really enjoyed being able to talk to our kids about the Berlin Wall and the Olympics area was really good but these were combined with other areas that were just a bit 'freak showish' for us. Within the Dungeon area there was some very macabre items and whilst it was interesting to discuss some of them with my 10 year old the idea of my children having their picture taken in a chastity belt just seemed so wrong.  It was good that you could take a route to miss the dungeon if you did not want to go through it.

LaseRace, Mirror Maze and the Black Hole

Miss M said her best bit was the LaseRace, this is at the end of the tour and you can choose your level of difficultly and try and get through the maze of lasers without breaking the beams and in the quickest time to get added to the leader board. You got one go at this in the price and could pay £2 for another 2 goes if you fancied.

JJ loved all of these. He mastered the mirror maze in no time and as it was not too busy he kept going in again and again and the black hole freaked me out entirely as I could not maintain my composure and was convinced the bridge was moving under my feet, of course it was not!

Sadly the interactive graffiti wall exhibit was out of action when we visited.

Cost & General Visitor Details

If we had turned up on the day and bought our tickets we would have spent just short of £100 for 2 adults and 3 children and if we purchased in advance via the website it would have been £85 which is a good saving but it is still a lot of money to spend, especially considering we were only in the attraction for about 2.5 hours.

Ripleys Believe It or Not!, London is really easy to access with buses, tubes and trains serving it frequently. The opening hours of 10am - midnight are excellent and it is accessible for those with disabilities. We used a couple of the toilets on site and both were very well used and a bit grotty with wet floors and smelly bins.

I noticed there were audio guides available in various languages and you can arrange for a guide too, I imagine it would be an interesting school visit.

The cafe was really nice in the middle of some exhibits and we were able to buy a drink and snack. We paid £1.50 for bottled water, £1.75 for a bottle of Coke and 90p for polos.

As with most attractions nowadays you leave via the gift shop and thus the kids beg you for various sweets and knick-nacks!

Conclusion
I'm glad we went to Ripleys Believe or Not! as now we have seen some very unusual exhibits and learnt a few new facts but if I'm honest it is the kind of place I'd only visit the one time. If you love the odd and the unusual  then this will definitely be for you.

Disclosure: We received complimentary entry for our family for the purpose of this review. I have not been instructed what to write and I remain honest.

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