The Green Goblin Blog

There is a definite down-side to booking tickets in advance to save money. It is the possibility that it will rain all day. All bloody day. Persistently. Without pause.

So our trip to Chessington Zoo looked a wash-out before we started.

Suitably drenched, we made our way from one ride to the next, navigating with a map so sodden that it had the physical strength of tissue paper:

 

It's amazing how happy kids will be once they are in the possession of a huge bucket of sweets (no, I didn't buy it - do you think I'm mad?):

 

Ramesses Revenge - what a laugh (for the observer i.e. me).
Here's a photo of the ride I borrowed from ThemeParkReview.com:

 

First they spin you round and then they lower you head first onto fountains, as you can see from the before, during and after photos of Samantha:

 

The Vampire is still a great ride - I even took video footage of myself to show how much fun it is. My expression at the end says it all. Just click on the ride photo and the 1Mb video will start playing. Note: The photo isn't mine - I borrowed it from Ultra Chessington:

 

The Zoo section is good - a relatively small number of exhibits but each is very well set out. What I found most irritating was the number of dumb kids who think the animals are trained to entertain them on cue. Banging on the windows and complaining how boring the lion and tiger were being just seemed so ignorant. I did wonder if we had it round the wrong way where the idiots should be on the inside entertaining the animals - or better still just in WITH the animals. They would stop being boring then...

On the whole I was left feeling that the day didn't seem great value for money but Samantha and friends enjoyed themselves. We booked in advance and that got the tickets down to £17 each. Most people seemed to be paying on the day but I would expect a fair number of those to have discount vouchers which would bring their entrance price to nearly £20, so we saved about 20% (or 40% on a full price ticket). We spent roughly 1 hour queuing for the Dragon Falls - now that was a very good ride but the park was only open 10-6 so we lost 1 hour from our 8 available just on one ride. The Vampire and Ramesses Revenge were much better so our party used those twice. The Rattlesnake was a longer wait than those (maybe 20 minutes) although we got in a second time with Exit passes because Tomb Blaster had broken down while we were waiting on the ride itself (another 20-30 minutes lost). And this was on a wet Friday - I really shudder to think what it must be like on a good day!