Maaan what a day !! It's 11.23pm and i've finally founda minute to sit down and update my blog!!
Today we visited Underwater street in Liverpool for the 1st time, The kids had both been on school trips there at various points and had been begging to go back, so we figured whilst we're in the last few days of the half term holiday we would go for a 'cheap' day out !!.....My 1st mistake was thinking ANY day out with 2 children would be cheap!! My 2nd was allowing them to pesuade us to take them there!!!
Finding the place was FAIRLY straight forward, though be warned....liverpools roads are like many rabbit warrens of one way systems and your typical city traffic congestion !! Head for the docks though and you wont struggle too much to find it....though I was expecting some sort of big centre...the place is actually hid in the basement of huge building!!!)
I had had a quick look on the website for underwater street and it had looked half decent. It's £8.95 per child and adults are free....so here was me thinking that we could have a half decent day out for under 20 quid!!!
1stly !!....city parking is never gonna be too cheap !!! Its actually pretty straight forward to get a parking space just outside the poor for the place.....but its £5 for 4 hours or £1 per 30 minutes (!!!) the other option is to take a 5 or 10 minute walk to a privately run car park, but even then your looking at £5.50 for 5 hours or £7.50 for the full day (not TOO bad if your planning on having the full day in the city for visit the docks/museums/or go shopping etc !!)
So, we get parking, only to discover that the parking machine only takes coins !! luckily the nice man behind the till in the center changed my £5 note into pound coins for me !!!
Rounded up the kids, crossed the road and went into the centre...down some steps and then paid our £17.90 to go in....then sort of stopped dead !!! the center is actually 1 long room on one level thats split into 6 zones- construction, imagination, science lab, physical area, art area and sensory area..
Looking around, I regretted our decision to visit pretty much with in minutes of going in the place and we spent a few minutes scratching our headswondering what we do next !!!....So we went over to the physical area..which consisted of a beam to walk along, a miniture climbing wall, an air canon in the shape of a tank that fired out balls and one of those buzz wire things that test how steady a hand you have !!!
Am gonna quickly run through the rest of the zones now as you can tell already that this hasnt been the best day out we've ever had!!! in the middle of all the zones was a large cafe (that took up nearly half of the place!!...i'll get back to this further down though!) The imagination zone was basically 4 or 5 'cubicals' that had stuff like a dress up secion, a post office/shop, a pizzeria (pretend obvioulsy!!) a pooch parlor oh and a tunnel thing!! this zone entertained Erin for a few minutes but kayden didnt really pay it any real attention!!
So off went over to the construction area...it had 2 toy metal diggers that you could pick to balls with the diggers, a sand pit that you were ment to dig for fossils in.....but actually had no fossils in there to dig for, then a frame constructed out of scafholding that you could build with foam bricks and hoist them up the frame to a higher ledge via a pully system. The diggers actally got sone attention from my 2!
The art section was exactly what its discribed as !!! a few tables where you could do arts and crafts and a car that you could paint on!
The sensory zone was a water trough to 'pan gold' in, a water bit to play with in, a table with a few puzzels on (half of which were missing) and a story wigwam tent!
Finally the science lab bit, there was various tables with mini experiments on like water bottles showing how water drains in a whirlwind, magnet experiments and optical illusions etc....unfortuantly again there was a fair few of the bits missing !!
I must point out that every 15-20 mins or so the workers there announce various activities that are taking place such as making slime, bracelets, paper aeorplanes etc etc !
That sums up what there is to do really!! An hour or so in, we decided that we had grumbly tums and it was time to test drive the cafe !!!!!!!!!!!!!!1 Why oh why oh why didnt we take packed lunches !!!!
!stly, despite the size of the cafe, we had to wait a while for a table as there was numerous filled with bored looking parents sat browsing facebook on their mobile phones wishing they had gone to the museum instead !!!
we ordered 2 jacket potatos, 2 plates of chips, a coffee and 3 small bottles of apple juice or and 3 mini muffins....this came to nearly £23 ....yes you read that right.... TWENTY THREE POUNDS !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! yah I still havent gotten over the shock of that nearly 12 hours later !!!
Anyways, food came...and my kids looked distinctly unimpressed with their plate of half burnt half pale chips !, we had to ask for the cheese for our spuds and had to wait for the colslaw....which arrived a few minutes after we had finished eating !!! We has chilli (and cheese when it came)on our spuds and a little side salad....the best bit was the salad !! the spud was oily and mushy and teh chilli was the only vinegary chilli I have ever had in my life !!!!!!!! :o/ not very impressive but for £23 quid it was getting ate !!!!!!
This is a very negative reveiw but I must say, for the bulk of the 3 mind numbing hours we were there, the kids enjoyed it...they are 5 and 7 (a very 'young' 7 I may add)...and if they had been ANY older it would have been utterly pants for them too ! the highlights of their day was getting a sticker for tidying up in the craft bit!!...That says everything really!!
So the long and short of it is...unless your kids are under 5, I probably wouldnt bother going...if you DO go (which ok it could pass a couple hours on a rainy day) .....TAKE A PACKED LUNCH !!!!
Cheers for reading and hope this helps as a review for you !!!!
