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Big family trip to Legoland today. There would be half as many people there as usual on a bank holiday, which was good, but rides generally had half as many seats due to social distancing (plus had to be cleaned every now and again) so on the whole things were probably slightly slower than usual.
We'd been told to go as far in as we could and work backwards to avoid the queues of people getting on the first rides they see. But it didn't really work out. We ended up queuing for about an hour for the first ride, unsure if our son was the requisite 1 metre to get on it (and wondering if they'd let us off it he was only a cm or two short. It turned out he was an inch too short and there was no leeway. So he and I missed the ride and had queued for the fun of coming down some stairs (but much more quickly than it had taken us to get up). And my daughter who got to go on the ride was a bit freaked out by it and nervous to go on anything else, so that wasn't the best start.
My wife had wanted to bail after ten minutes and go on the rides with shorter queues. And now everything had long queues, just like she'd predicted.
But one day she will be wrong about something and that day I am going to be like that kid who won that Subbuteo match that time.
Ernie and me went on a ride where a train went round in a circle pretty quickly. He loved it. I was a bit scared.
The kids were excited just to see things made out of lego and there were lots of playgrounds and slides that you could get on without queues (but where social distancing was falling down - one playground said that each structure should have only members of the same family on it - that didn't happen).
We got to Duplo-world where things were a bit more of the right pace for our little ones (and me). We went on a fairy tale boat ride. As we queued to get on a man got off with his family. He was wearing a Slipknot hoodie, but carrying a small cuddly purple unicorn and had just stepped off a gentle ride where he'd been looking at the 3 bears and the 3 little pigs and Red Riding Hood. It made me laugh. But that's parenthood boiled down to its essence.
It was an exhausting day and some queues were just too long to join. The kids were reasonably patient if the wait was 30 minutes, but it was tough it got any higher. You can pay a bit extra to (in essence) jump the queue (or at least be informed when your turn comes up so you can do other stuff), but that feels a bit unfair and I certainly resented the absolute cunts who were doing that. But it's a weird thing to be queuing for 90 minutes for a ride that might be over in a maximum of five.
I think a better system would be to allow people to buy up as many tickets as possible. So if you wanted half the number of people you could all buy two tickets and leave one unused, or if you were an eccentric billionaire you could get all of them and have the park to yourself. Obviously my system is a lot less fair and rewards the rich even more, so I don't know where I get off.
Or maybe it could be done by lottery where you pay a small amount but if you're a lucky ticket winner you get a day in a theme park where there are few enough customers that there are never any queues. It's really really weird to pay so much money to spend most of the day in a line doing nothing.
Maybe during the pandemic they could have limited numbers to 200 high paying customers. I'm just spitballing here.
We decided not to queue too much and so we looked at the models of landmarks wrought in plastic bricks instead. I took a picture of myself by Edinburgh Castle so I could pretend to casual observers on Twitter that I had managed to get up to Auld Reekie this year. I should then have gone on to pretend I was in Paris, Vegas, The House of Commons and NASA, but I couldn't be arsed. Just imagine I did that.
I was glad we'd gone and I think the kids liked it, but they are a little bit too young to get loads out of it. But the excitement and anticipation kept them going and a highlight was being in a helicopter ride where you controlled the rise and spin of the craft you were in.
At the end we found some fairly regular slides in one hidden away corner and the kids had as much fun on those as anything that they'd have had to queue for.
It was still a fun and largely non-fractious day, which knackered everyone out, which is all you really want from a day. Some overpriced lego and a 70 minute drive home were all that were needed to complete it. I think you'd struggle to explain to an alien why such a weird combination of activities would be considered entertainment (I mean, they probably wouldn't understand English for a start), but I'd still recommend this journey into Hell to any family. Even ones comprised of people who used to go and see Slipknot but now are just porters for unicorns.
