Note: Quick note before I begin. We decided to have a mobile free day, so I didn’t take any photos for this post, well apart from on at the end when they were in the splash zone. We wanted to concentrate on the day rather than taking lots of photos 🙂
Just in case you don’t know, Paultons Park is a theme park here on the South Coast of England. It’s claim to fame, so to speak, is that it has Peppa Pig land - part of the theme park has rides inspired by Peppa Pig,
It’s not just Peppa Pig rides though, that is just one part of the theme park. There are lots of other big rides as well as other themed areas - one based around dinosaurs for example. You also get the regular rides like the log flume and roller coasters.
Hopefully, that gives you the setting 🙂 It’s just a regular theme park with a themed section or two. The great thing is that it’s accessible to both toddlers as well as older kiddies.
What we loved is that Paultons Park does a free queue jump facility for disabilities. Basically, you get to jump the queue once on each ride, which is especially useful if you have a child, like us, that has issues with waiting and also being in crowded places.
It’s easy to get - you simply take you diagnosis letter with you and go to see the nurse. They jot down your details, so that you don’t have to take your diagnosis letter again in the future, then give you the queue jump sheet which gets stamped at each ride.
Then, when you're at the rides, there are certain points you go to and wait and they come and take you on the ride. This was certainly useful and great as free.
The great thing about when we went was that it was an inset day for our kids. So it meant we could go on a day where most kids were in school which meant the park was a lot quieter. This meant less waiting. This also meant we only needed to use our queue jump facility on a couple of rides (most busy were the 2 Peppa Pig rides we did).
Last time we went to Paultons Park was a few years ago when little Mr was just under 900mm (their sizes), he could go on about half the rides then but not the best ones.
This time he’s over 110mm so he was allowed on around 95% (if not more) of the rides which meant we could get on more of the bigger fun-filled rides.
This was perfect as both our kiddies love the quick fast rides and believe me we could tell by how they were dragging us on. I think the favourite one of the day would be a coin toss between the log flume and a ride called the raptor - one of the newer rides. We went on both around 4 times. The great thing this time around is that little Mr was above the 1.1m height. That said, for any child under 1m, it's Free (taken from their website).
So, it was a blazingly hot day. The bad point is that we needed to buy drinks there. The good point is that if you take a water bottle, or juice bottle, to most (if not all) of the shops, cafes, etc. then they will fill up your bottle with tap water for free. This was a god send (so to speak) as we could drink lots of water. It's not too cold, at least wasn't on the day, just to warn you.
When we were close to going home we went to the splash zone. This is a smaller section where they have lots of water sprinklers going. Little Mr loves water play and as it was hot it was a great place to cool down. Don't forget to take trunks or a change of clothes though - we did plan ahead for this. It's also the only place I got an image as our locker we chose was right near this point. It really did finish off a great day.
The biggest thing is, that, if you have a child with a disability - take your diagnosis letter along and get the free queue jump. It worked really well on the 3-4 rides we needed it for. As it was quiet we didn't need too much. I can imagine if we had gone on a day in the school holidays it would have been packed - so would have used more.
It certainly was a great day out, though each and every time we have been there we have had fun. This time round though, little Mr was tall enough for him to enjoy all the rides too.