Make the most of your time in Britain
Sculptures, shopping and slides
Readers, hello! How has your week been? You can tell the end of term is near as sports days are all go here, and I’m ready to have a break from the morning hustle of teeth clean-shoes on-brush hair-pack lunch-find your cardigan-out the door-phew.
We recently bought a Rough Guide travel book called ‘Make the most of your time in Britain - 365 British travel experiences’ and I’m now quite obsessed with it.
Partly it’s fun to go through it to find the things we’ve already done and reminisce how much fun we had, and partly it’s fun to go through it to make a list of all the things we really want to tick off.
I thought I’d share a couple of the things they recommend in the book with you, and let you know how it went when we did them.
First up… ‘Shopping in Manchester’
It seems a bit strange to me that shopping in Manchester might be considered as an essential travel experience in the UK, given it’s something I’ve been doing for at least 20 years, but when we took the girls into Manchester for birthday pancakes a couple of weeks ago, we also took a trip to Affleck’s Palace.
For the uninitiated, Affleck’s Palace is a Manchester institution. It’s a three-storey warren of independent stalls, shops, cafes and seond-hand clothes shops. It’s full of button badges, band posters, goth outfits and Korean bubble tea. It smells a bit like a a charity shop x incense x chips and it blew my 9yo’s mind.
I remember spending houuuuurs in here as a teenager and it truly is a travel experience, even if you only took a 30 min train ride from the suburbs to get there.
Next up… ‘BeWilderwood’
This place is cool, we went to the Cheshire one last summer with my lovely friend and her two kids. You can read about in this blog post, but it’s essentially like visiting an enormous treehouse in the woods, with plenty of brilliant, super-quick slides.
There are also zip wires and mazes, all made of wood and natural materials, and it feels like you’re somewhere relaxed and green that isn’t full of loud music, flashing lights and neon plastic. And the girls have asked me several times when we’ll be able to go back.
And also…Yorkshire Sculpture Park
We’ve been here a couple of times and you can read about our last visit in this blog. It sounds like the kind of place that might be a bit boring, but honestly it’s awesome.
The whole park, which is near Wakefield, is enormous and car-free, which means the kids can run around without any fear of them dashing into a road, and it’s also spotted with cool sculptures. From 10ft red letters spelling out ‘LOVE’ to a fibreglass octopus, there’s something unusual to see around every corner. The park also produce some nice family-friendly pamphlets and leaflets with inspo for games and ideas on how to interact with the art. Sweet.
Fancy getting the book? You can find it here on Amazon and I’d recommend it.
No newsletter next week due to having booked an adventure, so I’ll see you the week after. If you got this far you are, naturally, my favourite of readers.
See you in a fortnight,
Jenna