A lot of waiting mostly!
Having a holiday to look forward to is a truly wonderful thing. It’s been there in the back of our minds for 12 months… Christmas 2021 was somewhat scuppered by us all getting Covid but we always had July to cling on to. The whole 18 Summers with your kids thing is plainly obvious when the boys are excitedly counting down to them! You just sort of get swept along in it, it’s contagious.
We’re going on an adventure to a place called Center Parcs, with Granny and Grandad… Yes, there’ll be swimming, yes we’ll go more than once, yes there’ll be activities, yes we’ll go out for pizza… repeat on a loop!
It was fab, all the anticipation, all that hope!
Ok, that might be a bit too far, but we don’t get out much (daily dog stomp aside) so indulge me!
Anyways, I digress…
So, as I said on my previous blog post <here>, my Mum booked our stay. A dog friendly lodge, 4 adults, 3 children and, of course, 2 dogs.
My Mum forwarded a copy of the confirmation email over to me for a snoop and then invited me to make an account through a link and after I was officially registered (if that’s the right phrase) as a “guest” I got my own confirmation email and info sent separately from then on. Easy peasy!
We did have a good rummage about on the site when we booked the break but that was it, a rummage, we couldn’t book anything else until nearer the time. Actually, we didn’t hear from Center Parcs again until February 2022. I got a reminder email and a bit more info, which got us all excited again and was nicely timed while the kids were off school for a few days. We all sat around the laptop watching random videos on YouTube of folk’s visits to Whinfell Forest and really got lost in looking at everything there was available on site to do!
It was finally time to plan our activities!
Mark and I started to look through the extensive activity list on the Center Parcs website and this time we were totally overwhelmed with the sheer amount available. Too much to do in one week and annoyingly no prices were available to view either. This is one of my pet peeves. Just give folk the info for goodness sake! There’s no point hiding the prices, just let us see them so we can at least try and save some pennies ahead of time.
We googled a few things to try and find more info but if there were even like a few customer reviews or links to verified guests social posts etc it would have been really helpful narrowing down our activity wish list.
Another thing we found very frustrating was the lack of info and nothing was site specific. The activity descriptions were all generic and very vague when it came down to the details. Severely lacking in pictures too. The pictures that were there were all clearly and carefully staged and just weren’t helpful at all.
We told the boys we’d try and get as much as we could fit in to one week and prioritised a few of them. We had to wait until the 10th of May. 8 weeks before our break. Another countdown was on!
Next blog I’ll go through our activity booking shenanigans. What activity would you do at Center Parcs, if you could?! Is there one that stands out? Would you like to see prices up front?
I’d love to know, please feel free to pop a comment below.
Jo 💚
team worrall 