Center Parks

[Zonnebloem]

Anybody stayed there? I was wondering how suitable it was for me and my 6 year-old daughter for a few days at Easter time. I am looking at the Lake District one at Whinfell Forest. Maybe the activities are too grown-up for her.

[Jumbo]

I haven't been but friends have spoken highly of CP. I think they are designed with families in mind so can't see a problem with taking a 6 year old. I think she will enjoy it.

[Zonnebloem]

Thanks for the feedback. I don't get a feel for too much to do for younger kids on the website but I may take the booking plunge tomorrow.

[Spoonhead]

If you go then let us know how it goes please. We've been thinking of going with our toddler. Cheers!

[Skyebantam]

a mate of mine goes every year to the one you're talking about (nr penrith?) and his son is 4. so should be fine he must enjoy it, like i say it's a regular family break for them.

[panther]

a mate of mine goes every year to the one you're talking about (nr penrith?) and his son is 4. so should be fine he must enjoy it, like i say it's a regular family break for them.

my friends have just come back, they go every year and take two children - think one is 6/7 and the other around 8.. they love it.. tup:

the only thing they said was that it is quite pricey once inside food etc but like I said, they enjoy it.

[Zonnebloem]

Thanks. I've gone and done it now. It's pricey before you even start though, let alone luxuries like eating and drinking.

[panther]

Thanks. I've gone and done it now. It's pricey before you even start though, let alone luxuries like eating and drinking.

its worth it for quality time you will have with your little girl.. tup:

[Skyebantam]

Thanks. I've gone and done it now. It's pricey before you even start though, let alone luxuries like eating and drinking.

i nearly fell over when my mate told em how much they charge for some logs for the open fire. take a woolly jumper mate tup:

[Parrot]

If you want to live in a goldfish bowl why not become a fish? :rolleyes::rolleyes:

[Zonnebloem]

If you want to live in a goldfish bowl why not become a fish? :rolleyes::rolleyes:

Erm.. Er...

Because seagulls are following the trawler?

[Parrot]

Erm.. Er...

Because seagulls are following the trawler?

Got It in one my friend... :rolleyes:

[Jumbo]

Have you got your Primrose Valley week booked yet P?! tup: :D

[Parrot]

Have you got your Primrose Valley week booked yet P?! tup: :D

Certainly have Mrs tup:

And we wont be fish in a bowl looking at seagulls follwing ze trawler! :D

[panther]

<<< mental note - remember to visit Beaks again this year at his summer get away >>>

[Zonnebloem]

I never really understood the attraction of a multi-week holiday on a beach, roasting and toasting on burning hot sand which gets in everywhere. Sand in your shoes, in your clothes, in your bum. Luckily i'm not a girl. Then you go and live all together in a hotel room, with no scope for packing kids off to their own bedroom while you settle down for a quiet drink. Or a bit of the other.

I think Center Parks is a brilliant idea and is suitable for all ages.

After looking at the website together, I pre-booked for wee one: a swimming lesson; a pony ride; a horse and carriage ride; junior golf (she refused to take part on the day) and a spell on the golf driving range for me.

There is loads to do, apart from all that. Tennis, archery, quad biking, sailing and pedalo on an artificial lake, diving, indoor football (including kids' coaching), badminton, falconry, climbing wall, tree adventure area, an Aqua Sana spa sun and pampering centre and tons of kids stuff like playgrounds, face-painting, arts and crafts, pony grooming, laser combat and all in the village in the forest. The swimming pool areas has several differently sized pools, slides and a really big flume that goes outside. The water's warm even if the air's cold.

The village area is quite big and an adult could take about 50 minutes to walk from one corner to the opposite corner, making bikes (why take your own when there are hundreds of bikes available for hire?) pretty essential equipment to get around. Apart from unloading and re-loading your luggage, cars cannot go around the village to your cabin. They have to be left in the car park. But this leaves the narrow roads and paths free for walking and biking.

The setting is beautiful. It's basically a forest, with different styles of cabins in various sectors of the forest. There were pheasants, rabbits and red squirrels playing in the cabin's back garden. A dumb chaffinch tried to fly in through the closed cabin windows every day. Our cabin was really cosy and comfortable with flat-screen telly, DVD player, microwave, fridge/freezer, dishwasher and conventional cooker for self-catering. Even the corkscrew was a top quality stainless steel and rubber cantilever design. No skimping on equipment at all. Nowhere near any real lakes though.

Staff from the welcome desk through to the restaurants, bars and activities were all friendly and helpful. They have to be - there's a customer questionnaire to be filled in at the end to name and shame the guilty but to praise the extra specially good ones.

It's child-friendly all over, with play areas in some of the resto's and the pub.

Downsides? The restaurants were mostly fully booked at useful eating times, or even closed for lunch. Prior booking was mostly essential, which is a bit annoying when you just want to wander and jump into the place that takes your fancy. Also, the food on offer tended towards the fatty burger & chips, pizza, pie and mash. Kid's macaroni cheese at Bella Italia was like lumpy wallpaper glue. Lighter food was harder to find. Café Rouge had a few more French style specialities which are perhaps more what I'm now used to. There are some nice snacks and smaller meals in the Sports bar. I never even got a place in the Indian one.

The Lakeside Inn had my choice of most helpful person, Anne-Marie. The pub had a play area inside, in a corner apart from main drinking areas. Shame they have just ditched Jennings real ales for some obscure brewery I had never heard of and their bitter was pee-awful. The child's lasagne was terrible and my lamb stew had just 2 pieces of gristly meat in it. Anne-Marie offered us meals the next day with no questions asked replacement if we didn't like our food. It was much better. She also made a great fuss over my daughter.

The major major problem is the cost. Monday to Thursday night apartment reservation cost over £ 930 and the pony ride, carriage ride, swimming lesson and golf lesson were all extras. At least you can stay on to use the facilities on your day of departure. But how can you justify £9 for half an hour in a pedalo on a lake that can easily be circuited 3 times in the half hour? Barbecues allowed, IF you buy their portable ready-wrapped barbie. Only their own non-spark logs can be used for the wood-burner and are horribly dear. Who cares though if it's warm and the apartment has a thermostat you can adjust to your own preferred temperature?

I could easily spend 2 weeks or more there but would need to economise by self-catering more.

[mowgli]

The major major problem is the cost. Monday to Thursday night apartment reservation cost over £ 930 and the pony ride, carriage ride, swimming lesson and golf lesson were all extras. At least you can stay on to use the facilities on your day of departure. But how can you justify £9 for half an hour in a pedalo on a lake that can easily be circuited 3 times in the half hour? Barbecues allowed, IF you buy their portable ready-wrapped barbie. Only their own non-spark logs can be used for the wood-burner and are horribly dear. Who cares though if it's warm and the apartment has a thermostat you can adjust to your own preferred temperature?

I could easily spend 2 weeks or more there but would need to economise by self-catering more.

It's somewhere I've always considered going and would be ideal for my little lad who is nearly 3 with so many varied activities but that is scandalous for a short break and I thought it was a typing error, maybe £390 for 4 days. :eek: I'd rather take him on 4 days out to places like Chester Zoo or the seaside than be robbed by Center Parcs. Sounds like they've got you over a barrel once you're there, is there a similar cheaper alternative?

[baldbantam]

We've gone virtually every year for the past 13 years since my daughter was born. It's pricey, but that doesn't stop it being virtually full pretty much all the time - you have to book months in advance, particularly for school holiday times.

We always pre-book as much as we can - and by pre-book I mean doing it the week before we go. That's pretty much the only way you can be certain of getting in to some of the restaurants at the popular opening times.

The curry house is one of the best I've ever been in.

We generally go to the Sherwood Forest one. It tends to be a weekend away as a supplement to our main holiday elsewhere, although we have occasionally done a full week.

The way to make it cheaper is to book one of the 8 berth cabins and get a party of 8 adults who can split the cost between them, and then go out of the school holiday season. All the facilities are still expensive, but the cost of the accommodation then comes right down.

They are very, very good at what they do.

[Zonnebloem]

They are very good at what they do. The crowds of paying customers suggest that they haven't got the maths all wrong.

I couldn't personally go for the 8-man accommodation because I don't know enough people where I live who'd like to travel to foreign lands (England), I would only ever do this with my younger daughter and the older one too, if she felt like coming along and I value a bit of privacy anyway. I'm not in favour of a scramble for toilets and showers.

I think Center Parks is well worth considering if your own hobbies and pastimes take precedence over economy. I try to rationalise things by comparing the cost of what is basically a fully equipped apartment with the cost of a bedroom in a hotel. It's not really comparing like with like. In an apartment, you can cater for yourself, retire to your own private bedroom, but you can't in a hotel.

As regards the restaurants, my preferences about food are not necessarily yours.

What I wrote was about the Whinfell Forest village near Penrith. Sherwood Forest or the other 2 may be quite different.

PS: No doubt the week I chose was expensive beacause it was school Easter holidays.

[baldbantam]

They all follow the same formula. My wife has been to the Penrith one on a girl's weekend away, and we've also done a week in the one down south.

There may well be one nearer to you than England. I believe they started off on the continent.

[biliousbantam]

There are many of them on the mainland, we went to one in Normandy once. You would not really know you were in France as there were many other nationalities there. If you had been to a UK parc it would seem very similar.

When the the kids were young, we lived very close to the Sherwood Forest parc and we went regularly. When they were taken over by Scottish and Newcastle brewery the quality did go down, particularly on catering. We had very good reason to demand to see the manger once and make a compliant. (Kept waiting for two hours for food in the 'Golf Club' with three young kids and my wife's Grandmother and we were not the only ones).

It amazed me that the manager did not really want to know about the incident or consider ways ways to improve service but very readily gave us vouchers for the parc shop. It seemed obvious that under the new ownership there had been a deliberate reduction in staff as it was cheaper to hand out a few vouchers to those that complained.

All that said when I become a Grandad for the first time later this year we will probably give
Center Parcs another try when the child is old enough.

[Rivals_Net]

Centre Parks - gota be the crapest holls ever! tdwn:

[king billy]

Its cheaper for a family to fly to Florida and stay in all inclusive accomodation with Disney, seaworld, universal passes etc......and nothing on earth can compare with that in terms of pure excitement for a family.....the Americans are the best in the world at catering for families and kids IMO - the only thing that lets it down is the length of the flight with young ones.....

I'm not tight - and i'm not short of a bob - but no way would i pay nearly a grand for a few days in this country.....not when we live in a big world with many, many things to do and see.....

If you want to quading - trecking, climbing, horse riding, pedalling a chuffing boat, archery - or other geeky sports like that then book to do em somewhere else and save yourself hundreds of pounds....:rolleyes:

[Zonnebloem]

Its cheaper for a family to fly to Florida and stay in all inclusive accomodation with Disney, seaworld, universal passes etc......and nothing on earth can compare with that in terms of pure excitement for a family.....the Americans are the best in the world at catering for families and kids IMO - the only thing that lets it down is the length of the flight with young ones.....

I'm not tight - and i'm not short of a bob - but no way would i pay nearly a grand for a few days in this country.....not when we live in a big world with many, many things to do and see.....

If you want to quading - trecking, climbing, horse riding, pedalling a chuffing boat, archery - or other geeky sports like that then book to do em somewhere else and save yourself hundreds of pounds....:rolleyes:


All probably true KB.

I'm in an unusual sort of situation as I have to travel as a single dad with a 6 year-old and the max time I get for summer holidays is 9 days each in July and in August. Not time enough to justify going over the Atlantic IMO and young ears don't take kindly to take-off and landing of planes. If the appeal court would grant me 3 weeks at a time or more, my holidays would look different.

I'm also going to UK to try combine hols with a very rare chance for my mum, who's now 91, to see one of her 2 grand-daughters. The other one she doesn't see any more.

Given that I have now booked overnight ferries at simply HUGE expense (€ 637 for the 2 of us) from Zeebrugge to Hull from Sat 4 July to Sat 11 July, can anybody suggest a better holiday for me and a little girl of 6 in the north west?

[Spoonhead]

Lake District camping for a few nights? Day in Southport or Morecombe. Avoid Blackpool although your daughter would probably love it! If she likes shopping then Southport is good and has some great Victorian architecture for you to appreciate. tup: Loads going on in Liverpool usually over summer. I spent alot of my childhood summers there doing the ferry accross the mersy to New Brighton. Avoid new Brighton! :D

[king billy]

You have my sympathy Z for the access you have with your daughter - the world see's Dads as the bad guys when relationships go wrong - but women can be truly nasty, horrible evil bitches.....

I'm lucky i get on with my ex and access whenever and for however long i want is never a problem....she and my son only live less than a mile away from me too which obviously helps....

Like i say - you have my sympathy, must be horrific - can't imagine not seeing my little lad regularly when i want....

[Macca Ha Ha Ha]

I looked up the prices for end July - early August and for a 3 bedroomed top end accom it came out at £1,750 for 1 week - for the accomodation alone:eek: - it may have all these wonderful facilties - but I reckon we could go on a cruise for a similar price and see some sights abroad and enjoy luxury service.

No wonder some go there out of school holidays - maybe it's cheaper then:confused:

[Macca Ha Ha Ha]

Used to spend some great time in St Annes when the kids were younger - not a bit like Blackpool - loads of families but not the chav scuffer type - great beach and sometimes you get to see the ocean when it's not miles out there somewhere! - proper old style resort.tup: