The Great British Theme Park Adventure

It was an early start but there was just time to admire the two yellow lilies that had bloomed overnight in my garden, before working my way through the surprisingly busy morning traffic to pick up Ben who would be my travelling companion for the trip.

The first day's park was Legoland Windsor, where we were meeting up with another friend Margaret. In fact, rather than meeting in the park, we met her car on the roundabout outside Legoland and followed her up the hill!

The Big Shop has expanded into the old Hill Top Cafe, and imaginatively renamed "The Lego Store" ... Merlin's creative naming strategy at its best there.

First ride of the day was a request from Ben: Duplo Dino Coaster which he hadn't managed to ride when it opened last year.

There was time for a coffee and a cake in the new coffee shop in Duplo Valley, which Merlin's imaginative naming team have chosen to call "Legoland Coffee Co.".

The coffee is better than the name, the inside is airy and nicely decorated, and the cakes are tasty!

Despite half term having been the previous week, Legoland was fully booked and, even while supposedly limiting numbers of visitors, was very crowded.

Social distancing is everyone's responsibility

Legoland has a brand new land for 2021: Mythica

The land features some nice models of large mythical creatures

The area's main attraction is Flight of the Sky Lion, the UK's first flying theatre

It was proving wildly popular, with a queue snaking out of the entrance

The queue time board was claiming a 120 minute wait

There was a long and winding indoor queueline

Even Lego minifigs have to social distance

The preshow video is cute, but essentially boils down to teaching kids how to sit on a chair

Unfortunately Flight of the Sky Lion was slightly disappointing, with the immersion broken by the top of the screen being clearly visible throughout the ride. Other flying theatres like Soarin' and Krrish don't have this problem, so it looks like although Merlin bought great ride hardware they cheaped out on the screen, which sadly ruins an otherwise very cool experience.

The former S.Q.U.I.D. Surfer has been adopted into the new Mythica land and rethemed into Hydra's Challenge

A pre-lunch ride on Dragon's Apprentice

Covid-19 precautions mean no duplo bricks to play with in the queuelines at the moment

A busy park meant a bit of a queue outside Pirate's Burger Kitchen to get some lunch

The need for social distancing caused the queue to look a lot longer than it actually was

As always, the food was not particularly high quality but certainly not the worst theme park burger

After lunch it was time for a ride on Dragon's Apprentice's older brother

Making sure to keep that 2 metre distance

One of the creatures from Mythica seems to have got lost and found itself stuck on the castle roof

The Dragon was on form as usual, with some new chocolate cake smells in the banqueting hall

No visit to Legoland would be complete without a trip aboard the Legoland Express

We were invited to a party

I love the music inside Haunted House Monster Party, but today for some reason the volume had been turned down so the party wasn't quite so lively as normal

The front row on each side was out of use due to Coronavirus, which halved the capacity of the ride

One moment we're at a party, the next we're on a Deep Sea Adventure (which surprisingly was walk on!)

Is that made of Lego? It looks a bit fishy to me.

Temporary purple fences have been installed around the Heartlake City lake to prevent crowds gathering during the shows

Closing time had been moved from 5pm to 7pm thanks to the surprisingly busy day, but even with the extra couple of hours in the park the time still finally came to haul ourselves back to the top of the hill on the Hill Train

There was a long queue of people eagerly waiting to buy a souvenir from the new improved Lego Store

As well as expanding in size, the shop has been given a facelift and is now much brighter than before

The range of exclusive Legoland sets continues to grow

And with that, we checked out of Legoland and the first day of our Great British Theme Park Adventure was complete. We said goodbye to Margaret and then headed north to Premier Inn Thetford for the night, via a quick stop off for a Waitrose sandwich at South Mimms services, ready for the adventure to continue...

Day two of our Great British Theme Park Adventure was a perfect summer's day, with blue skies and glorious warm sunshine

Our first destination of the day was Pettitts Animal Adventure Park near Norwich

The car park is a short walk down the road from Pettitts' main entrance

We were greeted by a very friendly monkey

Pettitts Animal Adventure Park is a small family park and zoo. It was very nicely presented, clean and tidy with a friendly atmosphere.

The park had implemented various changes due to Coronavirus, and there was plenty of hand sanitiser on offer

The Pettitts Chicken Show was a real highlight

Who couldn't love a room full of animatronic singing farmyard animals?!

Disappointingly, the meerkats didn't sing too

Pettitts recently installed a kiddie coaster made by Guven Lunapark, the factory we visited in Turkey in 2018

Safari Adventure is a children's self-driving car ride past some nicely made animal models

The park's other rollercoaster is the Rocky Roller Coaster, a mine train themed kiddie coaster

The train takes visitors on a large loop around the rides area

The Pettitts staff were all really friendly

Sadly Covid-19 has meant the petting area has had to temporarily close

Luckily the animals can still be seen over the fence

Keep off children, this play fort is for kids only

Take a bath? You're having a laugh!

Pettitts' crazy golf is free to play - no upcharge attractions here! We just had to help ourselves to a club and a ball and play a round. Let's not talk about who won though.

This little monkey was keen to show off

Pettitts was a real surprise for me - I wasn't expecting much, but it proved to be a charming little park being nicely run with a great range of family attractions

Just down the road from Pettitts, on the way back to the car park, is the Humpty Dumpty Brewery

The brewery's shop was open as we passed, so we popped in

I bought a bottle of local cider to take home

The next stop on our grand tour took us to the seaside for an afternoon at Great Yarmouth

Joyland is a small amusement park for children, just off the beach

Like everywhere else, Joyland has had to make several Coronavirus-related modifications, including implementing a one way system around the park

Our first ride was on the Snails, which has been at the park since it opened in 1949

Jet Cars is a ride from the 1970s, which zooms around inside Joyland's central mountain

Utilising another part of the mountain's innards, Neptune's Kingdom is a dark ride which takes riders on a journey through an undersea kingdom

Tyrolean Tubs is another of Joyland's historic rides, first opening in 1949 and now the only remaining Virginia Reel in operation anywhere in the world

More modern, but still fitting perfectly into the park, is Spook Express - a rollercoaster which encircles the central mountain

We opted to put our last tokens to good use, with a repeat ride on the tubs

With the sun shining, we decided to take a walk along the Pier

There was the promise of a Ghost Train ride ...

... but sadly everything was closed and the end of the pier had been taped off

We settled instead for a drink and a pot of tasty seafood

Suitably refreshed, we wandered down the front to the big wheel

If you can't get the staff, replace them with a machine

It was a beautiful afternoon, and there were some great views from the top of the wheel

Looking towards the Pleasure Beach, which was sadly closed that day

Leaving Great Yarmouth behind, we drove two hours northwest to Boston, positioning ourselves ready for the next day of theme park adventures

A special shout out to The Mill pub in Boston, where we ate a fantastic dinner

Setting ourselves up for a full day of fun with a Premier Inn breakfast

Our plan was to start the day by popping into Botton's Pleasure Beach

That plan was quickly foiled when we found out the park didn't open until midday

Instead, we moved onwards to Fantasy Island

Ben and I had last visited Fantasy Island six years ago in 2015 on a day which was too windy to allow Odyssey to operate, so we were very much hoping to rectify that today

Firstly though, we had to collect our wristbands from inside the Pyramid

As it was an off-peak day, many of the rides were being run on rotation (one hour open, the next hour closed), so we decided to catch Millennium while it was available. In contrast to 2015, the entrance is now inside the Pyramid rather than up a flight of steps from the public street outside.

Covid-necessitated queueline modifications including plastic screens dividing the queue from the exit path

The new entrance and Coronavirus modifications weren't the only changes to Millennium: Since our last visit Fantasy Island has been bought by Mellors Group who have made numerous investments and improvements to the park, including repainting Millennium in a smart new purple and green colour scheme.

The rollercoaster has aged well and has been nicely looked after, providing a pretty smooth ride (for a Vekoma looping coaster!) and is a huge amount of fun.

Next, I took a seat underneath the Starflyer (I'm not a massive fan - they scare the pants off me) while Ben took a higher seat on it, 70 metres above. The ride is a temporary addition to Fantasy Island until they can open Turbulence, the former Bling star shape ride from Blackpool Pleasure Beach, later in the year. This particular Starflyer can usually be found at Winter Wonderland in Hyde Park.

We tried a couple of times to ride Spinning Racer, Fantasy Island's new Maurer Spinning Coaster which previously travelled the German fair circuit, but it was having technical problems

Instead, since it was coming up to 12pm and it was just about to open on rotation, we decided to be first in the queue for Odyssey.

Whilst it looks nice, Odyssey is a terrible, rough and unpleasant ride ... as you might well expect with it being an oversized SLC

Next to Spinning Racer is Family Roller Coaster, another kiddie coaster from Guven Lunapark

Spinning Racer was finally back up and running, so we took a ride

We made a quick circuit of the market to get some nice photos of Odyssey in the sunshine

We had lunch at House of Coffee, a little cafe underneath the Millennium lift hill

We chose 'tea for two', which proved to be an excellent choice

After lunch we rode Rhombus Rocket

Ben tried out Magic ...

... while I took a look at the outside of one of Fantasy Island's halloween scare mazes

The door was open, offering a small peek inside

The new management has introduced a nice range of merchandise

Time was getting on and it was time to leave - we'll have to wait until our next visit to discover what this new attraction will be

It was back up the road to a now opened Botton's Pleasure Beach

We had popped in to ride Queen Bee, a rollercoaster which was not running last time we had visited in 2015

It's a small children's inverted coaster which sits on top of one of the arcade buildings

Last time we were in the area, we also tried to visit the amusements on Cleethorpes beach, but they were closed...

... We took a short detour on our route to have another look, but sadly they were all shut up again.

Three hours later, we arrived in Blackpool and checked-in to The Big Blue Hotel

The room was nice, although the mattresses were surprisingly hard!

We took a short stroll down the Promenade to stretch our legs before bedtime

Blackpool Tower and Central Pier lit up in the distance

There wasn't much life on South Pier

Waltz all night ... but not tonight

According to the security guard, the rides had closed about 20 minutes before we had arrived as it was so quiet

An unfortunate turn of phrase from Blackpool Council: apparently the town is best experienced from far away!

Returning to the hotel, it was almost time to call it a night after our long drive

What a way to start the day!

Big Blue Hotel guests can use an exclusive entrance to enter Blackpool Pleasure Beach

We walked down to Icon and were first in the queue outside the gates.

Icon opened in 2018 as the first new rollercoaster at the Pleasure Beach in 24 years (not counting Infusion which had been moved from Southport)

This was my first time riding Icon, and I thought it was ... OK. It's nice and smooth, but lacks any real stand-out moments of brilliance.

Next up was Steeplechase. Ben wanted to ride all three tracks, so luckily it was pretty quiet!

By that time the Icon Gift Shop had opened, so we popped in for a browse and had a chat with the very friendly guy in charge.

There's some unique merchandise on offer, including Icon dog leads!

Gromit was lurking around outside Wallace & Gromit Thrill-O-Matic ... he didn't seem to like it when I called him Wallace.

The ride is fun, although I miss Gold Mine

The classic River Caves, first opened in 1905

Splish splash

First classic woodie of the day - Grand National

Despite what the sign says, it seemed (a bit!) less rough than when I last rode it

No, this isn't a workshop or a junkyard - they're trying to flog off used ride parts in the gift shop!

A wall of names made out of personalised "bricks" is being built to celebrate Blackpool Pleasure Beach's 125th Anniversary this year

We had lunch at the new, improved, shinier and more upmarket version of Coasters

We sat out on the restaurant's terrace, which overlooks The Big One, Big Dipper and Icon's brake run

The view was good, and the food was great

Blackpool's Ghost Train was built in 1930 and was the first in the world

A ride on Alice completed the classic dark ride set

Flying Machines: The closest most of us are likely to get to international air travel for a while

The ride gave us the opportunity to take an aerial view over the construction walls at the ongoing refurbishment of Valhalla, which was originally supposed to reopen this year but has been pushed back until 2022 due to delays associated with the Coronavirus pandemic.

Passing Mandy's fountains, we made our way over to the Big Dipper

Big Dipper used to be smoother than the Grand National, so the way the rollercoaster has deterioriated is very sad: very rough with lots of banging, shuffling and lateral shunts

Covid-19 precautions such as regularly stopping the rides for cleaning throughout the day means everything is currently a little slower than usual, so the Pleasure Beach is asking for everyone's patience and understanding

The Big One queue was down the ramp out of the station, but due to social distancing the cattlepen wasn't in use so it looked longer than it really was

There were two trains in service, so it didn't take long to reach the front of the queue

While The Big One is never going to be an airtime monster, the first drop plunging 205ft headfirst toward Blackpool Promenade is hard to beat

From the wildest rollercoaster to one of the tamest, but just as fun: Nickelodeon Streak

Pleasure Beach was only open 11am-5pm, so with our time in the park drawing to a close we decided to end the day where we began, with another ride on Icon

Whilst it might not be the best ride in the world, considering the deterioration of some of Blackpool's other rollercoasters, Icon was a very pleasurable way to end the day

Overall, we had a great day at the Pleasure Beach. The park wasn't too crowded, and most rides were up and running. It was just a pity it was open for such a short amount of time.

Seeing as it was just over the road, we decided to pop across to South Pier to see if we could get a ride on the spinning mouse - it certainly looked a bit more alive than the previous day

Sadly it was not to be - apparently the wind had picked up so they had had to close Crazy Coaster before we arrived. I guess that'll just have to be a rollercoaster for next time we're in Blackpool.

With various restaurants and eateries looking rather busy, we decided to head back to The Big Blue to see if we could get dinner in the hotel

It proved to be a fantastic decision, with some wonderfully tasty food served up

After dinner we took a short stroll around the perimeter of the Pleasure Beach

We discovered some old Big One track in one of the car parks ... it's a wonder they're not for sale in the Pleasure Beach souvenir shop!

What better way to end the night, and the trip, than by watching a few episodes of the 1990s BBC TV documentary about the Pleasure Beach