Summer 2014: Day 15 – The Eden Project

I really need to play catch up a bit with my holiday diary or we’ll be into the Christmas holidays before I’ve finished writing about the summer! But then again there are plenty of days later in the holidays where the write up will probably just say “kids watched far too much CBeebies today” and that should speed up the blogging process!

For our penultimate full day at Coombe Mill we decided on a day trip to the Eden Project which is about a 40 minute drive away. Now the Eden Project is probably one of Cornwall’s best known tourist attractions now and somewhere that everyone wants to go to – and rightly so as it’s brilliant! One tip before you set off though – tickets can be a bit on the pricey side, but if you book in advance you can save up to 15%. Even better still, you don’t need to print anything out, so you can actually just book the night before (as we did) and then you just have to take a special reference number that they email to you to the people on the ticket desk. Very simple to do – and a good thrifty tip.

Once you arrive at Eden and are through the ticket section it’s hard not to be blown away by the scale of it all. Not only is the site physically huge, but the famous biomes are far bigger than you first expect. Both the Rainforest Biome and Mediterranean Biome are fantastic learning opportunities for people of all ages and it’s very easy to totally forget that you’re in Cornwall whilst in there. We all enjoyed the new Rainforest Canopy Walk in one, and had a gorgeous Mediterranean lunch in the other.

Outside the children had great fun running around the various gardens and Little Miss C enjoyed seeing some of the slightly quirky touches around the site.

When we visited the Dinosaurs Unleashed event was on which Mr C and I thought was very good. Master C was puzzled by the whole experience of being confronted by a huge roaring dinosaur. LMC however was completely and utterly petrified! Just goes to show that not everything suits everyone and looking back through my photos the whole thing does look a bit gory.

We had a wonderful day at the Eden Project, and once again it made me think more about the fact that the project is so much more than just a tourist attraction. The Eden Project is also a charity and a social enterprise, aiming to teach people about the environment around them, the world as a whole, and what we can all do to understand it better and help to protect it. Whilst LMC learnt a huge amount from going around it just aged 4, children that little bit older would gain so much more. Even I found myself reading some things and realising that previous assumptions had been wrong.

The Eden Project impressed me the first time we visited, and five years later it’s done the same again. If you’ve not been before then please do make a trip as you won’t be disappointed. On our last visit we totally overlooked all the play areas, but this time the kids certainly made the most of them dotted all around the site. Perfectly spaced out to let them run off steam whenever they needed to.

And if that wasn’t enough excitement for the day – after a quick power nap in the car on the way home they made it back to Coombe Mill in time for the evening train ride.

I’m also delighted to say that that evening Mr C and I finally made time to play Scrabble together too. It’s something we used to do regularly before we had children yet now children, work, housework and tiredness just seem to get in the way. I miss those evenings. More so than I realised. The fact that I actually managed to win this time (a rare event!) pretty much made my day.