We went on a brothers and sisters and girlfriends trip to into the West last weekend, to visited my cousins and my cousin’s new babies. Babies are great fun… although we did have the thing of “how on earth do make it stop crying?” at one point when we were left to look after the younger one. Interestingly shoving a full size football in the face of a 6 month old baby is good way to stop it crying for a little while. Flicking through the photos really quickly on my digital camera also seemed to have a good hypnotic effect. But on this occasion the baby was not going to stop crying until its mum returned.
We visited in the Eden Project on the Sunday, a big set of domed greenhouses with a whole rainforest inside. It was forecast to rain. Eden Project probably does very nicely out of rainy weekends in Devon. They were certainly packing in the paying visitors (£15 each) on this bank holiday. I suppose its one of the few big days out in the area, which is (mostly) indoors. It must be very profitable now I reckon. It would have been expensive to build of course, but with the ticket tills ringing like this, they must’ve reached their break even point a long time ago.
In the end sun came out, as you can see in this glorious picture of an artichoke.
Are they still trying to justify the prices at the Eden Project by giving you a ticket to go back for free within 12 months, knowing that holidaymakers go to Cornwall at most once a year?
Yeah. You have to switch your giftaid donations to the Eden project, and then they give you free entry for a year, as a thankyou. And then there’s some “activation” procedure involving giving your name and address. But the question is, does this stop you giving your free entry card to somebody else? (I mean I’m sure you’re not allowed to do that, but would they know?) We’re going to try it. We’ve activated our tickets and left them with my cousin, who is going to use them some time this year when she has visitors.
Went to the Eden project a few years ago and it was a nice day out. I heard the queues were pretty bad, but it was out of season and not too bad
I would certainly recommend the Eden projects with your kids but it can work out reasonably expensive with tickets and refreshments. Although don’t most days out nowadays@ Certainly worth it though