Last week of the holidays

Time flies, and it's the last week of the summer holidays: school starts tomorrow or Monday (depending on which school).

The weather has been good too, so we've squeezed in a couple of trips.

Monday (that quaint and mindless British invention the bank holiday) we went to Felixstowe. Some hours on the beach, a picnic lunch, feeding the slot machines, and a swim at the pool.

Yesterday we went to Chessington World of Adventures. Those who know us will know that we're keen on theme parks, and we hadn't been to Chessington before.

It was hot, the park was busy, and the queues were long. That's only to be expected. But again, the park did a less than optimal job. To start with, the ticket sales at the entrance were excruciatingly slow - it took about 45 minutes to buy a ticket. Then the ride staff were doing an indifferent job of filling the rides. Few rides were full up - some only half full - which extended the queues even further. One of the major rides was closed all day, and another operating at partial capacity. On the plus side, they did let the rides run over the scheduled closing time slightly so we managed to get an extra ride and came away feeling happy.

(One hint to theme park operators: you're missing a trick here. It's a baking hot day, people are standing in a queue for an hour, and you have a non queue-jumping policy that means people can't leave the queue and join back. You could make a fortune by having roving ice-cream and drinks sellers working along the queue line - we would have bought something more than once.)