Today was the NI Big Splash Puddle Jumping Contest so we headed out to Castle Espie with our wellies packed. After paying the entrance fee we proceeded round to the puddle jumping competition which was a bit underwhelming after seeing the promo video on the website.
AJ had some practice splashes in the muddy puddles surrounding the competition puddle container and seemed to be loving it.
Unfortunately when it came to his competition jump he didn’t really want to do much so didn’t get a score for his splashes and decided that he preferred to jump in the muddy puddles instead.
We headed round to the wetlands and were greeted by a multitude of birds. The wetlands area was a larger than we anticipated and after the puddle splashing we had to keep an extra special eye on AJ as he was trying to run off and jump in the larger bird ponds which are considerably deeper.
He stopped to watch a duck feeding.
He then noticed the other birds swimming and diving out on the pond.
A short walk round takes you to an even more vast area which has a caveman installation with a hut which was pretty empty save for makeshift boat and broom hanging up on the wall and some glass windows which I’m sure the cavemen must have installed after seeing a Safestyle UK advert on their erm…TV.
Due to AJ getting a little wet earlier on and it being past 12pm we decided to get him home for his afternoon nap. He really enjoyed himself and there seems to be a lot more to see that we didn’t get round. There was also a Lego trail which there were building workshops and dotted around the park were various large Lego birds which had fallen foul of the Kragle (see what i did there?).
The price was just over £16 and of course with most of these places AJ went free. We were only there for an hour so probably didn’t feel like we got our money’s worth but it does seem like a place where you could take the family and spend quite a bit of the day there.