A face only a mother could love?

Knowing it was going to be HOT today we bet on the fact that everyone else would be going to the beach and we'd probably get sunstroke at a nature reserve so we decided to give our annual passes (courtesy of Tesco) a bashing and go to Chessington instead.

We like Chessington. It's close to home, has a nice selection of rides, the staff are friendly and they have an all-you-can-eat pizza, pasta and salad buffet restaurant that's brilliant value. The best thing, though, is that every time we go, something happens to make it live up to its name of 'World of Adventures', like the time the log flume broke down just as we were about to go down the big drop at the end and we had to get out of our log and climb down the emergency stairs or when we saw Jonathan Ross and his family on the 'Berry Bouncers'. Today's 'adventure' was that as we were waiting in line to go on the Vampire ride, they had to stop it for a while because someone had been sick on it. My photo of the poor lad cleaning the affected seats almost made it as my blip today!

Anyway, it was far too hot for our usual mad, frantic rush around the park trying to get in as many rides as possible so we really just pootled around at our leisure and spent quite a bit of time in the zoo. Never too sure what I think of zoos, being torn between knowing the animals should really be left in their natural environment but at the same time being fascinated at being able to see so many different species in real life that we wouldn't otherwise. This ostrich seemed particularly fascinated by us, though!