8529/21448
I decided to take the kids on an Easter Monday adventure and get them out of the house and away from the Easter eggs (though they are both the kind of terrible kids who have a little bit of Easter Egg every day and make them last for months and have to throw some bits away, unlike a normal kid who eats them all on Easter Sunday before breakfast and is then sick, but still keeps eating - I am so ashamed of them). Catie wanted to stay home and sort out her office, but also didn't want us to go anywhere that she'd like to go, so we ended up taking a chance and going on an app-based Scavenger Hunt in Tring.
The kids were surprisingly up for it, at least until it started and didn't even complain about the 50 minute car journey.
Tring holds terrible memories for me of being falsely accused of flushing nappies down the toilet and being unable to sleep and missing trains due to exhaustion.
See this blog and
the next day - though to be fair I got two episodes of Relativity out of this experience and didn't have to make up a thing.
I've done lots of fun gigs there though and they are one of the rare theatres to put on one of my plays, so good memories too, but I mainly think about that angry hotel maintenance man holding up a bag with a nappy in it, as we tried to recover in the bar and told us not to put stuff like that down the toilet (even though we hadn't).
I am not sure I'd ever been into the actual town before (as the theatre and that hotel were on the outskirts) and it's a very quaint and pretty place. The scavenger hunt turned out to be quite expensive, as I needlessly bought three tickets, when we did it all on my phone and also it wasn't really very good either - mainly involving questions about places, most of which could be answered by looking round the exterior of the building, but some of which could not. And it was not interesting enough to excite the kids. When did this pub start serving food? There didn't seem to be anywhere obvious that revealed the answer and even if there had been, so what (I guessed 1980 and was one year out).
We did get to go into Tring's weird natural history museum which is full of taxidermied animals in glass cabinets - interesting, but also macabre and in that uncanny valley. Apparently there are fleas in there somewhere dressed up in Mexican hats, but we didn't see them. Ernie had been here before with the school and wanted to see the turtle - Phoebe was more freaked out and keen to move on. They had already tired of the stupid expensive questions and the photo based stunts we were meant to do.
Ernie started obsessing over a book he'd had as a young kid Axel Scheffler's Flip Flap Safari. You can make different animals by changing one half of the page. So a Zebra and a Lion might be a Zion or a Libra or whatever. Ernie loved this now he could read the funny animal names himself. I said that they must have had to be quite careful to make sure the animals did not make any rude words. I tried to think of an example, but couldn't think of an animal that ended in the right letters.
Luckily Phoebe was on had to suggest a Fox and a Duck, showing me up for being a terrible parent, but one who had at least trained his kids well. She then wanted to add a sheep to an animal that ended in "it". Again I was flummoxed. But she then thought of "nit". She's got a great future ahead of her. Luckily Ben has seen all my shows so couldn't have a lower opinion of me than he had already.
Though the scavenger hunt was a bit of a wash out - we did go to five of the six locations and I had a go at answering everything, even for the location that we didn't go to- I did have fun being with my rude children. We had a pub lunch and then headed home so I could listen to York City sneak a late win and go two points clear at the top of the league. Just giving their fans enough hope that things are going our way, before pulling the rug out.
