Warming Up

We went on an expedition to see dinosaurs today. Sounds dangerous but they were all safely behind electrified fences in a place called Jurassic World.  I haven’t googled them, but they seem legit and I think I’d have heard if there had been any issues with visitors being killed etc.

The dinosaurs were at there Excel Centre in East London, so it was a bit of a jaunt, but the travel was part of the fun and the kids behaved pretty well and we got to go on the Elizabeth Line for the first time. My only regret was that I didn’t get to go on this line when Elizabeth herself was (presumably) driving the trains. But Charles did a good job.

It was worth the trip, because it’s not every day you get to see actual living dinosaurs in almost complete safety. They even let us have a look in the lab where they extract the DNA of dinosaurs from mosquito trapped in amber. It must be a bit of a tombola as to what you end up with from a process like that. You don’t know until you’ve got the DNA out which creature it might have belonged to. They must have created a lot of tiny rat like mammals and stuff too. And got quite a lot of swapsies even when the blood belonged to a dinosaur. How many mosquitos are trapped in amber? A lot apparently. This place had all the dinosaurs (but none of the rat things)

A bit embarrassingly for the exhibition something went wrong with the electrics right at the end and it looked like a T Rex was about to get out and eat everyone, but they rushed us to the safety of the gift shop, which presumably the T Rex couldn’t get to. I doubt that will happen again. Surely if anything goes wrong at a place like this they quickly learn from the experience and ensure that it can never happen again. Or just close the place down if it kept on going wrong. I asked for a refund due to the trauma but none was forthcoming.  And for that lack of customer service I will only be giving them three stars of Tripadvisor. But apart from nearly getting eaten by a T Rex it was a great day out. And like I say, what are the chances of that happening again? 

I was glad to see that the Rod Hull false hand was employed for one of the puppet dinosaurs, not a trick that I’d ever resort to, but you might spot it in the picture from the website above. The kids enjoyed the experience, but my son seemed to be a bit confused as to whether it was real or not (the idiot - of course it was real, you can’t make fake dinosaurs that look this real) and a little bit scared, but although you’re whisked through pretty quickly, there’s loads of different things to do and see. It doesn’t have the scope of the Harry Potter world, but then you can’t nearly get eaten by a T Rex in Harry Potter World, so you get what you pay for.

Thanks very much to Simon Legg for getting us in. And to the staff who showed admirable commitment and enthusiasm.