We have a rather odd family tradition in this house!
Every Summer, we head off to the Trafford centre for the weekend. We stay in the same hotel and do exactly the same things every year and if I’m honest, I probably enjoy it more than any other break we go on through the year!
Last Friday afternoon, we rocked up at the Premier Inn at the Trafford centre, dropped our things off and headed straight over to the Trafford centre for our annual family activity of Laser Quest!
(Clearly, when I say family activity, I really mean I’ll go sit in Costa for an hour and relax while they run around getting hot and sweaty having two games of their beloved Laser Quest.)
I’m sure there must be a similar thing nearer to where we live but the Laser Quest at the Trafford centre is apparently ‘awesome’, ‘amazing’ and ‘the best ever’ so it’s become our annual Summer tradition. It’s not cheap though although I do think it’s well worth the money as a treat. I paid just short of £30 for the three of them to have two games each which took around an hour – just time for me to enjoy some Me time in Costa which is right near to it.
They have so much fun in there and all three of them come out every year looking all hot and bothered talking non-stop about how much fun they had in there and how so and so did this and so and so did that. It’s a pleasure to see their faces lit up like they are and well worth every penny for both the kids and Mr Frugal who enjoys it even more than them. He’s an old pro from his younger days and despite the fact he’s getting on in years, he always manage to win!
Laser Quest is their thing and I hope it continues for a long time to come.
Normally after Laser Quest we go for Nutella pancakes at the pancake shop but this year, we decided to skip that and try something new after Miss Frugal saw a YouTube video a few months ago. We decided to go to JumpNation which is basically a giant room filled with wall to wall trampolines and again, it’s not particularly cheap at around £10 each. I booked online a few days before we went so when we got there the kids just had to pop on their special socks (£1.50 a pair) and wait for their safety briefing. You get an hour on the trampolines and the sessions run throughout the day up until about 10pm I think and our two were literally bursting to get on the trampolines at the start of their session.
We sat in the café watching them and it looked like amazing fun until it went a bit quiet and there was an announcement telling everyone to leave the trampolines immediately. There’d been an accident and one poor girl was laid down on one of the trampolines with some sort of leg injury. The people at JumpNation were great and started handing out free drinks straight away but the kids had only been on the trampolines for 15 minutes and they were dying to get back on.
In the end it took around 30 minutes to get the poor girl off the trampolines and by then the next session of people were starting to arrive for their hour. The kids got the last 15 minutes of their session and then they were given an extra ten minutes but they weren’t allowed to stay on longer as the next session were stood waiting. It was a bit of an anti-climax considering how much they’d been looking forward to going but they still had an amazing time when they were allowed on so all was good!
We had a quick wander around the Trafford centre, had our photos take with Thing and then went back to our hotel room and had a picnic on the beds – possibly the most frugal part of our day! 😉
I’ll tell you all about Saturday soon….
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