wookey hole

so in looking for things to do with kids in or around bristol, we happened upon wookey hole, a local attraction that boasts cheddar caves, life size dinosaurs, a circus museum and the world's largest collection of um, clown eggs. we'll get to those later.

to clear things up, wookey hole is in no way associated with chewbacca, much to our disappointment. so needless to day, chewie wasn't on hand to greet us upon arrival.

most english amusement parks, castles and public attractions close up for the season in october. some reopen for a brief christmas stint but otherwise after october, it's kind of a tourist attraction ghost town.

which is how we arrived at wookey hole, it being one of the few open year round.

sadly, the day we visited vacillated between drizzles and full fledged rain, further limiting the already limited array of things to do at wookey hole.

parking is free though. which is big, for england.

after ruling out pirate miniature golf due to being rained out, we opted for a tour of the cheddar caves, which is reputedly haunted by the wookey witch. the cheddar caves are true cheddar caves. not in the sense that one can reach out & pull off a hunk of cheese goodness from the cave walls. somehow, someone figured that you could leave fresh cheese in the caves to ripen. probably some old miner that forgot his lunch only to return the following spring to find it had "matured" and that the resulting cheese tasted damn good. the caves are a constant temperature all year, thus being the perfect environment to ripen cheese.

wookey hole also has a large mirror maze which the kids delighted finding their way through. they were better than most of the adults present. i must note that my children are also unusually adept at finding their way through a corn maze, so mazes must just be their thing.

wookey hole also has an amazing amount of circus memorabillia, if that makes your socks roll up and down. costumes, hats, shoes, scaled models of circus sites, and many circus wagons, including one of the abominable (or is it abdominal?) snowman being kept alive with various potions and whatnot.

lastly, the wookey hole also boasts the largest collection of clown eggs ever assembled in the world. what are clown eggs you ask? these are regular eggs with the insides drained out and painted with the facial likenesses of famous and not so famous clowns from around the world. there must be like 300 of these eggs at wookey hole. so incredibly strange. there was also a marcel marceau egg but it didn't do any of that walking in the wind or invisible wall thing. thank goodness.

we learned several things on the wookey hole expedition:
1. wookey hole not affiliated with chewbacca. damn.
2. cheddar caves not actually "made" of cheese but more a cheese storage/ripening facility.
3. clown eggs exist. for what reason, we do not know. kinda like stonehenge.
4. dignan is claustrophobic