Midlands Holiday - Day 5
We took the decision to visit the National Space Centre in Leicester, figuring we might visit Warwick Castle later in the week. Now I understand why I hadn’t heard of it – Houston it is not. That said it’s not bad, it’s just too expensive for what you get in return (it’s the same price as the zoo was yesterday), and it’s pitched very much at kids. They do have a fantastic dome shaped film theatre offering 360 degree views above your head. We got to watch a 20 minute film called Stars as part of our admission and paid an extra £3 each to watch another film called Big (but I fell asleep in that one – I hadn’t had any coffee all day). They also have a flight simulator ride taking you on a trip to Jupiter’s moon Europa which is very good. We also listened to a short talk about the European Space Agency’s mission to Mars.
The rest of the rather large place is made up of typical museum information boards with interactive bits (that mostly seemed to be out of order or at least malfunctioning) and a huge number of short information films that eternally seemed to be in the middle of playing – they don’t seem to have a beginning or an end!?! That said they have a lot of quite cool model satellites (or in some cases the real thing) hanging from the roof and even a couple of rockets housed in a building made from giant bubblewrap (honestly).
If you went with the intention of just looking at the bits interesting to you personally then it would probably be really rather good, but the overpriced admissions fee meant we felt we had to squeeze every last penny’s worth out of the place so I found it really quite dull in the end (and I like all things intergalactic!). This is probably a bit unfair on the place, but I doubt if I’d go again. Mark would go though I think – he really liked the flight simulator and perhaps one day we’ll have a small child for him to take.
Then we headed off down the M6 in search of Hartlebury Travelodge, a few miles south of Kidderminster. It’s a little hotel hidden behind a Little Chef, but we found a nice enough pub called the Mitre Oak at the next roundabout heading towards Worcester – within easy walking distance (although we didn’t walk, we would have if we’d known in advance).