We’ve just returned home from a long weekend darn sarf for a visit to Legoland and Chessington.

Legoland was a bit of a disappointing day out because the queues for everything were just enormous.  Traffic was backed up for miles just to get in the car park.  We had to queue for ages with our advance tickets to get them changed into normal tickets to get through the turnstiles.  All the rides had long queues – the shortest queue was about 15 minutes, the longest was a couple of hours.

From an entire day in Legoland we managed to go on 3 rides because #3 has Dyspraxia and can’t queue for long enough.  While we were waiting for a Legoland maintenance person to come and help us bump start the car (accidentally ran the battery down too far while we were having lunch) a member of staff asked Mrs Sane what sort of day we’d had.  She said it had been a bit disappointing and why and the member of staff said that we should have said when we arrived there because they know children with Dyspraxia can’t queue for long and allow them to queue jump.  A bit late to find out at 6pm!

We went to Chessington World of Adventures on Saturday and headed straight for customer services.  We explained what had happened at Legoland, they took our details and gave #3 a queue jump wrist band.  They recognise things like Dyspraxia and other illnesses that can cause distress or agitation when queueing as a disability which is great and made all the difference for our day out.  The system they operate is pretty fair – on the most popular rides, if you jump the queue they write the time you would have got on the ride if you’d queued and you can’t go on any of the other most popular rides until that time.

Where Legoland was a day of dragging a very unhappy, bored and agitated 7 year old (and his sister) around the park, Chessington was completely different.  We got to go on most rides, we didn’t have to keep dragging him back into the queue or try and find ways of constantly occupying him for half an hour or more.

It’s fantastic that Merlin Entertainment recognises the difficulty kids with Dyspraxia have with queueing and offer this queue jumper service.  It made our day and we’d definitely go back to one of their attractions.  In fact, before we decide to go to anything similar I’ll be checking if they do the same thing.