Mummascribbles – Those pesky ride on machines! – Mummascribbles

Today I am talking about those ride on machines…the ones where you have to part with a minimum of £1 (they were 50p back in my day), for your child to have a quick ride. The machine might come in the form of a horse, Iggle Piggle’s boat or maybe a car that has Peppa Pig in.  There’s normally a selection to choose from and never is your child happy with just one. No, they want to go on all their favourites.

These machines – they are EVERYWHERE!

When we go over to the shops across from our house, there is a whole selection. It used to be Thomas, then Iggle Piggle and now Zach’s favourites are the big horse and the little merry go round.  Luckily we don’t have to go over there very much and sometimes one of us goes while the other stays home with Zach. But when we do go, there has to be a ride involved.  Now this, I am fine with. I remember loving the horse outside Rossi’s toy shop (remember that shop?!) and would always bug my mum to go on it on the way to or from brownies. With Zach, we make him wait until we’ve done what we need to do and then he can have a ride on one machine of his choice.

What gets my back up is when one of these machines ultimately spoils an event. When we were down in Cornwall recently, we visited the aquarium in Newquay.  As soon as we walked in, there was a camper van ride on machine. Zach went straight to it and wanted to go on it, only it wasn’t working and there were two men in the process of fixing it. He was fascinated watching them fix it but it still wasn’t working once we’d paid and entered the main attraction.

The problem we had was that he knew it was there and he knew it was being worked on in order to fix it. This meant that the entire way round he was asking to go back to see if it was working yet. He wasn’t particularly bothered about the beautiful fishes or the sharks or the giant turtle, just that bloody £1 per go camper van. Not the stuff we’d paid almost £40 to go and see.

When he decided half way round that he needed the toilet, this meant we had to go out to the main entrance where the ruddy thing was sat! Of course he ran straight to it and it was working, so we made a deal that if we let him go on it once, we’d go back in via the start of the aquarium and walk through everything he hadn’t paid attention to. He was happy with this and finally he started to enjoy what we took him there for. He thought the shark tunnel was awesome, especially because if one of us stood upstairs, we could see each other through the glass and wave to one another!  He also thought the giant turtle was pretty amazing and so did we.

In the end, we did manage to enjoy ourselves, once he’d finally stopped harping on about the ruddy camper van.

It’s the same in soft play.  You pay for them to go in, to run around and have fun on the slides and the first thing they go to is the ride on! And at the zoo or wildlife park. And even possibly at leisure centres and parks! It’s just like shops putting the sweets next to the checkouts. It all makes our lives so much harder when all we want to do is have fun with the purpose of which we went there for.

So I know that this little post probably won’t make much of a difference (although it’s made me feel better!), but aquariums, zoos, shops, etc –  please think about the impact these things have and how maybe if you didn’t have these machines in your attraction, then there may well be a heck of a lot less tantrums going on! And we’d be a lot better off, because seriously? £1 for a 20 second go! Gah.