climbing

AS SNOW turns to rain, the UK is once again experiencing a wet and windy spell, so what better place to head to with the kids than soft play?

Across the UK there are lots of indoor attractions featuring playgrounds and soft play.

They make the ideal wet day out as often, they include features for both younger and older children.

And pretty much every single one has that all important cafe for onlooking parents…

Woodlands Family Theme Park, Devon

Home to Devon‘s largest soft play, Woodlands theme park is a great spot for miserable weather.

Inside, visitors will find drop slides, ball pools, climbing tubes and obstacles.

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The area is for children over 90cm tall.

Then there is also the Ice Palace, which is split into two sections – one for toddlers under 95cm and one for children up to 125cm.

In the Circus Drome Zone at Woodlands there is even more soft play with the Big Top Soft Play where there are stacking cubes, soft play blocks and interactive puzzlers for kids under 110cm.

In this zone there is a Circus Bouncy Castle too and the Acrobats Challenge with nets, rope swings, ball pools and slides for kids between 90cm and 140cm.

And finally, in the Toddler’s Village Zone, there is a Mermaids Ball Pool with slides.

An adult or child under 92cm costs £16.50 to enter and children under 92cm tall are free.

Play Factore, Manchester

Play Factore in Manchester claims to be the biggest indoor family entertainment arena in the UK.

Inside, visitors can head on the tallest standing indoor slide in the UK as well as head to a laser tag arena.

Kids can enjoy a bounce on the interactive ValoJump trampolines too and a zip wire.

In the Toddler Area, there are two floors of play designed for kids under the age of five.

It is safety gated as well so no running off moments occur.

Inside the Toddler Zone, there are tunnels, three different slides, soft play areas, an immersive interactive room, balance mats, touch screens and obstacles.

For older kids, between five-years-old and 16, there is a play frame, which is dubbed to be the largest in the UK.

Inside there is a network of tunnels, slides and obstacles including bubble balls and spider nets.

Sporty kids can head on the inbuilt football pitch or basketball court too.

Peak general admission varies depending on the age of a visitor.

For six to 11-month-olds, it costs £3.95 each and then for one to four-year-olds it is £12.95 each.

Kids aged between five and 16-year-old cost £17.95 each and parents cost £5.25 each.

Riverside Hub, Northampton

The Riverside Hub in Northampton has several different zones for visitors to explore.

For example, there are the Role Play Villages where kids can use their imagination to explore a make-believe world, with a cafe, shop, witches house and tooth fairy dentist.

For kids a little older and braver, there are a number of climbing activities including a beginner-friendly oak tree and a 10-metre beanstalk.

In the Toddlers at Riverside zone, there are a number of ball pits, activity walls and a gentle waterbed.

There’s a giant play frame as well with four levels featuring slides, games, themed zones and even a football pitch.

Ticket prices usually cost £7.50 per adult and children between one and three-year-old are £12 and finally, kids between four-year-old and 17, cost £15 each.

Travel writer Catherine Lofthouse said: “There’s so much to do here that it’s a struggle to fit it into the two and a half hours that each session is allocated.

“We could have happily spent the whole day and still have gone back for more.

“With three boys aged between five and 12, it can sometimes be difficult to find somewhere that has enough to keep all ages happy as the older two are getting a bit big for soft play, but that certainly wasn’t a problem here.

“Laser tag, crazy golf, two climbing poles, go-karts and even arcade machines all included in the price.

“There’s a mezzanine floor with extra seating that’s perfect for cheering your little climbers on as they get to the top.

“Downstairs, my sons really loved being able to take on the free arcade machines that would be pay per play elsewhere.

“And the go-karts were a big hit too, with short queue times despite how busy the venue was.”

Flip Out, various

There are several Flip Out locations across the UK – which means you likely have one near you.

These indoor adventure and trampoline parks feature interconnected trampolines, foam pits and stunt walls making them ideal for burning energy.

Some of the newer locations, such as Canary Wharf, also have other attractions such as laser quest, bumper cars and interactive football.

Keep an eye out for special events too, as sometimes there are After Dark DJ nights for teens and Mini Flippers sessions for kids under the age of five.

Travel writer Catherine Lofthouse headed to Flip Out Coventry with her three children.

She said: “Based in a former department store in a city centre shopping mall, you enter through a hall of mirrors and an arcade before exploring 13 attractions set over two floors of fun.

“With a ninja warrior course, laser tag, bumper cars and drift trikes, I hardly saw the older two while we were there.

“I think the dark space and graffiti vibe of the upper floor really appealed to my 11-year-old and 13-year-old, feeling a bit more grown-up than the bright lights and primary colours of soft plays aimed at younger children.

“But there was still lots to love for primary aged children here too.

“My six-year-old enjoyed the inflatables, roller rink and football zone.

“For little ones, there’s a dedicated toddler soft play next to the cafe area, so they can play in safety while tired parents have a rest nearby, hot drink in hand.”

Family tickets for two hours are normally £65 for four people or £80 for five.

The Playhive, North Yorkshire

The Playhive at Stockeld Park in North Yorkshire is one of the country’s largest indoor playgrounds – and claims to be one of the biggest in Europe.

While the attraction is not your typical soft play venue, it does features soft play elements.

For example, there is a Baby Bee Play Area for little ones under two-years-old that features soft play.

There is also a bouncy castle.

However, most of the other features are for older children such as the jungle-themed climbing walls.

The whole attraction is heavily themed too, so there are rocket walkways, spaceships, submarines and planes.

A 90-minute session starts from £13.50 or you can also purchase a ticket with access to the full Adventure Park, including outdoor attractions, from £23.50.

In other attraction news, England’s little-known theme park to get two new rides this year in massive multi-million pound expansion.

Plus, first look at the UK’s new Bluey rollercoaster – the first-of-its-kind in the world.

As metaphors for the American dream go, Gabriel Tallent’s taut and engrossing second novel, “Crux,” is exceedingly direct: It’s literally a book about climbing.

Its two main characters, Dan and Tamma (short for Tamarisk) are 17-year-old high-schoolers living in the scruffy outskirts of Joshua Tree National Park. Whatever free time they can scrape together is wholly dedicated to climbing boulders, despite their lack of equipment — neither can afford pads or ropes to break their falls, and Dan salvaged his climbing shoes from a dumpster. (Hard living is Tallent’s specialty: His 2017 debut, “My Absolute Darling,” centered on a tween girl living by her wits in a forest near the Mendocino coast.)

No romance is in the offing between the two — Dan is straight and Tamma is exuberantly profane about being gay — so their bond is built almost entirely around climbing. “Any day you were going to climb granite was the best day in the world,” Tallent writes.

Tallent is well-versed in the lingo of the sport, and some of the book’s finest, most lyrical passages are constructed around it: “Her left foot greased out from beneath her, and she came cheesegrating down the slab,” he writes of Tamma slipping on a boulder. There’s no glossary, but the main terms are clear enough: to “send” a climb is to finish it; a “crux” is a crucial pivot point. The language is infused with intensity, lust and earthy rudeness: Climbs have names like Fingerbang Princess and Tinkerbell Bandersnatch.

Dan and Tamma are climbing toward something, of course: He’s pursuing a college scholarship and she is determined to infiltrate the world of professional climbers. If that doesn’t pan out for either of them, Tamma figures they’ll just chuck it all and live off the grid in Utah: “After graduation, you just go, ‘I’m not going to college! PSYCH! I’m going to Canyonlands with Tamma! Later, bitches!’ Then spike your diploma to the floor and walk out.”

But as her intensity suggests, both of them are running from things too. Each of their families are struggling, laid low by astronomical, ever-escalating medical costs and poor relationship decisions. Tamma’s mother is partnered with a drug-dealing layabout; Dan’s mother, a onetime successful novelist, has a worsening heart condition.

It doesn’t help that civilization seems determined to cut them off from the desert’s wonders. Crowds of weekend warriors limit their ability to climb in isolation, and the region is rapidly filling up with “mansions, survivalist compounds, movie-star bungalows” and more.

“Don’t ever mistake this for a country in which you can set off on your own,” Dan’s father tells him. “It’s not a place dreams come true, at least not anymore.”

If the novel stayed in that lecturing, gloomy zone, it’d be easy to lose patience with it. More often, though, Tallent demonstrates his characters’ precarity rather than declaiming about it. Dan has legitimate reason to wonder whether his college applications are worth filing in an era of late capitalism and a dying mother. Tamma is trying to find the emotional stillness to deal with a dysfunctional family that makes plenty of demands but offers little support. In that regard, “Crux” recalls the best recent novels that have drilled deep into the physical and emotional damage of life on America’s lower rungs: Atticus Lish’s “The War for Gloria” (2021), Barbara Kingsolver’s “Demon Copperhead” (2022) and Ayana Mathis’ “The Unsettled” (2023).

Such a list might also include “My Absolute Darling” too. But where that novel was intentionally defined to make the reader feel closed in, here the Mojave Desert vistas are free and expansive; whenever Dan and Tamma make a break for the boulders, it’s as if their hearts have cracked wide-open. “Every crunching footstep was real,” Tallent writes. “And when you were up on the rock, then every crystal, crack, and ripple was endowed with indissoluble, life-saving importance, each dike and chickenhead inalienably itself.”

But if the desert offers a source of inspiration and possibility, it’s also an inescapably punishing landscape, and the main theme of the novel is how much success — especially now, especially in America — is going to have to depend on individual resolve. Culturally, this typically gets framed as alpha-male, gym-rat bluster about bootstrapping. Here, a woman commands most of the stage. Tamma’s best lines in the novel are unquotable in a newspaper — they involve physically strenuous sexual fantasies involving Ryan Reynolds and various members of Fleetwood Mac — but her exhortations are typically 10 parts insult to five parts inspiration, with a dash of terror that she may fail. “I’ve seen into your heart, dude,” she tells Dan. “Your mom, she doesn’t know who you are, but I do. You’re not that guy. You don’t want to be safe.” It’s fun, headlong reading with a shot of melancholy. She’s trying to convince him, and her — and maybe us.

Dan, as bookish as he is athletic, approaches matters in a calmer register: “How should I conduct my life? Do you trust yourself, or do you not?” Still, the fear and frustration are much the same, and in this novel the tension, smartly and lyrically rendered, is at once wide as the horizon — how do we survive in this country? — and narrow as the slightest of nearly invisible footholds its characters require to get even a little bit ahead.

Athitakis is a writer in Phoenix and author of “The New Midwest.”

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Running the quieter trails of the Swiss Alps

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Running from Asia to Europe in the Istanbul Marathon

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April

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Abseil from London’s highest helipad

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Winning tip: a fancy dress marathon through Bordeaux vineyards

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