February 2020
We started our hopefully epic five-year mission with a gentle introduction and a soft bridge in from the extinction of the dinosaurs (the most recent historical time period that Kane really knows much about) to mammoths and Early Man(kind). The "Ice Age" installation at West Midland Safari Park is a short walk through some static and animatronic early mammals (and one terror bird) set in dioramas in one corner of the large and varied visitor attraction.
Fortunately for us, we have relatives who live near the park, so we began the day looking out at the bitterly cold February rain over Bewdley and decided that we could definitely put off the pre-booked trip until the afternoon when it would still be cold enough to be vaguely thematic but the rain might have eased off a bit. So we watched the animated "Ice Age" film in the warm instead, and that was much better than trying to go round the safari park in the aftermath of Storm Dennis.
When we arrived at the park we were already thinking about lunch and we were disappointed that the "Pancakes and Waffles" kiosk at the entrance was actually just an ice-cream take-away which offered defrosted mini-pancakes/waffles as sprinkles on your sundae. The Ice Age attraction wasn't actually on the giant pictorial park map there either, which alarmed us until we realised that the map is a lot older than the zone is and the Ice Age part is in fact the very first themed area you see on the left past the penguins.
You enter the Ice Age area past a giant Smilodon (not a British History animal, but an attractive signpost that would get guest happiness points in 'Zoo Tycoon') and across a long flat wooden bridge into a giant fibreglass volcano. The bridge is wheelchair accessible and has various signs trying to orientate you in geological time, which were all too high up and too boring for Kane as he could see a pathway into a giant fibreglass volcano.
You pass through the volcano, which has perspex panels over 'lava' in the floor and cut away walls with various coloured lights behind ("is that supposed to be blue lava, Mummy?") and onto a raised boardwalk between Giant Mammals of the Ice Age. The volcano is a miracle of line-of-sight theme park design work as it is not only a dramatic entrance to the Ice Age zone but looks lovely in the distance from the next-door "Land of the Living Dinosaurs" static/animatronic zone. The Giant Mammals began with an impressively large proto-rhino straight from the film we watched that morning and the equally gigantic giraffe/sloth/elephant and frankly terrifying giraffe/sloth/zebra (these all vastly predate humans and so are out of my remit). I was impressed that they had gone to the trouble of upholstering all the models in thick fur, which probably looks better when it hasn't been rained on all morning (though to be fair, soggy manky fur is realistic).
Turning the corner you realise that Ice Age is quite a small area as such things go - there is a very short uphill loop on your left to do Animals of the Americas (basically Smilodon, Giant Sloth, Glyptodon armadillo-thing) and the main diorama of "Northern Europe" as the path continues to the right. You need to do the mini-loop as there are signs telling you to beware of the Smilodon so it is important to find it! As with the model dinosaur exhibit, there are occasional perspex tubes with real or replica fossils relevant to the models, and next to the Smilodon there is an interesting outdoor exhibit showing how its replica skull is different to that of a lion.
Northern Europe is the area we came for! A (small) herd of mammoths, a cave bear, lion, woolly rhino and .....a Dire Wolf which lived only in the Americas. Anyway, moving on (a phrase I think I may be saying a lot on these trips) we were able to have a good viewing here before Kane rushed on into the next area (a tunnel decorated by Ice Age humans forming the way out). I was impressed by the range of mammoth models, although unfortunately both tusks of the largest one right at the front were hanging down exposing internal struts, which was a great shame in such a newly-built area. Charitably, it was possibly the sort of damage that visitors might do if they ignored the barriers, went into the diorama and swung from the tusks, so it might have been very recent. The whole area took about twenty minutes to look at including my efforts at impromptu lecturing - you could get back out in five if you were walking briskly.
After Ice Age we went round the Land of the Living Dinosaurs and to the main restaurant (dinosaur-themed) for lunch. Sadly the food looked better than it tasted - the red pepper and hummus bloomer sandwich was beautifully tied up with string (why?) but wasn't fully defrosted and the children's lunch box was slightly more unhealthy than usual including a Vimto-flavoured jelly which was so strange-tasting that none of us could finish it. Fortunately, we had brought along our own entertainment from home in the form of a 1970s plastic woolly mammoth and Smilodon which I had owned as a child and which had been lovingly preserved for decades in case of future grandchildren. Unfortunately, during the time in storage they had contracted plastic fatigue, so the Smilodon conclusively won the epic battle by breaking the leg off the mammoth. Fortunately, no-one cried.
After lunch we looked at the hippos (I was impressed) and then drove my car around the actual safari part, which is a set of fields covering a hill with Jurassic-Park like fences and gates separating one group of free-ranging animals from another. The cheetahs, some rare deer, some sheep and two sets of tigers are in cages within the safari area which you drive alongside but you are in-amongst the lions - two crossed the road right in front of us, which was an interesting test of how close I was willing to drive a car containing my son to a lion (not very close at all, it turns out). There are also elephants, two types of rhino (all subtly segregated from the road by ditches and flat electric fences), painted dogs and dholes (foxes) and very many herds of deer/antelope/etc. As the park was quiet this was a great time to do the safari and we were able to stop and look as much as we wanted and got some great views of cheetah, rhino and elephant in particular.
Kane was not especially interested to learn that all these animals could be found in southern Britain during an interglacial period 125,000 years ago or to discuss how one might bring down a rhino/lion/elephant to eat if you had a spear rather than a car (the trick is to use a cliff, pit or swamp), but all the car doors were locked so he was a captive audience.
We had a long drive home from the park so in the car we listened to a CD of some of the "Littlenose" stories that I had read out and recorded (I'm pretty sure you can buy actual recordings of these but I didn't think of that until it was too late/I'm used to reading these stories out loud anyway so it wasn't a big change in my routine to tape them).
On the way back we stopped in the motorway services for a meal and had a look at the first pages of the first scrapbook for the project. Kane was actually very interested in these and the idea that we would write our own 'history books' together as we went along. We ate paninis and talked about the novel concept that modern humans had evolved from older versions of humans all the way back to our common ancestor with chimpanzees, looked at a timeline showing how tiny the whole of written history is compared to the distance between now and the first trace of humans in Britain (which I had put as the Happisburgh footprints at 900,000BC) and discussed Neanderthals "like Littlenose and his family". I had left blank pages to add in photos from this Ice Age trip before the next day out.
I was pleased with this day - from the film to the scrapbooks we fitted in an awful lot of Ice Age content (and other stuff!) and I think a reasonable amount of it went in. I didn't expect Kane to be able to retain dates or the complexities of periodic glaciation but I think that by the end of the day he was familiar with basic Ice Age megafauna and the idea that early forms of human lived alongside them and hunted them to eat, which is a great start for the next trip...to Cresswell Crags, next month.
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