A Grand Day Out : Howletts Animal Park

Apologies in the delay in me posting, the lurgy decended upon our house this weekend so I have not been up for doing much of anything! Now back to your regularly scheduled programming  ...

We decided to go to Howletts Animal Park in Canterbury for Nana's birthday and I thought I'd share the experience in case you fancied it. 

I bought the tickets online prior to going as you get a 10% discount, so adult tickets were £18.85 each and the babies were fee (woohoo). Another benefit of buying the ticket online prior to visiting is that you don't need to queue! There is a separate line for online bookings, you just show your code and off you go! 

There is a big variety of animals in the sanctuary, I would say predominantly monkeys/gorillas but also elephants, bison, tigers, leopards and some more obscure animals too! Tom enjoyed looking at the animals but found it hard to make out some of the smaller and more camouflaged ones so we didn't dwell on them for too long. The best moment for me was Tom saying 'hello' for the first time, and it was to a gorilla! 

All of Howletts is pushchair/wheelchair friendly, I didn't have any problems with mine and it's a big mother! There were also baby change facilities available, they weren't the most luxurious but a means to an end, and they were clean so I can't complain! 

We had lunch on site, visiting a canteen type cafe in which some of us had burger type food and others had jacket potato/pasta type dishes. They were child friendly, providing a decent baby seat. I would consider it unremarkable but not unpleasant. It wasn't an issue as we weren't there for the food! We did stop for an ice cream which was really nice, they had speciality flavours such as haribo or marshmallow, I had the marshmallow and it was lush! And the ice cream was reasonable value for money and a generous portion! 

Overall, we had a really good day out. Tom definitely  enjoyed himself, and it was great that you could get really quite close to some of the animals. It would be great to have more big animals but that would be for Tom's perspective. From mine, I really enjoyed the little monkeys, they were so sweet! A few of the animals had babies and it was adorable to see mamas and babies in nature.

I would definitely recommend a visit if you are in the area, just pre book your tickets!