Essex Archives ⋆ Page 19 of 22 ⋆ Jupiter & Dann

A Day Out at Weald Country Park

Posted on December 16, 2020July 8, 2024 by Dann Sullivan

Jupiter really loves deer. She grew up in a small town that had a lot of deer, deer hunting, and often just wild deer wandering about. As we have been going on more creative date nights, due to most things being shut, I surprised her with a trip to Weald Country Park – which ended up being so popular, that we went back with the kids. This time of year is when all of the deer are out, making it a perfect wintertime activity. Weald Country Park is free to enter – although if you park nearby you’ll need to pay for the car park – and contains a few different park areas, trails, a pond, deer and a cafe.

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Picking out our Christmas Tree at Christmas Wrapped Up | Day Out

Posted on December 6, 2020January 30, 2025 by Dann Sullivan

As a part of creating new traditions with our family, we decided to go to the same Christmas Tree farm as last year: Christmas Wrapped Up. We ended up spending the afternoon picking out a tree. There is something so special about being able to walk around a plot of trees, taking a look at each one before picking out the one you want – as I said before, last year was the first time that the children got to do it, so this year it was still incredibly new to them. As you might expect, trees are all quite different, although we went with a very specific tree in mind, something that was big and would fill up our living room. After clearing some space in our home and getting all of our decorations together, we set off.

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A Day Out at Christmas Wonderland at Lakeside

Posted on December 4, 2020July 8, 2024 by Jupiter

When we heard that Winter Wonderland in London was cancelled this year, we were pretty sad. Dann and I always make a journey to the lovely Winter Wonderland, enjoying all of the foods, rides, and more. Despite it being cancelled, Christmas Wonderland is taking place at Lakeside, and although it isn’t as big, it does have ice skating! I love ice skating so much, it’s something I’ve always done. As a young kid, when ponds would freeze over, everyone would get their skates and ice skate along them, playing games of hockey or just hanging out. It’s a lovely time, so when Dann surprised me with the tickets to go ice skating, I was pretty pumped.

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A Day Out at Marsh Farm Halloween Festival

Posted on October 27, 2020November 14, 2024 by Dann Sullivan

We returned to Marsh Farm, where we had previously gone to pick pumpkins, for their annual Halloween Festival – an impressive event which has a lot more going on than any of us expected.

Even though the days seem to be getting shorter, and the temperature keeps dropping, it’s more important than ever to make sure that you get out of the house when you can. We’d already travelled to pick pumpkins at Marsh Farm’s impressive Pumpkin Village earlier in the month, and while there we noticed that there was actually much more to the place than a village shop and extremely well laid-out and decorated pumpkin patch. We spotted an entryway reminiscent of theme park booths, and what looked like a carousel. We had to go back and see the whole thing – so we set a day aside and headed there on a quiet Sunday.

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A Day Out at Hatter’s Farm

Posted on October 26, 2020January 30, 2025 by Dann Sullivan

In the continued spirit of October, we made our way to Hatter’s Farm, an activity-clad farm which we’d occasionally spotted signs for while heading to the next city over. It had been the Corn (Maize) Maze that had originally caught our eyes – as there aren’t too many of them around this way, but it turned out that they actually had a couple of things going on beyond the opportunity to get lost in a field.

Corn Maze

I’d never actually been to a Corn Maze before, and neither had the kids (although, Jupiter, being from the United States, had been in dozens), so it was a really cool experience to finally manage to get along to one. It sounds really silly, but it’s very bizarre being dwarfed by corn, although the farm staff had done a great job of cutting wide paths through the field. Rather than just being a maze cut from crops there were also nine signposts which, together, served as an anagram for a mystery word. It gave an extra reason to explore all of the dead ends, which was welcome. The place was a bit muddy, with small feet getting stuck here and there!

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