See life at the SEALIFE centre (Sealife Centre (Scarborough))

Member Name: werewolf2

Product:	Sealife Centre (Scarborough)
Date:	27/06/09 (98 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: 2 for 1 offers on a lot

Disadvantages: parking quite high to pay if only staying a morning or afternoon

Scarborough Sea Life Centre is well worth a visit - we had a 2 for 1 offer from Tesco's and I have recently seen a similar offer on a particular brand of tea bags. I often seen voucher of a similar nature in The Mirror Newspaper and have seen The Sun advertising vouchers of this nature too.

Price:
It costs £12.95 per adult, £11.95 for concessions, under 5''s go free, and children have a cheaper rate, which I do not remember as it wasn't applicable to our group. (Prices were for October 2008).

Parking:
We had to pay for 3 hours parking, which was about £3.50. I found this to be quite high, if you only planned to stay at the centre for a few hours. However there is plenty to see and do at the centre and you could easily stay all day. As we'd planned to go somewhere else on this day, it did turn out to be a little expensive and so we were glad we'd got the 2 for 1 offer.

Things to do:
When you get inside there are lots of exhibits of fish, sea horses and sharks. There is plenty to do for children - as they have a sheet they give out and you have to answer questions as you go round the centre. These have multiple answers and you have to guess the correct one.

In addition, they often have talks about star fish or crabs in the rock pool area and you get the chance to hold some of these items, if you are lucky.

What animals can I see:
They also have penguins, seals and otters, which if you arrive at the right time you can see the handlers feeding them and they give you a talk about each particular breed. We were lucky enough to see the otters and seals being fed. Some of these talks are repeated during the day as some of the animals need feeding twice during the daytime.

We missed the penguins talk as it wasn't for another 1/2 hour and we were getting cold and one member of our group was getting bored - because we'd promised him he could go to somewhere he'd prefer and he was champing at the bit to get there!

Other Faciliites:
The centre has an excellent cafe facility, which unfortunately is upstairs and when accessed at the end of the tour is up 2 flights of stairs. Michelle and I managed to carry Mark's push chair up (with him in it), but there is a stair lift for wheelchair users from the shop, which you need to get assistance with. The staff in the shop or at reception will be able to help with this.

I was impressed with the food and drink available from this cafe - as I am on a wheat free diet I can not usually find anything I can eat but they had a fantastic range of flapjack and other items I could choose from. Prices were pretty reasonable too.

The Sealife centre is not near the shops at Scarborough so you'd either need to take your own food and eat it outside or use the cafe. There was a small hut near the icecream cabin, where you could sit and eat too.

The toilets (downstairs near reception) had pictures of otters, seals, etc on them and were extremely clean. I thought the pictures idea was brilliant in the ladies, but don't know what pictures were in the mens.

I was also impressed that there seemed to be wheelchair routes around the centre. For wheelchair users to get to the cafe just go out of the sea life area into the shop and ask for assistance to use the stair lift.

Werewolf2

Summary: great day out for all the family