After months of thinking about this wheel and never doing anything about it, I thought it was finally time to get my act together and make the trip up to York and try it for myself.

We couldnt have asked for better weather although cold the skies were blue and there was no sign of any rain. Admission costs are £6 per adult, £4 for children with under 4’s free, you can also hire a pirvate “VIP” pod with tinted windows and a DVD sound system (some people have more money than sense), they say on busy days you could be sat in a pod with strangers but today it was busy (for a Saturday in Jan) and we sat on our own with most pods containing 2 or 3 people. Queue time approx 20 minutes. Im sure it gets mad in the summer

Well I suppose we all knew it was coming, yep another theme park in the UK has closed down. I was going to make this a trip report but considering whats happened recently its more a fond look back at the park in its final year of operation in 2006.

We visited the park in the height of summer last year and it was very quiet considering the time of the year. One of the ride ops mentioned they normally get about 600 people through the gates during the summer raising to 2000 on a very busy day. It was dead when we visited and you can see by the photographs it was a glorious day.

The park first opened in 1985 and was owned by a few companies the final one been Venture World Ltd.

Having heard nothing but good things about Oakwood we decided to take the 5 hour journey to south wales in the summer of 2006. We visited for the weekend leaving on Friday afternoon with the intention of visiting Oakwood on the Satrurday and Folly Farm on the Sunday. We stayed just outside Tenby in a Travel Lodge which was central to both attractions and cheap.

Unfortunately for us and other visitors to Oakwood this was the wettest day of the year by far and we ended up completely soaked through to the skin within about 1 hour of arriving at the park and we still had another 9 hours until the park was closed.