Places to go and see in York #2

Today I visited one of York's premier tourist attractions. My destination was a place which I have never before visited. It was also a place that involves time travelling and odours. Can you guess where it is yet?

Today I went to the Yorvik Viking Center. This is a place that quite literally takes you back to the time of the vikings and lets you experience their lives, loves and smells. After you've paid your £7.20 entrance fee to the little man who doesn't let you have a discount, even though you have a brand new York Card, because it's the "wrong time of year", you go down some stairs and enter the Time Machine. If I'm honest, it's not the best example of a time machine I've ever seen. But unlike the Tardis, it has plenty of seats and unlike Marty McFly's DeLorean, it has plenty of seats and unlike HG Wells' Time Machine it has plenty of seats.

Our trip back in time lasted only a few minutes, and we did experience a small amount of Time Turbulence. But apparently if you stand or sit at the side of the Time Machine, you don't experience this turbulence. Probably because there's a special damping field or something. As we passed back in time, we witnessed High Ousegate and its inhabitants moving back with us. This was a bit strange because the Time Machine wasn't on High Ousegate. I'm guessing that they must have achieved this effect with a complicated series of mirrors.

Anyway, eventually we made it back to Viking times, and we left the Time Machine and got into a new mode of transport which was to take us around Viking era York. This was rather like the cars on Nemesis at Alton Towers, but a bit slower and with less foot danglage. I was a little confused by this because the car appeared to be powered by electricity and I didn't think they had electricity in Viking era York. This clearly shows how badly educated I am! I can definitely state here and now, that having seen things with my own eyes, the Vikings did have electricity!

So the car took us on a little drive round the town centre, and I saw some blacksmithery and some cup-making and a man in a Viking-style toilet cubicle. We went up Coppergate, which in those days was a thriving shopping street. Much like it is now in fact except that they hadn't built The Coppergate Centre back then.

Eventually we found ourselves back in the present day. I'm not quite sure how this happened as we didn't get back in The Time Machine. Maybe I fell asleep for 1000 years or something. However it happened, I was home and relieved to have survived the experience relatively unscathed.

Overall, I found the experience slightly underwhelming, and slightly short at under 20 minutes (I will of course retract this comment if it turns out I was actually in there for 1000 years and twenty minutes). Possibly this is what happens when you've been waiting around 20 years to go somewhere. It's always going to be hard to meet the expectations that can build up over that length of time. But on the plus side, there were no queues.

Yorvik Viking Centre
Time spent in attraction: 18 minutes
Does it have a bar? No
Fun: 4/10
Suitable for a rainy day? Yes