Playing Pokemon Go at Center Parcs, Whinfell Forest

It might have been the craze of the summer, but Pokemon Go is still alive and well in our house. My husband and I each play on our phones and enjoy some healthy competition, and the children help us along by taking over our phones when we go out as a family. We've just returned from a short break at Center Parcs Whinfell Forest, and while we were there we had a lot of fun family time catching Pokemon together in the forest.

My sister works at Center Parcs Woburn and told me that there weren't many Pokestops there, so I wasn't sure what to expect when it came to Pokemon hunting at Whinfell Forest. I found an article from the Center Parcs website which suggested that the other parks might be better, but I couldn't find any detailed information about the different locations, so I thought I'd share my experiences of catching Pokemon at Center Parcs, Whinfell.

Fortunately, it was very positive! Our lodge was in a fairly central location, and this was the view from my bedroom. The yellow gym on the left is in the Village Centre, and you can see how the Pokestops are frequent, and located all the way along the main paths.

Like all Pokestops, they mark a point of interest, and they are often things that you might otherwise have missed. There are various owl markers around the park which are Pokestops, and they also drew our attention to different carved animals, sculptures and other interesting things. You can plan some nice walks taking in lots of them at once. There were also about four or five Gyms around the park, generally low level gyms that were easy to fight in and take over. One of them stumped us for a while as we couldn't work out how to access it, I suspect that it may be located in a staff only area, but I managed to get my Pokemon in by standing right up next to a wall and reloading the app until it put me down near enough to get in!

It's easy to get absorbed in your device when playing, and although it's probably safer to play on the site than out by a road, you do need to keep an eye out as there are occasional vehicles, and also plenty of bikes trying to get past that you need to watch out for. It felt a lot safer going out at night to play than roaming the streets at home, so my husband and I went for several late night walks around the forest, it's generally well lit as long as you keep to the paths. It's a safe enough environment that older children could be sent out on their own and roam about for hours, never actually being that far away from their villa.

It's a great incentive to get the children out and about for a walk in the forest and to explore the whole site. Because we only have two phones between us we have to share them, so there are always two people looking about and enjoying the surroundings. I've never played Pokemon Go on a bike, but I imagine that even if you can't catch the Pokemon as you are cycling it would be great for racking up the distances for hatching eggs and collecting buddy candies. There are lots of flat, even paths for walking and cycling.

There were plenty of Pokemon around to catch, and being quite far from our usual Pokemon catching locations there was a good amount of variety for us.

We were lucky enough to be at Center Parcs for some of the Pokemon Go Halloween Event, where there were lots of opportunities to collect extra candy. This meant that a lot of the Pokemon about for the majority of our stay were the Halloween themed ones. But before the event started, we noticed that in particular there were a lot of Nidoran, Clefairy, Eevee and Caterpie, as well as the usual Pidgey, Weedle and Rattata that you find all over the place. Around the lake in the middle there were plenty of Magikarp and Poliwag, with the occasional Dratini (check by the Pancake House!).

So if you are heading to Center Parcs Whinfell and want to spend time out and about playing Pokemon Go it's a great place for it!