Scooting at Dorney Lake {The Ordinary Moments}

Welcome back to another week of the Ordinary Moments. If you haven’t joined in before this is a weekly linky that launches every Sunday morning and is open until midnight on the following Saturday. It’s a linky that celebrates any ordinary moments in your life – or the not so ordinary some weeks too. Basically – anything goes. I’ll be sharing and commenting on the posts that are linked up during the week and there’s a badge at the bottom of the post if you’d like to add it to yours too.

The children got new scooters for Christmas and we’ve been looking for somewhere where they can scoot easily and safely for an extended period of time. Many country park paths are too rough to scoot well on and we wanted to go somewhere where they could scoot happily for an hour or so. After some searching online I found Dorney Lake at Eton Dorney which looked perfect.

Dorney Lake is about half an hour from us in Dorney, Buckinghamshire near Windsor and is privately owned and financed by Eton College. It’s home to the Eton College Rowing Centre and was used as an Olympic venue in the 2012 Summer Olympics when it was used for Olympic rowing. The lake is mostly used for rowing, canoeing, dragon boating, open water swimming and triathlon but it also has a 5km tarmaced path around the edge which is perfect for running, cycling and scooting.

We parked easily in one of the lake’s two pay and display car parks. It costs a flat rate of £2.50 to park for the day. We were there a stone’s throw from the lake and made our way to the path to start our adventure.

The path around Dorney Lake is amazing. Honestly, I have never come across anywhere with such good quality paths. The children were in their element at being able to scoot happily with minimal obstacles and just making sure they kept to one side of the path.

We did get lulled into a false sense of security though as we walked and scooted happily down one side of the rowing lake and when we came back down the other side the wind was so strong and so cold. It was definitely much harder for the children to scoot the last leg of the trip but as it was so flat it wasn’t as hard as it would have been – and on a calmer weather day or in the spring and summer it wouldn’t be an issue.

At the head of the lake the Eton College Rowing Club building stands proudly with a row of jetties outside for rowers to start from. The building is also a conference centre and has toilets and refreshments available although we brought our own.

Dorney Lake is set within a 400 acre site of parkland and arboretum and there are many storyboards to read and learn from dotted around as you explore as well as sculptures to look at. We stuck to the path so didn’t get to explore much but we’ll save that for another day. We loved watching the water sports and stopped during our walk for a hot chocolate pit stop too!

We thought Dorney Lake was a fantastic place to scoot and definitely a bit of a hidden gem as it’s somewhere we hadn’t known existed until a few weeks ago. I’m sure we’ll be back soon – and Dave’s even decided he’ll be running there with the children when the weather’s brighter.

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If you have an ordinary moment this week, come and link up – I’m looking forward to reading the moments that you share and will comment and share them on Twitter through the course of the week. Thanks so much for taking part.