How we score things

We do not say a page is "verified". A destination page here means one thing: a person assembled it against the rubric above, wrote the prose, and looked up the drive time. It does not mean anyone stood in the car park, counted the bathrooms, or ate at the restaurants. Where we have been, the page says so and carries the notes you only get from standing there. So far that is nowhere.

They are not crowd-sourced. There are no user reviews behind these numbers. They are editorial judgements against the rubric above, which means they are consistent but they are one point of view.

They are derived, not measured. The sub-scores were assembled from an underlying guide plus a hand-authored overlay. They have not each been re-checked against a fresh visit.

Some of these facts are sourced and some are not, and each page tells you which. Every attraction price links to the operator's own page. Restaurant details and temperature ranges link to nothing: they came from the guide this site was built on and have not been re-checked since. Where a destination has a "Watch out for" note, every factual clause in it is quoted from the source linked underneath - and 29 of our 38 destinations have no such note at all. That means we looked and published nothing, not that there is nothing to know.

Anything that can change carries the month we last checked it. At the foot of every destination page there is a short table - what we checked, where it came from, and when. Where it says "not yet", nobody has looked yet, and we would rather write that down than leave you to assume. Whether a place is still open we re-check yearly, prices yearly, opening hours twice a year, restaurants every two years; a scheduled job tells us what has come due, so the table is a record of work rather than an intention. Still open is a separate line from the price because more than half the attractions here are free, and a free place has no price for us to look up - so nothing would have told us it had gone.

"Recommended stay" is a judgement about the place, not about your trip. It answers one question - how many days of things to do are here - and deliberately ignores how far away it is, because the drive time is quoted separately and you are better placed than we are to decide whether a long drive is worth two days. The low end assumes a brisk pace, the high end a child's. Like the scores, it is one point of view rather than a measurement.

"Best for ages" is the same kind of judgement. It is our reading of what a place has to offer a child, from the attraction mix - the low end is where it starts being worth the trip, the high end is where a child starts being bored. It is not advice about your child, who you know and we do not.

Drive times are looked up, not estimated. Each one is a single routing-engine lookup from the hub to the destination, stored and republished unchanged. They assume clear roads: no traffic, and no seasonal closure. Where we have checked and found a closure, a tide, a ticketing rule or a traffic pattern that could ruin the trip, the destination page says so. Where the page says nothing, it means we did not find one - not that there is nothing to know.