Travel Guides Family Friendly Amusement Parks
Maddie Brown
Theme parks offer visitors the opportunity to step inside fictional worlds while enjoying a good thrill. From Disney World’s Magic Kingdom to Six Flags Great Adventure, parks often create rides and rollercoasters inspired by beloved pop-culture characters. But that’s not the only direction a park can go in. Take Hershey Park, for example, which is focused on candy. Or Legoland, which revolves around legos. And then there’s Diggerland — an amusement park that’s all about construction.
Diggerland USA, which opened in 2014, is located in West Berlin, New Jersey. While the park contains attractions for all ages, it caters to youngsters in particular. At this special site, kids get hands-on experience with various types of actual machinery. You may be asking: How is this possible? Well, the owners of Diggerland worked with construction equipment manufacturers to develop models that are safe and child friendly. These safety features include an auto shut-off for motors and rollover protection for cabs. The tracks are also fixed in place, preventing users from roaming freely.
Driving, riding, and operating machinery aren’t the only adventures visitors can partake in at Diggerland. There is also a water park that’s open during the summer, for example. So, what can visitors expect when going to Diggerland? What kinds of rides and activities does the amusement park provide?
Visitors can control excavators and drive construction vehicles
Kelleher Photography/Shutterstock
Diggerland features a ton of unique attractions that can make you feel like a construction worker. At the Lumberjack Claw, visitors get to operate a log loader, an apparatus that sorts timber. At the Mini Dig: Shapes attraction, users can maneuver the arm of a mini-excavator to lift and release objects into holes. There are several other variations of a “dig”: Big Diggers, Mini Dig: Bowlers, Mini Dig: Ducks, and Superdigs. With a 7,092 pound excavator, Big Diggers is a huge step up from Mini Dig (and is always supervised be a professional). Mini Dig: Bowlers and Mini Dig: Ducks bring balls and floating ducks, respectively, into the mix. Superdigs is a great activity for tinier tots, as it uses a miniature excavator for diggers under 36 inches in height. Visitors can also drive construction vehicles, like dumper trucks and tractors. Then, there are rides like the Dig-A-Round carousel and the Spin Dizzy that are modeled after machinery.
The theme park also has an area just for adults. While the main Diggerland park offers family-friend adventures, Diggerland XL is designed for visitors over the age of 18. There, adults receive individual direction from heavy machinery foremen while operating an excavator, a dozer, or a wheel loader. The equipment is massive, weighing up to 53,000 pounds!
Diggerland also has pools and slides
In addition to providing construction-themed rides and activities, Diggerland has a variety of attractions at their waterpark, The Water Main. One such attraction is the Carpool Lane, an obstacle course where guests travel across the pool by utilizing floats and grabbing onto ropes. In the middle of the course, water sprinkles down from overhead cranes. Visitors can also get their splash on at the Jackhammer Bay playground, where construction tool-inspired creations, like jackhammers, squirt water. And of course, there are plenty of pools and slides for a classic waterpark experience. The Water Main uses clever names to identify its pools, like the Claw Hammer Cove and the Bulldozer Bay.
Just like the construction area of Diggerland, parents must stay with their children at The Water Main. Many of the attractions have set a minimum height requirement that ranges from 36 to 42 inches, depending on the activity. But some attractions, like the Bulldozer Bay wading pool, are open for youngsters who aren’t tall enough for certain sites. With its waterpark and construction-themed activities, Diggerland offers a one-of-a-kind experience. An Instagram post from Diggerland USA says it best: “The only place in the U.S. you can glide down a water slide and pick up the controls of a crane the same day.”
