Summertime is the perfect time to make the best family memories. The kids are off from school, and I don’t know about you, but we love to take these laid-back months to plan lots of family fun. Like most kids, mine love Sesame Street characters and were so excited to spend the day having some family fun together at Sesame Place in Langhorne, PA.
We live in Central PA and the park is about 100 miles from our house. It was a bit of a hike, but well worth it to spend the entire day playing together. Sesame Place is only 30 minutes from Philadelphia and 90 minutes from New York City. It’s a very doable day trip from lots of locations in the PA, DE, MD, NJ, and NY states.
There’s a huge parking lot adjacent to the park and you have to pay a minimum of $15 to park. You can pay a little more for preferred parking that gets you closer to the attractions, but we were happy to walk a few extra feet and save our money. You do have to cross the busy street the cars enter the park on to get from the main parking lot to the park, but there are crosswalks and it’s totally safe.
You can find current admission prices here. Seniors and AAA members get a little discount, and children 23 months and younger are free. I love that! It’s rough paying full price to get a child that age into a park only to have them fall asleep in the stroller. My favorite admission deal, though, is their Elmo’s Any 2-Day Ticket. This currently costs $57.99 (+tax), which is the same price as a one-day pass. With this 2-day pass, you can come back any other day during the season for free! It’s almost like a buy-one-get-one deal! Awesome, right? And nowhere else are you going to find the real Sesame Street for your kids to play on. Seriously, it’s like walking into the TV show. The kids love it and seeing their faces light up when Elmo came dancing down the road was pretty darn cool. Plus the rides were awesome. We loved the water attractions the most! More on that in a bit! If you are close enough that you’d hit the park more than once per summer, definitely get a season pass. It more than pays for itself on your second visit. This is a great gift idea for the grandparents or other friends and family that buy gifts for your kids. Being able to go to Sesame Place together all summer is much better than more toys, right?!
You are permitted to bring a small (10″x12″x12″) cooler into the park. Basically you can’t pack your meals and bring them in, but you’re welcome to bring drinks and snacks. We took waters and a few bags of pretzels, crackers, and grapes. It was enough to tide the kids over between meals and it was HOT the day we went, so the water was much needed. As soon as we got into the park we rented a locker. We paid $19 for it and they gave us the key so we had unlimited access. I like that as opposed to paying with quarters every time you want to access your stuff. When we returned the key we got $4 back. The lockers are big enough that we stuffed our little cooler and a bag of our clothes and towels into it, plus my pretty big camera case. Not gimormous, but plenty big enough if you pack smart.
After that we hit the rides! Water rides were up first since it was a total scorcher that day. Hands down the entire family’s favorite ride was the Sky Splash. This is an awesome tube ride that up to 6 people can fit in. The tube spins and swirls down the slide (that’s waaaay high up in the sky), traveling through little water falls, bumps, and other fun surprises (not the least of which were the awesome lifeguards that splashed and laughed with our kids). The final drop down the slide is a big one and I wish I had pictures of my kids’ faces. They loved it!
We also enjoyed Big Bird’s Rambling River where we all got to float along in tubes together. Probably the most crowded and wettest attraction was the Count’s Splash Castle. My daughter and husband had fun getting seriously soaked, going down the big slides together and standing under a giant bucket of water that the Count dumped on the crowd every few minutes. Although it was crowded there, there were plenty of areas around the perimeter to hang out with littler kids who weren’t quite ready for the bigger attractions. My son and I had fun splashing around in the shallow water and we did find one smaller slide to go down together.
When we had our fill of the water rides we hit the changing rooms in one of the restrooms to get our dry clothes on and try out some of the dry rides. Oddly enough I think the ‘ride’ my kids like the most was Cookie Mountain. They were both able to climb it and giggle the enter way down, sliding toward the ground. My daughter is 6 and a master climber. She had a blast in the Nets ‘n’ Climbs attraction. It didn’t go so well for my son who is only 3 and got his foot stuck a time or two. Good thing my husband was with him to get him out of there safely. We hit up a couple more rides before it started getting late and the kids were totally worn out. We went back to the lockers, grabbed our stuff, and hit the road.
It was hot and very busy the day we went, and having worked at an amusement park as a high school and college student, I remember some of the challenges that presents to the staff. We had a great time overall, but did think of a couple of suggestions that might improve the experience. It would be great to have a locker attendant working, or someone to keep an eye on the locker area. There was more than one person that used it as a changing area. They may not have known where else to go and having an employee available to direct them would have been helpful. The other idea we had was to have some more directional signs throughout the park. They have an awesome, detailed map, but you can’t carry that around with you on the water rides. There are a few big maps posted in the park, but no arrows pointing you to different attractions. We ended up missing a couple of water rides because they were tucked in the back section of the park and we didn’t realize they were there until we saw them when we were on the dry rides. I think a few arrows pointing you to some of the major rides would be great!
Our day was a ton of fun and the kids are still talking about it. It’s not infrequently I hear a certain little boy say to me, “We’re going to Sesame Place today, right?” If you’re local to Sesame Place definitely look into taking your family for a visit or purchasing a season pass. It was a great day, a memory-making day. Aren’t those the best?
In an effort to not make this too long, I want to bullet point some of my tips for a great visit. Be sure to check them out before you hit the park!
- Take a small cooler into the park with you. Buying drinks and snacks at the park takes you away from the rides, plus it will cost more than you’d pay bringing it yourself. Freeze your bottles of water before you pack them so they stay cold longer and cool the rest of your snacks. Frozen grapes are perfect, too!
- You can pack lunch and leave it in a cooler in your car. There are picnic tables in both parking lots. Read all the park policies here.
- Wear flip flops or other shoes you can get wet. The park is almost all blacktop and it gets very hot. Unless you’re in one of the pools, wear your shoes. We wore them on the water slides, the river ride, everything we could. There are too many places for little feet to get burned.
- We took 2 towels and didn’t use them. You really don’t need them, so don’t bother with the extra stuff to pack and lug.
- Wear sunblock and bring extra to reapply!
- Spend some time on the Sesame Place website before you go. My kids showed me all the rides they wanted to hit and we got them all while we were there. It helps to have a visual of the park map in your mind’s eye, too. Study it a bit so you have an idea where things are.
- We all wore our bathing suits to the park and brought dry clothes in a bag which we stored in our locker. It worked great and we only had to change once. You can wear your bathing suits all over the park, no need to change for the dry rides!
- If you can, go to the park on a weekday. We went on a Friday when it was about 95 degrees and it was pretty crowded. Not awful, but I do think a Tuesday or Wednesday would be a better day to go.
- The park is the perfect size. You can easily hit all the attractions in one day and you’ll immediately get a feel for how it’s laid out.
- Check out the parade and show schedule before you go. We were able to catch a parade which was SO cool! The kids loved seeing all of their favorite characters live! We didn’t take in a show – too busy on the rides! But they look great too and are a nice way to get a break from the sun and heat.
- Take your camera! There are lots of opportunities to get pictures with the Sesame Street gang and you don’t want to miss a few shots of your kids on the rides.
- HAVE FUN! This goes without saying. How could you not have fun at Sesame Place?
Sesame Place is generously giving one of my readers 4 free tickets to the park so you can create your own memories this summer! This giveaway ends on July 17 at 12 midnight ET. You can enter to win here! Good luck!
I was provided with a complimentary tickets to Sesame Place to facilitate this review. The opinions in this post are 100% mine. You can read my full disclosure policy here.
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