Potters Resort – A ★★★★★ Seaside Weekend
Potters Resort | Coast Rd, Hopton, Great Yarmouth NR31 9BX | 2 night breaks from around £239pp
W-O-W! What a weekend at Potters Resort in Norfolk, an unforgettable weekend away from London!
Potters is a great place to unwind, eat delicious food, watch top entertainment & get active – all included in the cost of the break.
From the moment we got in our taxi from Lowestoft station, with chatty Iranian taxi driver Dana, we truly felt we were on an adventure. Dana warned us that we were a little below the average age of a Potters Resort visitor, but we soon discovered Potters Resort is for everyone; lucky singles, romantic couples, active families & fun-filled groups of friends.
We knew that Potters was the home of the World Indoor Bowls Championships, so we were expecting to spend the weekend channeling our inner octogenarian – but this was no crosswords and Countdown fest! Instead, days of golf, segway-racing and swimming, followed by evenings of nerve-wracking bingo, top-notch entertainment and dancing into the small hours.
We were blown away by the love and care the staff at Potters show for their guests, and by the amazing quality of food, accommodation & activities all around the resort. Big shout outs go to Mark Brewer, Buzzby, Emma who served us in the restaurant, and the hilarious Rachel Baade who was our Oscar winners quiz host.
Food & Drink
As we arrived at around 4.30pm we had only one thing on our minds: food! At Potters, you’re assigned a table for your whole stay – and you’re served all the food you could possibly eat at breakfast, lunch, dinner & even a midnight snack, all included in the price. The food in the Gallery Restaurant was a treat every time we visited, with a great mix of help-yourself buffet and a la carte dining.
Highlight: We’re rather partial to a carvery, so our Saturday night meal of Norfolk turkey, orange infused stuffing & all the trimmings was a delight. Plus the ribs & pasta bake we had as a midnight snack really hit the spot!
Accommodation
We stayed in the hotel four-poster suite and loved the proximity to the main resort attractions like the Atlas Theatre & the Gallery Restaurant. The room was homey in feel and had a little living room set up with the most ULTRA HD television we’d ever seen. The Hunger Games looked so eye-poppingly clear when we watched that we thought it looked like a documentary filmed on a HD camcorder!
Highlight: Realising that we weren’t supposed to put soap bubbles in whilst the jacuzzi bath was on full. We nearly caused a bubble flood!
Entertainment
You might have experienced holiday resort entertainment before, so your expectations might be low – a smutty late-night comedian, perhaps, or a cruise ship crooner, or maybe even an end-of-the-pier magic act. Potters Resort offers entertainment at a much higher level – the Potters Theatre Company performed two excellent shows during our stay, with choreography and staging worthy of a touring theatre production, and performances – both singing and dancing – that wouldn’t be out-of-place on the West End stage!
The Friday night show, Cool Britannia, knocked our socks off – a non-stop romp through some of the greatest British music across the last six decades, which climaxes with a barnstorming Bond-theme medley.
Highlight: Cool Britannia is a new show for 2016, and it’s 1 1/2 hours of pure gold entertainment from the resident Potters Theatre Company.
Activities
Potters Resort ay be the home of bowls, but that’s just one of MANY activities available to fill your day – in fact, there’s so much to do, we don’t know how anyone had any energy for the late-night rock’n’roll dancing!
Where should we start? The 9-hole pitch and putt golf course is a fun but challenging way to start the day, but the sea view and fresh air makes up for the futile hacking around in the rough – and, a short stroll away is the Segway course, not too challenging but a great place for your first off-road Segway adventure. There are bowls rinks galore, inside and out, and a chance to try out rally cart racing, so both ends of the adrenaline spectrum are covered. If shooting is your thing (don’t worry, no live targets), you can give the air rifles a try or get futuristic with the laser rifles. And if the jacuzzi bath isn’t enough for you, there are two heated indoor swimming pools, to wallow in or do lengths, whatever floats your boat.
If you’re not feeling sporty – or you were feeling sporty but now you’re knackered – there are several quizzes to work out your brain cells. We stormed the Oscar winners quiz, winning a bottle of sparkling perry in the process.
And if all else fails, you can try your luck on the fruit machines and penny slots – some of the machines let you win tokens that can be spent in the shop…
Highlight: All of the above, but especially the moment number 62 came up in the sixth game of bingo on Saturday night – WE WON!
I am Joint Editor at To Do List. I like free, cheap & offbeat London, especially: cabaret, art, theatre, pop-ups, eating out, quirky films, museums, day trips, social enterprise & much more.
