Where to Wednesday: Best Playground of 2009
Its a cold dreary day and I’m searching for ideas of the best local place to go with the kids today. Fortunately, this is probably the best time to look, as “Best of 2009″ lists are all over the place. So I hopped onto the internet to find out what the folks on the world wide web thought the best playground is in Sacramento. Sure enough, this question has been asked and answered to readers of Sacramento News and Review. According to this magazine, the best playground can be found in McKinley Park.
What would the “best park” contain, you ask? This one really lives up to its reputation. There is a library, a local pool, tennis courts, basketball courts, a beautiful rose
garden, tons of big, shady trees, lots of picnic tables, a small lake (or is it a big pond?) with an amazing variety of ducks and geese. All I was really interested in, though, was a decent playground. Here again, there was no disappointment. Created by a community collaborative, this playground is castle-like with enough long raised walkways, bridges, and ladders to entertain any school-aged kid who has been house-bound by cold weather. It is made mostly of wood, which blends in with the park quite nicely. The amount of thought and detail behind it is obvious. For example, since much of the structure includes play areas above ground, one space below it is used for a small tire swing. A play area for smaller tots is attached and yet in a separate area. Two beautiful sea lions (the head of a lion and the body of a fish) mark the entrance into the playground, which adds fanciful art that is also climbable.
My thanks to the voters at the Sacramento News and Review. I can’t believe having grown up in Sacramento I hadn’t found this park earlier. My hat’s off too to the scores of community volunteers who built this beautiful playground. Just shows that when a community comes together, you get nothing but the best.
I will definitely file this away for when we return, eventually.
One of the places I will miss the most in Minneapolis is an indoor playground called Adventure Peak. It’s amazing, tall, with a gazillion slides, walkways, bridges, tents, and tunnels…and it’s fully netted/enclosed, so there is no possible way the kids can fall out. The first time I took Haley there, she played for FOUR hours. Next time, I took her, I brought a book. HEAVEN. And check it out – it’s only $5 for unlimited time.
It’s a necessity here, where the temps get dangerously cold outside and your kids bounce off the walls during the winter. But in cities like Sac and Phoenix, it would make perfect sense in the broiling summer.
Every city should have one. I think it should be a law.
I used to take my kids there all the time when we lived in Sacramento. Its a great park. That and Land Park are my favs.
[...] nice park while driving through Sacramento, CA. So you can imagine my excitement when I came across this wonderful review at Tripping with Kids! McKinley Park was named Best Playground of 2009 in the Sacramento News and [...]