Fort Washington Park

So, continuing on our playground tour…

You may think that once you’ve seen one playground, you’ve seen them all, but friends, that is not true.  Once you’ve seen a dozen, you still haven’t seen them all.

We randomly, but delightfully, ended up at Fort Washington Park on Sunday and the playground there had at least two features that I had yet to see at a playground.  One was the fake mountain climb, above.  (Conquered, below.)

And the other was the cool tube ladder-things (official name) that you could climb up to the top.  Seriously, they were cool.

Look how satisfied Rachel looks after scaling the cool tube ladder-thing.  Quite an accomplishment, I have to agree.

And they had the traditional playground stuff too.  Classic, can’t be beat: slides…

…and swings…

And I even got Rach to ride one without Jim’s help!

Pretzel Park

We went to Pretzel Park recently and it’s pretty much our new favorite park.  I’m a sucker for modern playground equipment.  (Here, it’s similar to, but much smaller scale than Smith Playground.)  Our favorite feature was the short rock climbing wall subbing for stairs up to the slide.  I didn’t get pictures of it because I was busy teaching Rach where to place her feet on the wall.  Maybe next time.

Pretzel Park is situated in a pretty cool spot on a plateau in Manayunk.  Below, you can see the train trestle for SEPTA’s Norristown line and a glimpse of Main Street, and at the top of the hill is Roxborough.  In between is this fun park, a beautiful, towering Cathedral, and tons of cozy row homes.

In addition to the cool playground equipment there’s a dog park sectioned off, which Rachel was fascinated by.

You can’t really tell, but there were about a dozen dogs running around.  Rachel sat right on the concrete wall, alongside the dog owners, and threw flower petals to the dogs.  (I don’t think they really noticed, but I thought it was cute.)

The best thing though, was playing under the trees.  We stood underneath the gorgeous boughs and pretended their canopy was our home.

Pretzel Park: We’ll be back soon!

Picnic in Rittenhouse Park

We had a very full weekend: full of errand-running, race-running, meatball-making, ziti-baking, and most of all, friendship.

Somewhere in the middle of all that, Rachel and I stopped to have a picnic in Rittenhouse Square Park.  It was an irresistibly gorgeous day and we just couldn’t pass up the opportunity.  We had pizza and lemonade from the farmer’s market, people-watched, danced along to a two-piece band, and counted  the number of school buses going by (pub crawlers adorned in Kelly green tshirts and booze induced grins).  It was the perfect portion of carefree fun.

The rest of the weekend was overwhelming and inspiring.  More on that soon.