100 parks

My wife a few years ago introduced me to the idea of 1000 hours outside. The concept in basic terms is making it an annual goal to spend 1000 hours outside with your kids. They'll play, they'll learn, they'll not be in front of screens. Yes, that's on average almost three hours a day, which is a ton. I don't think we'll ever get there. But we can at least try to do a mini version over the summer months (and put our young ones in nature school).

With the end of May, when summer was just getting started, I had an idea along those lines. At the time it was simple, I'd try to take the kids to 100 different parks and playgrounds. It's about 100 days between Memorial Day and Labor Day, that's a nice round number, and it seemed an ideally aggressive goal considering summer activities, travel, rain etc. I didn't have it thought out much more than that. But I knew we'd be outside.

On getting going I quickly learned there are an absolutely ridiculous number of parks, everywhere. I had thought, about halfway through the summer, we'd have to venture fairly far to continue to find new ones. We did venture, and I'm glad we explored as much as we did, but in all truth we didn't need to go too far.

Goat Hill in Eagan, corner of Lexington and Diffley

Lake Rebecca Park Reserve in Rockford, didn't count toward the 100

The rules, as it were, shifted as the summer went on. Each park could always only be counted once, even if we went there more often that that. We ignored elementary schools for the most part, they were often busy during the week. At first I kept track of everything separately, each playground, if a park had more than one, was counted individually for example. There were a handful of nature preserves or state parks (say, in Alaska) mixed in. By the end of the summer the ultimate goal narrowed, we would visit 100 parks south of the Minnesota River, in the truly south metro of the Twin Cities. We would rate their playground(s) on a simple scale. This is 100 parks relatively close to where we live, largely in Apple Valley, Rosemount, Farmington, Lakeville, Burnsville and Eagan. I was flexible on the end date, and it just went a little past Labor Day.

We used a three point rating system for the parks. If a park met a very high threshold and the kids would be happy to return over and over, it qualified as a 'favorite' and received two stars (**). If a park was fun enough that they definitely wanted to return it received one star (*). If they didn't care to go back to a park, it was only alright, it received no stars. That was the extent of our review generally. I do somewhat regret not keeping more notes, as I could've perhaps tracked places with nice bathrooms (instead of porta-potties), shelters, or other things. Throughout the summer I solicited the kids opinions everywhere we went and they pretty rapidly had a good gauge on the three rating levels. I also, after we had been to 20 or so, just kind of knew what they were going to say based on how long they played and how much fun they had. That piece of it got easy and we rarely disagreed.

It become obvious this was going to be shared and I tracked it in two places. One, where I started, was a piece of paper on the wall above our calendar. It's a table with 100 spaces that got entirely filled in and beyond, and is also where I included the star ratings. Two, as I had make this electronic, I used Google Maps and their customizable lists. Most of the summer I needed Maps to find the parks (I was doing a lot of this while the kids played at them, finding the next destinations), and I had two lists that constantly grew. The first was parks we had visited, obviously, and the second was an even more rapidly stacking pile of parks that we had not yet seen. This second list nearly caught the first in length by the end of the summer if you can believe it. We have quite a few more to visit in the future.

More than anything this was a mission for the summer, can we get there, and a way to fill the gaps in time, outside!, with something exciting. If we were ever restless around the house, or were out running errands and needed time to wiggle and climb, we'd hit up a nearby playground. There were days we'd get to three or four. The kids never got tired of checking out new ones, though there were frequently requests to hit up a particular favorite they had in mind instead. I'd estimate that 75% of the parks were near where we were going anyway (shopping, camp pickup/drop-off, sports) or near-ish the route. The rest we would leave the house simply to explore and that was fun too.

Fun side-effect? The kids are strong now and extremely confident in their abilities. Both boys do monkey bars now. They all can climb everything and do that everywhere we go, especially at home. So perhaps a downside too.

Lists:

Google doc of every park we visited this summer - 117 in total, exactly 100 south of the river

Google Maps Favorites (MN only, 2 stars) - 8 in total, as of now

Google Maps good to great parks (MN only, 1-2 stars) list - 46 in total, as of now

I'll include some takeaways and observations about the cities around here. The favorites were almost all parks with a rubber ground surface for whatever reason. It's likely just what's used for the nicest, premiere city parks now. I think Lakeville probably has the best parks overall, quite a few are new and well designed. Apple Valley is the worst, almost all of them are, I'd guess, 15-20 years old, none are well maintained and they consistently have old, un-groomed sand for the base. Eagan I now think of as the Edina south of the river, there's clearly old money there. One interesting wrinkle about Eagan parks are they almost all have small rocks for the base, and collecting these became a big piece of our summer. Burnsville has a mix of run down old parks and some actually nice new ones, they're clearly working on it. Rosemount and Farmington are mostly older parks, but the kids basically always liked them. They both do/did a good job.

The top 3 'Parks of the Summer':

1. Hyland Play Area - Bloomington

   - huge rope/net climbing areas, maze like, long slides, several playgrounds in one

   - not in the 100 but still pretty close, and blows away everywhere else

   - not for littles or anyone uncomfortable with losing sight of their kids, and very busy

2. Woodhaven Park - Eagan

   - new to us

   - high enclosed net bridge, various levels of difficulty and good for all ages

   - need to remember to bring a basketball here, bunch of odd-shaped hoops

3. Savage Community Park - Savage

   - new to us

   - another tall main structure, tree themed, lots of swings, good for all ages

   - also ton of pickleball courts but they've been full whenever we've visited

   
   

The rocks collected from Eagan parks (one mini jar per kid), 'agates' and others

Woodhaven Park in Eagan

To sum up, we did it! And there's a whole lot more we didn't see, even within 20 minutes or so of our house. I don't think going forward I'll track every new playground but I will try to keep the 'Favorites' and 'good to great' lists in Google Maps up to date. They can be a resource to us and to whoever else, if you so choose.

Hope you enjoyed. Glad I could finally get this one out and add something to the family legacy (i.e. our last name).