Wellington Park and Amberleigh Park

My new playground posts are getting further between. With only a handful of parks left, I'm pretty much limited to weekends to head out to a new park. But on Saturday, we got the gang together after dinner and headed out.

Brian and his boys were joining us again. Our first stop was #52 Wellington Park. We entered this park through the woods off Brandonway road:

Which, as a side note, I think will be a great training ground for Henry to practice "mountain" biking. I had thought this was only an open space, no playground, so I was happy to round the corner to see this:

(action shots thanks to Brian!) We unloaded the five kids and let them have at it:

A pretty typical play structure, but the wooded trails more than makes up for it. After getting slightly turned around and heading south to Brand Road, we headed back up Dublin Road to #2 Amberleigh Park. This was an open space, no playground, but it was still a good stop. There was a LONG set of wooden stairs:

all the way down to the Scioto River:

Henry and I practiced skipping rocks for a bit. I was actually able to skip one all the way to the far shore, but no one was very impressed (except me).

From there, we headed north to the very similarly named #1 Amberleigh Community Park. Walter and Gids had been here before, but it was new for our family. It's very different from the typical playgrounds we've been to. We unloaded and let the kids go to town:

Several wooden town play houses were centered around a fire truck:

They also had some stuff to bounce on:

and climb and run around:

and play music on:

The kids loved this and we stayed here quite a while. I finally resorted to bribery to get them moving: we headed to the Shawnee Hills Wendy's for Frostys:

(completely gratuitous brush with celebrity side note: I was on a jury this winter with Wendy... of Wendy's) As we were finishing up our not-a-milkshake dairy dessert, Brian and I kind of looked at each other and had the same thought: "what time does it get dark now?" It was about 8:00, and our super long summer nights of July are already a memory. Luckily, I had my generator light and a pair of taillights, so we spread the lights around and hightailed it (relatively speaking, when towing 180+ pounds) down Memorial Drive to home.

Three down, nine to go. Single digits!