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| The Roller Slide. Weeeeeee! |
While on a recent trip to Chicago we had a few hours to kill before heading to the airport. Once upon a time, my husband and I would have just gone to a bar, but now we have a child. We had already been to two zoos during this trip, including the beautiful and free Lincoln Park Zoo, in an effort to entertain both our child and ourselves and now we needed to find another family friendly activity that would wear out our highly active two year old. Not really knowing what to do we decided to just start driving south along Lakeshore Drive as this was the general direction we needed to go to get to Midway Airport. We saw a playground so we decided to stop.
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| How do you work this thing? |
As soon as my daughter saw the playground she was off and running. What immediately struck me was the quality of the playground, the unique play equipment and the beautiful setting right on Lake Michigan with views of the skyline. We simply don't have it this good at home! I know I should consider myself lucky that we have a large backyard where my child can play anytime, but Chicago has really done right by their residents by providing so many wonderful parks. The 31st Street Harbor Marina and Park is no exception. By far the most popular piece of equipment was a slide that instead of being your typical piece of molded plastic was instead a set of rollers. My daughter loved hearing her voice vibrate as she slid down. What was also different is that the slide was wide enough to accommodate two kids at once. Double the fun! There were several other other unique slides as well. One was your typical plastic slide, except it was very long and formed into a hill so you need not worry about your child falling over the side and cracking open their head. The other slide was simply two rails in parallel. Kids drape a leg over each rail and slide down. This kind of equipment allows a child to experience things in a different way and makes them think about how it should be used as opposed to just going through the usual motions. I'll be honest, had there not been a ton of kids and adults there I would have been trying out all of this equipment myself. In addition to the slides there were swings, a rock climbing wall, an area of stacked rocks for climbing (that looked a bit dangerous, but I appreciate this kind of design), and lots of equipment to climb on. Plenty to do for kids of all ages and abilities.
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| Can anyone spot the trees that don't quite fit? |
While I have only good things to say about the playground itself there was one thing that struck me as odd. The brightly painted trees. I know that some designer thought this was a great idea, something different, perhaps a landmark of sorts, but I found that they added little to the area other than making you wonder why they are there. The other thing I really liked about this park is that it is part of a trail system along Lake Michigan. For those of us who like to walk or run it is always nice to have a place to stop or something new to look at as you jog. Apparently, when Chicago failed in their bid for the summer 2016 Olympics they still decided to build this park which would have been where the sailing events would have been held. The marina contains 1,000 boat slips which I'm sure were needed and provided a significant economic reason for going ahead with the construction of this $130M marina and park.
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| Falling asleep in the swing=time to go |
After about an hour we decided it was time to leave and of course our child was in tears as she still had more to explore. I agree, there is so much more to explore and I hope to be able to return to Chicago to revisit not only the 31st Street Harbor Park, but perhaps check out some of the Chicago's other parks. I have yet to be disappointed
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