Adventure Playground

Our musical let out at 5:00, the WORST time to try and leave the city.  We decided we'd make Les Mis into a fun overnight in SF.  We ended up finding the best hotel deal across the bay in Berkeley, though, so this is where Day 2 was spent.  Our morning started with a couple hours of play at this crazy Adventure Playground.

Here it looks like we set our children free to play on trash heaps.  And, yep, that is sort of what we did.  This park has a unique vision of letting kids explore and create in unstructured ways.  The playgrounds are all things like old boats, pianos, tires, seats from buses, and hodgepodge play structures that are literally handmade of random piece of wood.  There was also a super fun zipline!

You had to run around the park and earn your tools by picking up garbage, splinters and nails.  Then you were rewarded with real hammers, nails, saws, and buckets of paint.  In organized racks were pieces and sheets of wood that you could use to build whatever you wanted.  Ella built a legit ladder with Dave, learning how to saw wood and hammer nails for the first time!

I love the above pictures because it captures us perfectly-- Delia didn't really want to do the hard work of building anything, she just wanted to run around and climb and play her imagination games.  Ella embraced the vision of this park and immediately started the scavenger hunt to earn her tools and get to work creating!

Delia did enjoy painting one of the structures, though.  She found this one that reminded her of the barricade from Les Mis and spent a large part of the morning acting out scenes and singing songs while on this structure!

Ella took the ladder she made and joined her sister.

You may be thinking this park sounds dangerous, but it was actually pristine and well supervised by staff.  The early child educator in me thinks this is just the most brilliant idea ever.  We are so protective of our kids, keeping them sheltered from anything that may harm them and doing everything for them.  I'm guilty of this too.  What a cool idea to, instead of confiscating dangerous items, actually give them a real tool and say, "Here try it!" while teaching how to NOT hurt themselves.  Or to give them a totally open ended playground and see what they decide to add to it and make of it.

We took a little walk along the bay too, enjoying those cool winds and a great view of the city.  Since we were by a great shopping center and passed another huge outlet mall on the way home, our overnight in the city ended with some fun back to school shopping.  It was a perfect little getaway and conclusion to our super summer of 2018!