Have you seen Tina?

Let's talk about Tina. If you've never been to Hillside Park you probably don't know about Tina. "She" carries a bit of history with her and is worth checking out. Being a piece of the Elk River junk yard Tina is recycled car. That's right.... a great big hunk of metal. We found Tina lurking in the woods and she's waiting for you to find her too!

Hillside is a great looking bike park with trails flitting off this way and that way. The kids were having fun watching bikers fly around the curves and hitting tricks on the trails. They were a little intimidated by the trails, but seemed excited for the day that they too could try their pedals at going around the curves!

Hillside Park is the last park in Elk River. We have now seen, been in and/or explored every last one of the 44 parks in town. It's been quite a ride and the kids want to try again this summer. I haven't started crossing them off the map "yet" but will when I hang up the phone on this blog post. We've got a good start this year, but it will take some ingenuity to stop by them all once again.

In the meantime... we've been hiking through Woodlands Park (one of our favorites). It's busy with visitors this spring. Loads of walkers, runners, bikers, rollerbladers. Just an overall lovely place to explore. Not sure how we managed it, but we ended up on a trail we hadn't seen this year. Beautiful as ever and so much fun to explore.

And then there is Hudson Park. The park that had dozens of visitors the day we stopped by. In fact, the gals at the park were giving me the rundown as to why it's the best park in town. We had a 45 minute 'layover' and had a chance to play on a beautiful afternoon. Apparently all the other mom's thought it was a good day to play too! Can't help myself from picking weeds when we stop at the parks... it really bothers me when they are poking out of the wood chips.

The boys were having monkey competitions on the firemen's pole at this park. Little did we know that they can climb from the ground up. Sometimes their strength amazes me. I kind of felt bad when the other boys were trying to follow their lead and didn't have the strength. Brought me back to school when I was the only one who couldn't do pull ups.

Anyways, I can see already that keeping up the blog with every park visit might just be near impossible. We are just having too much fun! Perhaps over the next few weeks I'll be more disciplined. If not... you will have to rest assured that we are tromping around the area enjoying all that the city has to offer.