Adventure #1 – Andrew Haydon Park
Address: 3169 Carling Ave
Important Features: play structure (2), bathrooms, picnic areas, lots of walking/biking paths
If you use the above address on Google Maps, or in your GPS, it will get you to the entrance at Carling and Holly Acres Road. Once you enter there, go to the parking lot to your right. You will have two playgrounds to choose from.
1. Dry Playground
If you are standing in the parking lot, facing the river, there is a playground just a few minutes walk to your left. This is the dry playground. It looks like this:
and this:
It is a pretty great playground. The kids I had were from ages 5 – 8 and they all loved it.
But what we were really looking for was the playground that had water in it. Luckily we made some new friends at the playground – two boys and their mom. We asked them how to get to the water playground.
2. Water Playground
If you are standing in the parking lot, looking at the river, you want to head to your right. You want to take the path that is closest to Carling Ave. There is a bridge that you have to cross that looks like this:
This picture was taken on our walk back to the parking lot – you can see the parking lot behind the bridge. If you follow this path, you will walk about five minutes and then you will see the water playground.
It looks like this:
and this:
and this:
It is absolutely one of the coolest playgrounds we have ever been to!
The water continuously flows from the bar above the slide like a shower and turns it into an awesome water slide. Then there is this fantastic puddle at the bottom that you splash into. It is muddy and messy and wonderful.
Then you have another area for water play with different troughs for the water to flow through. If you turn the part at the center, the water goes a different direction – through a different trough pathway. Then there is one section that you can tip back and forth like a teeter-totter to direct which trough the water goes through. And, as my daughter will point out, you can climb on it too!
For some reason, the 8 year old boys didn’t really want to play in the water. One of them went down the slide a few times, but my son didn’t at all. So the two of them went to collect wood and built a fort. It was super cool!
They also found a great piece of wood that looked like a piece of knight’s armour.
I would highly recommend this park for kids between the ages of 2 – 10. There are plenty of different options to keep all ages interested. The girls (ages 5 and 7) definitely want to head back to this park. I will see if I can get them to do some reviews for me tomorrow and will add it to the post!
And I would love to hear what you think about this park. We definitely did not have enough time there, so we probably missed some things. Let us know!
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We are going to aim to do a few of these Awesome Summer Fun Adventures each week of the summer that I have all the kids (my two and various friends). We will post our planned trips on our World-Changing Kids Facebook page a day or two before we go. We would love for you to join us if you could. To stay up to date on our plans, you could like our Facebook page here or you could email me at worldchangingkids@gmail.com and I will start a mailing list for our upcoming adventures.
We will also do some Acts of Kindness on these Awesome Summer Fun Adventures. We will try to work our way through as many of the 75 Acts of Kindness in our book, “Plant a Garden of Kindness, A Child’s Guide to Filling a Year with Weekly Acts of Kindness”, as we can.
For more information on our book – including the amazing Ottawa retail locations that carry it and instructions for ordering it online – click on the “Buy Our Book” link in the top right hand corner!