Great Orange Ball

Local to us is a park that has an orange balloon.  It’s been there for years on the old military base.  The balloon goes up and down 400 feet for certain hours of the day, weather permitting, giving lots of people a great view of the county.  Up until recently it was free, but we missed out on that by a couple of days.  We’ve been meaning to get over there and check it out for awhile now.  Like for years now.  Honestly, we’re pretty good about checking out the things in our own backyard, so to speak, but this place, as huge as it is, is kind of a pain to find if you’re just blindly exploring.

So there we were one day, William hadn’t been able to fall asleep for his nap, and we needed to go to Costco, so we called it a nap fail and set out.  He was fine, so we thought.  We went to Costco, he was as wide awake as he could be.  Might as well go see if we can find the place.  We’re driving along and I glanced at the clock, 4pm.  I glanced in the rearview mirror and William had nodded off to sleep.  Do I wake him or let him sleep, was the question. Knowing that from the point he wakes, he will not be able to sleep again for 5 hours, minimum.  We decided to let him sleep.

Photos from that outing:  LINK 

So we got to the park and scoped it out, and decided to schedule a day to go back when William would be awake.

This past Saturday was the day.  The place is enormous with lots of space to roam.  They have more than just the balloon, too.  There is a carousel, a garden area, a playground and the old hangars are used as exhibit areas, and the open outside space is used for a Farmer’s Market every Sunday.  I commented to Tony what a fun outing this was, it would be perfect for a simple and easy first date… and it’s also an easy outing for a family if you want to spend the day at a park without worrying about it being crowded.

Here are some photos from this weekend’s outing:  LINK

So that’s what we did this weekend.  What’d you do ?