Journey to 100 Parks Kickoff - Yunkers Park - Crystal, MN

All of our park hopping gave me an idea this morning.  What if we try to visit every park in our city?  Wait, what if we try to visit 100 parks?  I've been want for a passion project for a while given how much we've cut out due to COVID.  Parks will be less of a destination as it gets cooler and I don't mind bundling up for an outing.  You can track all of parks at THIS page. You can also access it any time with the menu bar at the top of the page on a browser or with the arrow on the upper right side of the mobile view.  I've added a map with the parks we hope to visit and will turn the pins green once they have been visited.  We will hit all the playgrounds in Crystal, New Hope, Robbinsdale, and Golden Valley.  This is 59 if I counted correctly, so we will have to branch out a little further as well.  You will also see a few rules I have given for ourselves.  We've got some favorite spots in the metro and I have solicited suggestions on Facebook.  I am looking forward to seeing a variety of play structures and maybe finding some new favorites for the kids.

Our first stop is Yunkers Park in Crystal.  I am hoping to get a picture of the kids with every sign, but some parks may not have them.

Key Features

This was a pretty standard playground, but one feature I especially like is the long straight run of a bridge, tunnels and platforms culminating in a couple of slide options.  You can see it in the video at the bottom.

Almost every park has a toddler structure these days which was a lifesaver when the kids were little.  Both of them still like to play on them, but even Esme has graduated to the larger structures now.

Anything that spins is always a favorite of Parker's I will try to capture all of the wheels we find.

He has really enjoyed swinging a lot lately as well.  He figured out he could get high enough to kick the tree branch.

This was an ok first stop.  I am giving it 5 swings out of 10.  Nothing super special, but fun.  The grounds needed a lot of attention.  There were some plant roots sticking out of the wood chips and Esme tripped on one of them.  We probably wouldn't choose to come back here, but would if we happened to be there.