Madhouse diaries : A walk in (and to) the park

During the holidays, I'm incapable of staying inside on a nice sunny day so last Friday, I told the kids that we'd go out for a long walk. I had a plan to go geocaching but my gps wasn't playing along, so we gave up on the first couple of caches that I'd spotted and called in at a local play area instead. I can tell Pierre is growing up because he never used to manage to climb up on the big silver ball and he was always too scared to play on the climbing frame !

As we walked along the canal, we watched the people rowing along in canoes. They were quite young children and it must have been their first lesson because they were pretty rubbish and kept going into the banks !

We discovered some new street workout equipment that has been installed and the kids had a play.

Our next stop was a big nature park that has everything we could ever want - play areas, ducks, woodland walks, pretty flower beds, ...

... and a much-loved cafe with a slushy machine. There is even a "chemin de la licorne" - "the pathway of the unicorn"- but, to Juliette's disappointment, it is just a name !

We couldn't see any ducklings yet but there were some of these babies - are they coots?

First we had the obligatory queue for the swings - there are very few parks with swings in our area so they are invariably popular.

Pierre played on the play fort (you can see him coming down the slide) but Juliette has decided she's too old now.

When they were all played out, we headed back out through the wild side of the park.

Then continued across the road to the Ferme Vernaelde, an educational farm that is open to the public (and, even better, all totally free). I'll do a separate blogpost because we took lots of photos of the animals.

The kids had great fun jumping off a log and I managed to get a couple of "in flight" photos.

This was where my geocaching part of the trip was supposed to kick in, but we'd already walked miles and it was late afternoon so I relented and we started heading for home instead. Pierre was very excited to find half an egg shell and a walnut shell on the ground - we looked it up when we got home and think it is a sparrow's shell. He loved the fact that you could see a bit of the yolk inside the egg so the bird must have eaten it.

Proving that they have boundless energy, the kids had a final go on the workout equipment.

We walked to a nearby bus stop and finally headed for home. Judging by their faces, I did manage to wear them out in the end !