Wright Park on a Fall Day

Last Sunday, it was a perfect Fall day: sunny, not rainy, cool, but not too cold. If you live in the Pacific Northwest, you know how rare those perfect Fall days are. So, we took an unplanned visit to the park. While we didn't have a lot of time to spend there, we had a nice visit.

Wright Park is a large park located near downtown Tacoma. It was designed over 100 years ago and is home to the W.W. Seymour Botanical Conservatory which hosts live music the second Sunday of each month. We haven't been there in several years. We tended to avoid it, preferring parks in better areas with fewer riff-raff. It has undergone some renovations recently and we were presently surprised by what we found.

Here's a photo that I took from the play area looking down one of the trails. Isn't it beautiful? The Fall colors were in their full glory and squirrels were everywhere.

Mika and Sammy headed straight for the playground. Mika wanted to pose at the top.

Josh decided to act older than his age by trying to climb this semi-circle set of bars. Scott spotted him from the underside which was a good thing because he slipped once. On one of his attempts, he got pretty much to the very top before deciding he didn't want to go down the other side.

Sammy enjoyed spinning on this spinner-thing. Many of the local parks have been install similar spinners.

Then Mika took her turn. Can you tell she was having fun?

Then Mika spun some more.

Scott even tried it out. He was surprised by how much it pulls you even when you aren't going all that fast.

Before long, we left to walk around the pond. The pond underwent a major remodel. It's very nice now, featuring a small island with a statue of three children running along on it. One part of the pond is elevated higher than the other side. A small waterfall was created between the two halves under a bridge that goes across the pond.

The duck population is obviously used to people feeding them as they immediately headed our way when they saw us at the top of the bridge. Josh enjoyed pointing them all out.

On our way back to the car, we came to this large hill just begging to be rolled down so I suggested that the kids do just that. Mika said something about it being wet. Thinking it was just a little wet, I told her to do it anyway. She did. When she got to the bottom, she was soaked!

I think we'll have to head back to Wright Park. It was a beautiful park and the kids enjoyed the playground. Of course, the wonderful Fall weather helped with that a lot.