Anzac Park

I thought I would give you a tour of one of the gazillion cool parks here. Seriously I am not looking forward to going back to American parks any time soon. They are all pretty much the same and compared to here.....boring!

This is Anzac park and it rocks. Our favorite is called New Farm park but this one leads a close second I think.

Wild Cockatoos. Our families favorite bird here! Actually we have a lots of avorites, so many things I dont even want to think about missing when we leave. I lvoe hearing the cockies and kookaburras. Seriously you should do a you tube search of a kookaburra, it sounds like a monkey sort of and a chortle type laugh. One of our american friends thought they had monkey chickens in their trees when they first moved here before they realized what they were hearing every morning!

 THis picture is not that great, but this is a zip line. Yep you heard me right, a zip line in the park. They call them flying foxes here. A flying fox in real life are the bats. But here at the park you get to fly like the bats and hence the name. So cool. Can you even imagine America putting these in their parks. No way, not even.....too much of  a liability. But here we eat up all that stuff that hasnt tainted Australia.

 Anzac park also boasts a sad pit area that is gated so littles cant wander in or out on their own accord. And this sand pit even has some built toys as well. And the thing I like about gates here, are they are magnetic and you pull up a pin type thing at the top to undo the latch. Perfect for short kids and it takes two hands often.

The main play structure is supposed to be like a homestead I am guessing, the "house" is a typical Queenslander style, water silo's with matching slides for races. A trap door, ramps, you name it, this cool place has it. See saw included. You dont see those in america anymore either, too many fingers injured from the rumors I heard when I was a kid. I wonder what the real issue was.....like I said we relish it all here!

 Anzac park has a beutiful pond with lots of local wildlife around. Many times when I have been there, I have seen people come on their lunch hour and go sit by the pond, how peaceful.

 Another side of the "house". Shows the water pump, which I guess used to actually work but with the drought lasting so long, they turned off the function so as not to waste water. For now the kiddos can still pump it and just pretend they are getting water out.

This was my attempt at showing the trapdoor latter. There is actually no door, it's pretend but I thought it was so cool that the kids can climb up from under the house, its a great hiding spot when playing hide and seek or chase, very commonly used from our experience.

View from other side of see saw/teeter totter, you can see the back of an old school truck that has a flat bed to climb on and steering wheel. Mostly a jungle gym from what I have seen and pow wow meeting place. Just to the left of the picture out of focal range are the swings, dont worry they didnt forget about the swings. There are actually two sets, one to the left and one on the other side of the house. In this pic you can see the sand pit as well in the distance.

 just a cute little man

 close up of the truck.......it is stationary, just looks like it moves.

 A better picture of the silo's.

Are you jealous yet? Yep, we feel pretty darn lucky to have all these cool areas so close to us. Erik was behind in his motor skills upon arriving in Oz. But I have tried hard to take him to all the different parks that I can (each one is different here, although not all as fancy or as big as this) and work on all the skills. And now I am confident he is right on par and some things he actually is mastering before I would have anticipated. Like some of the balancing activities that a lot of the parks have. Now to work on his coordination. Poor kid has little coordination, falls on his face nearly every time he runs at full speed. To the point of not letting him get up to speed unless he is on grass or padding, because he has taken 100 too many faceplants on concrete. One day!