Well the new playground is in and it is for the most part a great improvement over the dated old equipment. The bigger kids playground is well set up , though the water feature does tend to drift some mist over to the nearby equipment. Not to worry, it's just water. Moving over to the toddlers playground though, this is where things get weird. We start off with the yellow wheel. What is that.. wheel of fortune? but there's no clicker, it just spins. $70 $80 or $90. 40 50 or 60... spins? 10 20 or 30 sad faces? Are these points? Weird. Then we move on to the next spinny wheel thing. It's a marble game, that with some work I can finish, but I'm a 38 year old man. There's no way a toddler even has the dexterity to move this wheel fast enough get the marble in the right place, let alone the strength. The thing is HEAVY. Which means when a larger kid comes by, he can get that thing spinning REALLY fast. So now it's a spinning at 10000RPM, with those knobs that stick out I foresee some broken little fingers in someone's unfortunate future.

Ok cool, so the wheel things are a bust. How about some puzzles. There's one with animals on the pieces, but .. you can't get some of them to stay where they should due to that physics pesky thing.. what's it called again? Oh yeah.. Gravity! There's one with some.. flowery? shapes. These have little cutouts that... also don't withstand the relentless forces of gravity, so it's impossible to complete the puzzle without having 4 arms to hold each piece in. My mini people found this most frustrating.

Ok lets try something in a different area. What about these neat wheel things that stick out of the ground like flowers. One has a bee on it an makes a cute little clinking noise as it spins. My 1 year old LOVES this. I, on the other hand, do not LOVE this. These are inexplicably mounted with their centers about 1 meter off the ground?!? My little person at full stretch can't even reach the bottom of them. Guess who's left holding the baby.. LITERALLY.

Ok stuff the puzzles and brain games. What about some good old fashioned spinning around. There's the round about. wait.. Why is that mounted half a meter off the ground too! Kids flying off roundabouts is as kiwi as pies, so now in the toddlers area, this thing guarantee's that when the aforementioned unplanned ejection happens, there's a good drop to guarantee an upset child.

Ok.. what about a swing. Miss 3 wants to go in the swings by the slides. Great. Miss 1 can't yet hold on to them.. ok where's the baby's swing.... << >> Oh.. there they are. A mere 70 meters walk to .. what looks like some leftovers from the soviet era. The chains are so short that one push lasts about 4 swings. The center pole wobbles so much the kids were genuinely scared of the thing. So we're doing swings in shifts. I'm about to impose martial law and declare the swings unsafe if only to keep my step count below a million.. Miss 3 needs the bathroom. Right.. At least this part should be straight forward. Found the bathroom. It's clean and simple, albeit somewhat industrial in design. Done.. Wash hands... No soap dispencer. ok, water it is. Dry... nope.. no hand drying facility. Not empty, not broken, just .. not. That's a pretty strange omission.

Now, I don't want to sound like a whinger. It's definitely way better than the old one. The kids will successfully run themselves ragged, All in all it's a good spot.. it's just.. weird.