Park quest

Well this post seems weirdly timed. I wrote it in November or something when it might have still been nice out (which is odd to say since... November, but we did have a profuse amount of warm days then), but I never posted. On the other hand, I think we may all enjoy a little peak back to those glory days of bare feet and short sleeves. For those of you not in Minnesota, it's freaking cold here right now. (Full disclosure: I haven't left the house today, but it's still remarkably cold).

At any rate, here is my post about our park quest...

I'm officially calling it for the year... we visited 19 of the 35 playgrounds in our city. I've lived here for years, but earlier this year someone else mentioned trying to visit many of our local parks. I didn't really think we would do so at the time they mentioned it, but one day when we were bored I suggested visiting a park from the park list we had...and a quest was born. Seeing we didn't start at the beginning of the playground season, I think we did a fairly good job of playing at 19  different parks (and a few of them we went to repeatedly because they are 'our' parks). I didn't take pictures at all of them, but here are a few from our adventures.

Aquila park

Dakota park

Oregon park

Parkview park

Louisiana Oaks park

Justad park

Minikahda Vista park

Jackley park

Bronx park

Rainbow park

Oak Hill park

Wolfe park

Fern Hill park

We also visited, but don't have pictures of, Center, Edgebrook, Sunshine, and Westwood Nature Center parks. And, our last park we visited this year (but I never blogged about) was Browndale park...

Browndale park

We met a friendly cat that lived right next to the park. I sorta, mighta, wanted to take him home.

And then I heard ducks, followed the sound and found this...

I can't wait for spring to come so we can continue on this adventure. We are over half way through our list so it will be no problem to finish next summer... and maybe even start over again.

Project 52 - Sun - Week 41

41/52

I'd been planning to do a photo shoot with one on of my nieces for fun, but we had to reschedule a couple times. The last time it happened, I really wanted to get out and take pictures so I took Riley out. She's used to being my model and was excited when I told her we were going to stop at Party City and a new playground. We stopped at Party City because I thought it would be fun to get some props for our pictures. To make it even more fun, we visited a playground in our city that we've never been to before which means we've hit 17 out of 35 playgrounds so far.

We didn' t have a scissor so the plastic band was still on this. We'll play with it another day.

We had a picnic dinner at the playground and then my plan was to drive towards the sunset to a spot I found online (I just 'drove' around on Google streetview). Instead I made a wrong turn and found this cool bridge that went over Minnehaha Creek so we had to stop.

This pose is all her own.

At some point, Riley hit her wall and just wanted to go home. I didn't blame her, but I still wanted to drive closer to Meadowbook, the area I found online. I tried to ignore the sun, but the golden light was amazing.

A couple days before, Riley had pointed out some early morning golden light and noted how beautiful it was. At first she didn't want to make another stop to take pictures, but she agreed that we had to since the sunlight was so pretty - just like the other morning.

I don't get to take pictures in this light very often so I was fun to experiment with this light. And, I appreciate when Riley is willing to be my model. Even though she was reluctant to take these last pictures... at first, in the end she was directing me and asking me to send them to grandma. Such a photographer's child, that one is.