Amused
Last weekend my little one and I made the long trip down to Oaks Amusement Park (a whole mile and a half away) and spent the day there. It started out as a birthday party for one of her little friends and turned into a fun filled day of rides, screaming and fun (plus a healthy dose of popcorn and cotton candy).
It had been a while since I’d been there for anything except preschool skate, and to be honest the park looks really different as a ghost town at 10 AM on a Wednesday than it does at 1 PM on a warm overcast Saturday. There’s something creepy and Scooby doo-ish about a bunch of silent carnival rides, but when the park is full of life it becomes its own entity.
Watching the kids run from ride to ride dragging their parents and siblings, the toddlers taking their first spin on the kiddie motorcycles, the tweens OH-MY-GAHing everything in site and the smell of carnival snacks in the air made for a great day.
The fairs and carnivals come and go so quickly here, but for over 100 years Oaks Park has been up and running. It’s such an awesome little pocket of history right here in my neighborhood.
If you haven’t been there lately you should check it out. They’re even adding a couple new rides this year, which is great because they’ve served as an awesome training ground for when I take my daughter to one of the big box amusement parks later this summer!
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Oaks Park is great….but PALES compared to The Enchanted Forest just South of Salem. They have a couple of rides that rival Disneyland in some respects.
We take our daughter there at the end of the summer every year. That’s where she learned to love the roller coaster!
Want some silly grown-up fun? Go to the Oaks Park roller rink on a sunday night. They have an organ instead of the standard cheesy roller skating music. I had company in town a few and took them there. None of us had been roller skating since we were kids. God, it was a blast!
A few? Oops. I meant to say I had out of town company a few months ago. Anyway, the roller rink at Oaks Park is awesome!