Sarah and Raymond are great kids and are often happy with a day out with a kite or their skates, but just occasionally we want to do something a bit more special and we’d love to share some of our favorite days out with you.
Somewhere we love to visit is the Fanshawe Pioneer Village but I have covered that in another post (An Historical View of London) so I’ll talk about some of our other regulars here, see if you fancy any of them for your brood.
Sarah is a thoughtful kind of kid who likes to learn stuff (‘stuff’ being Sarah-speak for anything from newts to nuclear physics) so she is pretty easy to please as long as there is a quiz, a guidebook, or loads of questions afterward. Raymond is a bit more physical, never happier than when he is tossing a ball around, running, jumping, and generally burning off energy. So the parks are a great stop-off point for him.
All kids like to grow up fast, but our two still love the Storybook Garden in Springbank Park. Leave your years at the gate and enjoy train rides, the Ferris wheel, and the climbing frames. From the minute you go through the castle entrance, you will find that it isn’t just the youngsters who can be kids again in Springbank Park!
There are also miles of paths for hiking or biking and – quite unusually – the paths reach other parks, so you can really eat up the miles without having to get involved with traffic.
We love London but we would be the first to admit that we get our share of rain and snow. Kids don’t stop needing amusement just because it’s wet out, so we are really glad to have the London Regional Children’s Museum here. It is one of the first Children’s Museums in Ontario, but it hasn’t let the grass grow under its feet and we find that for our two it can provide a whole day’s entertainment and then conversation at the dinner table for weeks afterward. The great thing about this place is that it is always changing – the permanent features such as Dinosaurs and Science in Your World are old friends, but there are always ‘guest’ exhibits to make each visit exciting.
Every parent or grandparent knows that children need fuel for all that running about – lookout for a post on the ‘fun venues for eating out in London’ for some places where they will love to eat; and where you will too!