Walla Walla Memory 8

Parks:

One thing that I remember about Walla Walla is the amount of parks there were.  When we were really young, we lived across the street from Menlo Park and then later we lived maybe a mile away from another park, Wildwood Park that we rode our bikes to.  Becca has a fond memory of Menlo Park ha ha!  (This is where our cousin peed on her while on the swings.)  These parks aren't the tiny parks that we have around here in Utah county that are basically a pavilion with a small playground and some grass.  These parks were pretty large with lots of trees.  My friend Regan lived across the street from Pioneer Park which was a larger park that had a huge duck pond and also an aviary.  The duck pond was really huge and we would always go feed the ducks.  I was always scared that I would fall in.  I think there's a story of somebody falling in but I don't remember who.  The trees there were really big and had branches that would slop down low to the ground which we liked to climb on.  It also had the coolest wooden playground ever.  When we had family picnics this is the park that we usually went to.  When I went back to Walla Walla a few years ago, I was really sad to see that they had replaced the entire playground that I grew up playing on and also the duck pond was very dirty with algae and green muck.  Apparently they tried to get funding to clean the pond but either they couldn't or it didn't work.  There was also another park that we frequented but not as often because it was further away called Rooks Park.  We would go there every so often for family gatherings and sometimes Regan and I would ride our bikes there on a "bike ride".  It would take us a while to get there but it was pretty fun.  This park was larger and had a lot of trees and areas where you could do a bit of hiking.  We would hike over to a reservoir that was in the park every time we went there.  I also remember playing volleyball there a few times.  When we were young we went to the Easter egg hunt that they had at Wildwood Park and later in the week or even month, we would still find the chocolate eggs wrapped in colored foil.  Another thing that we would do that was kind of strange was collect the nuts that fell from the trees.  I don't even know what kind of trees they were but they'd drop these green pods that are a little smaller than a baseball and when you'd crack them open, there would be a brown nut thing inside.  We would collect these in grocery bags and take them hope to break them open.  For some reason, we thought this was fun.  Who said there was nothing to do in Walla Walla?  Anyways, that was one thing that I noticed when I moved here to Utah, the lack of parks.  It's pretty sad because it was such a huge part of our growing up with all the time that we spent at the different parks.