Happy Hollow
Today’s kid-friendly excursion was to Happy Hollow, a fun-park/small-zoo down in San Jose. Back in the day, I only visited the park two times, and it wasn’t terribly exciting, but I decided to give it another shot.
As it turned out, the park had been almost entirely redone since I last visited. Sadly, we again arrived at the same exact time as a bunch of playschool- and daycare groups, so the vast majority of the morning was spent waiting in line for the a) small carousel, b) tremendously jerky mini-rollercoaster, c) very slow dragon-open-bus-thingy, with a stop at a very large climbing castle/structure.
After lunch the crowd grew much much sparser and the kids could start doing the same thing over and over again, without standing in a 20-30 minute line, which made everybody happier. Due to this, we never made it to check out the animals because the park closes at 3 pm.
Ah well, at least a good time was had by all after lunch! 🙂
Some pictures from the day:
Anna and Bjarki finally on board the rollercoaster.
Closer-up to the siblings.
Bjarki totally ran out of gas waiting for the Danny the Dragon-ride bus. I had not packed sufficient snacks!
After a looong wait, we finally got to go on board.
I could take lots of pictures because it went pretty slowly. Basically it drove around in an elongated circle of sorts, passing statues from various fairy tales on the way.
Snow-White's dwarfs.
Happy Hollow holds the distinction of having the worst hamburgers for sale of all the places we went in area on this trip. They were simply pitiful. Sadly, hamburgers with ketchup and some veggies remain something that the kids will almost certainly eat, even when stressed (pizza, not so much) so that's what I went with. All in all it was a 'let's serve cheap food and make a big profit'-cafeteria, which is in contrast to the SF Zoo and Monterey Aquarium where they pride themselves on 'good food', and it shows.
After lunch, we went back to the rides, although some of them were now closed (which is bizarre, why do they randomly close some rides? Can't they hire more staff? Are they saving electricity?) Thankfully this one was open because it was Bjarki's favorite: The Frog Hopper. He went on it over and over again.
Happy kids! 🙂
Another friendly ride was the 'Mini-putts'. This was the only (open) ride that I recognized from way-back-when, as this was the only ride Anna didn't freak out on and actually enjoyed when she was smaller.
It doesn't take much to make kids happy. The cars just go round and round, and the fire-trucks have bells they can ring.
Bjarki feeling pretty stoked! They also went on this ride multiple times.
Soon it was time to go because the park was about to close (at 3 pm? Saving money?) so we headed back out the way we came, but stopped by the carousel to take a few spins (there was no line).
Bjarki on his cool dragon. 🙂
With that, we left to drop Anna off on a play-date with another old friend of hers. I think Bjarki and I just retreated to home-base, and the most exciting thing after that was trying to optimize the route for Augusto to go get groceries (dinner), and pick up Jason, Finnur, and Anna from three different locales. Yes, our lives are just that ho-hum boring. 🙂