42. Cariboo Park, New Westminster

Poor Charlotte! She waited all day to get to the playground – and when we finally got there, she had a bit of a misadventure! We went to Cariboo Park, which has not one, but two playgrounds – one for big kids, one for small. She made a new friend here, Caleb, and they played on the small playground for a while before moving on to the playground of doom.

Charlotte began climbing a ladder – a vertical one with slim rungs that was very challenging for her, something she hadn't yet tried before. And yet, she was actually doing it! She was very focused, head bent, watching her feet as she carefully placed them on each higher rung. But Caleb's mum swooped in, “protecting” her head from the rung above – which really posed no danger to Charlotte! The swoop distracted Charlotte to the point that she lost her balance and she fell / was scooped up by Caleb's mum who deposited her “safely” on the ground. Charlotte then went and tried something a little easier and I was a little upset with Caleb's mum for helicoptering her. But she did try it again and this time she made it to the top! “I did it!” she cried and there was a round of applause from myself and Caleb and his mum. She took the small slide down and tackled the ladder again and again, making it seem easier and easier each time she did it.

So what came next was a little too ironic for my liking... After climbing the ladder again, Charlotte went even higher, moving on to the big slide rather than using the small one again. It was no higher than many other slides she had been down before and thought nothing of it, but just as Charlotte set off down the slide, Caleb's mum told me it was “dangerous”. A second later, Charlotte was at the bottom, face-first in the gravel. Caleb's mum was closer to her than I was and stood over her, flapping her hands in a panic. I picked my poor girl up and she spit out a mouthful of gravel through her tears. She ended up with a scraped forehead, chin and knees, but thankfully she only cried for a minute or two before she was back at it again. The slide had a pretty strange design to it – it ended at the bottom in a box shape and the kids needed to put their legs on either side of it. Caleb's mum said she had seen lots of older kids hurt their legs on it, but poor Charlotte had no idea what she needed to do and just pitched off face-first. But soon she was climbing the ladder again – though taking the little slide back down! Besides, she got to go for a Dairy Queen ice cream afterwards! The park has two geocaches in it, both of which we have already found, “Cariboo Park” and “Cariboo Park #2”. The park is located at N 49.14.048 W 122.54.208:  https://mapsengine.google.com/map/edit?mid=z7IAXiVD2wGY.ke14vi-3MYtI&pli=1